Chapter 266: Reid
Jake’s clattering around downstairs—pancakes and bacon, the kind of morning he builds with ritual when he’s trying to keep all of us steady—and I’m sitting up in bed with a book I’m not really reading while Madeline sleeps soft beside me. One of us always stays; we learned fast that the second we both step away is the second a nightmare finds her. She blinks awake, lashes fluttering, and I start, “Good morning, beau—” but she’s already bolting, a blur of copper hair and bare feet, bathroom door bumping the wall before I’m even out from under the quilt.
I’m there by the time she folds to the floor. I gather her hair, wrap it in my hand like something sacred, rub slow circles between her shoulder blades while her whole body heaves. It’s been like this a week now—big, brutal nightmares that rattle her apart and then leave her sick to her bones—and every time it tears me clean through that therapy hasn’t softened the edges yet, that her body is paying interest on what her mind can’t help reliving. Her small fingers shake on the rim of the porcelain; when it’s over she slumps, breath sawing, eyes wet, knuckles white. I crouch beside her.
“You okay?” I ask, low.
She nods, the kind of nod that’s more apology than answer. “I’m sorry you have to—”
“Don’t care,” I cut in, and kiss her forehead before she can roll away. She tries anyway, murmuring something about morning breath, and I just smile like an idiot and say, “Told you. Don’t care.” I set the water running for her, line up her toothbrush, tuck a towel into the heated rack because she loves it warm. “Shower, teeth, take your time. I’ll be downstairs with Jake.”
She gives me a shy little smile that still kills me, even after everything, and I leave her to steam and quiet while I rub a hand over my jaw and head down.
Jake’s at the stove, griddle popping, the whole kitchen a promise of sugar and salt. He glances up, reads my face in a heartbeat. “What’s wrong?”
“She threw up again,” I say, and he frowns like the skillet just misbehaved.
“This is happening a lot,” he says. “Nightmare about the alley?”
“Didn’t ask,” I admit. “But probably. The sound—” I break off. We both know the sound she can’t shake. The one of her wrist breaking. That's always the one she dreams about.
“At least she’s not losing weight,” he says after a beat, flipping a pancake, measured voice fighting worry. “She’s eating. She looks good.”
“She looks perfect.” I lean on the counter, hating that this is our morning calculus. “Just feels… cruel.”
“Yeah.” He exhales. “Yeah.”
Minutes later she pads in, towel draped around her shoulders, hair damp and clean, tank top and loose joggers hanging soft on her, skin pink from the heat. Jake kisses her temple; I tilt her chin and give her a proper one now that I can—slow, deep enough to taste mint and heat—and she blushes like she always does, which is its own kind of medicine.
“What was it about this time?” I ask, keeping my voice easy.
She thinks, brow knitting, then shrugs. “I don’t really remember. Woke up feeling awful and—” she tips her hand, “—body took the wheel, I guess.” She’s already stealing bacon with her left hand, flipping a page in her book with the other, like nothing in the world has ever been more normal than reading while pilfering breakfast.
I’m telling myself that’s good—dream amnesia can be a mercy—when something slots in, cold and bright. Morning sickness. It started after nightmares, sure, but… my gaze drops to her belly. Flat. As usual. My brain, traitor that it is, goes red-hot and racing. I look at Jake; Jake is already looking at her the same way, a flicker of the exact same thought moving between us like a current.
She doesn’t notice—she’s busy humming over bacon and berries—so I tip my head toward the stairs. Jake nods.
Up in the bathroom, we close the door like we’re about to commit a crime and stare at the shelf of pill bottles. Pain, healing, vitamins. A pink tablet in the daily sorter—was her birth control pink? I try to replay the blur of hospital days, the lineup of medications, the way she’d wince swallowing everything they handed her. Jake opens the cabinet, closes it, opens it again, as if the answer might appear on bottle labels if he squints hard enough.
“When did we—” I start. Meaning to ask what were the days we had sex over the past few weeks.
“Almost every day,” he says, deadpan, and then makes a face because saying it out loud right now sounds insane.
“We never used anything,” I say. “I mean, we're clean, all of us, she said she was on birth control when we first had sex, but… since the hospital?”
He rubs his mouth, thinking. “Could be the meds that make her sick. Or stress. Or her system resetting.” A pause. “Or.”
“Or,” I echo, heartbeat doing an ugly, hopeful thing.
“It’s been, what—four weeks since the first time we finished in her after she came back?” he adds. “Give or take.”
I do the math twice because it feels like counting down to a tide change. “Yeah.”
Silence stretches. Out in the hall the house ticks and settles; downstairs, the griddle pops, and from the kitchen I swear I can hear her little content noise when she finds the best berry in the bowl.
“We don’t add stress until we know for sure or feel like we need to ask,” Jake says finally, voice quiet, practical even when his eyes have gone soft around the edges. “We keep an eye out for more signs. And we figure our own heads out in the meantime so we're cool, calm and collected when we talk to her. If it's necessary.”
I nod, because that’s the sane path, the responsible one, the one that won’t spook her or us. But my head is already a lost cause, because the image arrives whole: her in our kitchen months from now, hoodie riding up, belly round under my palm; her laughing when I say the word “ours” and mean it five different ways; her freckles stretching bright over skin warmed from the inside.
“I know my head,” I say, and it comes out rough. “If it’s that… I’m in.”
Jake’s mouth twitches, the kind of almost-smile he saves for when something scares him and he wants it anyway. “Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”
We stand there a second longer, two enormous idiots staring at a pink pill like it’s a star chart, then I clap his shoulder and we head back down to our girl, who is perched on a stool with bacon in one hand, a book in the other, and absolutely no idea that the two men who love her are already trying not to picture the future with a little Anderson baby with green eyes while they butter her pancakes.