“I can do that.” Rocking back on his heels, he grinned. “You gotta tell me everything that’s been happening here.” He rubbed her belly again. “I’ve missed a lot of stuff.”
“Yeah, you missed all the barfing. Except that one time.”
“No, like appointments.”
“I’m using a midwife.” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, come on. It’s not like I couldn’t deliver it myself if I had to.”
“That’s true. So what happened at your last appointment? Did you hear the heartbeat?”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “It was pretty amazing.”
“What else?”
She thought back to the appointment, which had been routine. Except, actually…Heat started to spread inside her. “The midwife told me that in case I was wondering, sex is perfectly safe, and in fact there’s some thinking that the hormones released by orgasm are good for the baby.”
He licked his lips. “Are they now?”
“I mean, I don’t know.” She performed an exaggerated shrug. “I guess we just have to trust the medical experts here.”
The Walsh repair.
It popped into Jake’s mind as he helped Nora out of the chair. It was some kind of surgery stitch that her grandma had invented, if he remembered correctly. A method for fixing broken hearts.
Damned if Dr. Walsh Junior hadn’t done it to him. Forced him to want things, to want them enough to hack through all the fear and habit that had accreted around him, calcifying his heart.
He cleared his throat. “I have one more thing to show you. In my room. Our room.” He steered her across the hall. “We can redecorate it however you like.”
“Are you forgetting that I’m the person who moved from Harold Burgess’s hovel to the Barbie Dream Room? I don’t care what the room looks like.”
“Well, you might care about this.” He had added a small cabinet to the far wall, across from the foot of the bed. He opened it to reveal a little TV and a DVD player. “Old-school, I know, but as you know, I’m a little behind the times on the whole technology front.” He was getting rid of that damn phone ASAP, now that he had Nora back.
“You’re not a Netflix guy, probably,” she teased.
“Happily, it turns out that most of your weird zombie movies come on DVD.” He pulled out a little drawer under the TV to reveal the collection that Clara had helped him order from Amazon with rush shipping.
“Oh, Jake. You know just how to romance a girl.”
“I know.” He wagged his eyebrows at her. “Now strip.”
“Stop it. You’re slaying me with the romance.” She was stripping, though, and rather quickly, too. And laughing. He did the same.
How quickly they had gone from crying to laughing today.
Soon they were standing in front of each other totally exposed. And not just physically. He had told her his worst fears and she was still here, his beautiful, brilliant Nora.
And, not to get too caveman about it, but she was here with his baby inside her. Her previously flat belly was gently curved, and it made him crazy. It made him want to do wicked, wicked things to her, but then lay her down and rub her feet while she watched zombie movies. It was all very confusing—but in a good way.
He hardly knew where to start.
Except, wait. He did. He smiled. “I like your hair, Dr. Walsh.”
“I like your hair, too, Mr. Ramsey.”
Epilogue
Thirteen months later
When Nora told Jake about her ex-boyfriends, that night they were rounding third base—third base being talking about sexual insecurities while grilling fish—she had mentioned one dude who kept saying he needed her to “meet him halfway.”
Jake had never really gotten that.
Nora needed someone to meet her more than halfway.
She worked a lot. She had an important job. She took care of the town of Moonflower Bay. She took care of their daughter. They took care of their daughter. Penny. Named after Dr. Penelope Walsh, of course, but maybe also a little bit after the Beatles song “Penny Lane.”
So when Nora went back to the clinic three months after Penny was born, Jake met her more than halfway. He brought Penny in for feedings. He filled in at the front desk when Jacques was sick. He learned how to do the billing and did it during Penny’s naptime so Nora could come home sooner and they could have their evenings free.
He didn’t even like to think of it as meeting her halfway, because that implied that there was a compromise being made. There were no compromises here. It was all his pleasure. It was, as Sawyer had shouted at him what felt like a lifetime ago, the first thing he’d wanted. He was good at it. At being a dad. At being a husband—they’d had what Nora called a shotgun wedding on a full-moon night by the lake before Penny was born. Eiko had gotten some crazy internet ordination, and they’d said their vows—“Standard, old-school. I’m not really a write-your-own-vows kind of girl,” Nora had said—chucked some flowers into the lake, and that had been that.
The best part of every day was the end of it. After Penny’s bath, they would all pile onto the bed and play two songs: “Hey Jude,” and “Penny Lane.” It had been the grief counselor’s idea, and at first he’d felt weird about it, but now he loved it. Nora and Jake would sing and try to make Penny laugh.
Which she usually did. She laughed easily, his Pen. She embraced new experiences—she’d just started solid food this week, in fact—with gusto, delighted by nearly everything she encountered. Watching her reminded him that while being open to the world could have a cost, it could also have a payoff that was immeasurable.
She was laughing now, in fact. He blew raspberries on her belly while she screamed in delight.
“Hey!” Nora stuck her head into the room. “I thought we had to leave. I thought it was imperative that I get home by four so we could hit the road for the mystery trip.”
“It was. It is.” He planted one last kiss on Pen’s chunky belly and snapped her into her new onesie.
“Is that…” Nora came closer. “Is that a Detroit Tigers onesie?”
“Sure is.”
“Oh my God, are we going to a Tigers game?”
“Home opener versus Blue Jays.”
“Are you kidding me?” She started jumping up and down. “Ahh!”
“Yeah, I mean, that was one of the whole points of moving to Moonflower Bay, right? And you haven’t gone yet.”
They dropped Mick at Jake’s dad’s house and managed to escape after only ten minutes or so of Dad and Jamila losing their minds over Penny—and hit the road. Nora made moony eyes at him the whole way.
That was the other thing about meeting her more than halfway. It paid off so profoundly. She was so ridiculously easy to please that it almost felt like cheating. Zombies and Tigers and trout melts by the lake all had the pixie doctor turning into a gooey pile of mush.
So yeah, the whole meeting-halfway thing wasn’t work at all.
Leave it to Jake to think of this.
The Tigers were the one item in the new-life to-do list she hadn’t gotten around to yet. But to be fair, she hadn’t known that her new life was going to involve a husband, a kid, and a house you had to walk through a lake to get to, so she’d been a little busy.