Chapter 108: The New House

Chapter 108: The New House
Amelia's POV

The house was in Brooklyn, twenty minutes from the city but far enough that you could hear yourself think, and it had a garden that needed work exactly the way my mother would have said, overgrown at the edges and slightly wild in the middle but with good bones underneath all of it, which was how I felt about most things worth keeping.

We went to see it on a Saturday morning, all four of us because the girls went everywhere now and there was no version of our life anymore where we left them somewhere and did things separately, which was an adjustment we'd made without really discussing it, it had just become the shape of things.

Grayson carried Clara in the carrier against his chest and I had Sarah in mine and we walked through the house with the estate agent trailing slightly behind us like she understood this was not a house-viewing conversation but a family one and had the good sense to let it breathe.

The kitchen was big, bigger than I expected, with a window that looked directly into the garden and enough space for the kind of mornings I'd been imagining without knowing I was imagining them, the chaos of children and coffee and someone always talking too loud, Elena appearing unannounced, Daniel dropping by with food that needed improvement, all of it happening in a kitchen that could hold it.

"This room," I said to Grayson, stopping in the kitchen doorway.

He looked at it and then at me and said "yes" without me having to finish the sentence, which was still one of my favourite things about him.

We looked at the bedrooms and the study and the room that would be the nursery initially and the room beside it that would eventually be something else, a playroom or a library or both, and we stood in the garden at the end and looked at what it could be and Grayson said "six months and it'll be completely different" and I said "twelve" because I was more realistic about gardens having grown up with one that never quite did what anyone hoped, and he said "eight" and I said "deal" and we shook on it which made the estate agent smile from the back door where she was very professionally pretending not to listen.

We bought it.

The process took three weeks and during those three weeks we lived in the strange suspended state of people who know where they're going and are just waiting to arrive, and I kept thinking about the mansion and what it had been at the beginning, a place I'd been installed in against my will as part of an arrangement neither of us had chosen, and what it had become by the end, a house we'd survived things in together, and how the new house would be something else entirely, the first place that was just ours from the start.

Elena cried when we told her, which she would deny if asked.

Daniel said "send me the address so I can figure out the commute" which made Elena laugh and me feel something warm and uncomplicated about how far that had come in a few months.

Thomas said "good" and nothing else, which from Thomas was actually quite a lot.

We moved on a Thursday because Grayson said Thursdays were statistically better for starting things and I didn't ask him to explain the statistics and we didn't hire anyone because I wanted to do it ourselves, or as much of it as possible, and so we spent the day carrying boxes with Marcus's help because he'd offered and we'd been genuinely glad because neither of us had properly anticipated how many boxes two people accumulated when one of them was a billionaire and the other had spent the past year acquiring things for two small humans.

By evening the kitchen was set up and nothing else was and we ordered food and sat on the floor in the living room surrounded by boxes and the girls were asleep in their carseats because it had been an overstimulating day for everyone and Grayson looked around at the half-assembled chaos of our new life and said "this is not what I expected it to look like."

"What did you expect," I said.

"More organised," he said.

"It's day one," I said.

"I know," he said, and he didn't sound bothered at all, which was different from the Grayson I'd met at the beginning who would have had this entire operation planned and executed by now, and I noticed the difference and filed it away as one of the things I loved about what time and everything that had happened in it had done to him.

We ate on the floor and the girls woke up briefly and we settled them and then sat back against the boxes and the evening went quiet and the new house made the sounds new houses make, slightly unfamiliar and slightly right at the same time.

"Tell me something," I said.

"What kind of something," he said.

"Something you haven't told me yet," I said, which was a game we'd started in Santorini during the brief strange peace of that trip and had continued unevenly since, small truths traded in quiet moments.

He thought about it for a moment, genuinely thought, not performing the thinking, actually doing it, and then said "I used to come into work on weekends when I was about twenty-six and sit in my father's office and just work in there alone because I thought if I worked hard enough in the right room the company would start to feel like mine." He paused. "It never did. Not until recently."

"What changed," I said.

"You changed things," he said simply, not as a compliment exactly, just as a fact.

I leaned against his shoulder and looked at the boxes and the girls sleeping and said "I used to think I was the kind of person things happened to. Not someone things happened for."

"What changed," he said, echoing my question back.

"Same answer," I said.

He pressed a kiss to my temple and we sat there while the house settled around us, becoming a little more ours with every hour, and I thought about the article on my laptop and the notebook Elena had given me and the blank pages waiting, and I thought about Sarah and Clara who would grow up in this house not knowing the version of their parents who had been strangers in a hotel room once, and I was glad about that, glad they would only know the version that came after.

My phone buzzed on the floor beside me and I looked at it expecting nothing important and saw it was a message from my old editor at the Daily Pulse, not the one I usually dealt with but the editor-in-chief, someone I'd met twice and admired considerably, and the message was short and direct in the way important messages sometimes were.

It said she'd been following my work and wanted to talk about something larger, a book possibly, or a column, or both, and that she'd been thinking about it since the article but had waited until she was sure before reaching out, and she was sure now, and would I be available to meet next week.

I read it twice and then handed the phone to Grayson and watched him read it and look up.

"Well," he said.

"Well," I agreed.

"Are you going to reply tonight," he said.

"No," I said. "Tonight I'm going to sit on the floor of our new house and eat this food and not think about anything that isn't right in front of me."

"Good answer," he said, and handed the phone back and I put it face down on the floor and picked up the food container instead and we sat there together in the good quiet of something that was just beginning.