Page 37 of Until You

chapter

nine

Cora

Oliver brought me a plate of food. It’s the thought that keeps playing in my head over and over. Through James’s toast. And now, as Henry, the oldest Blankenship child, is called up by Pops. He calls Gracie up too. They clearly have a history together, though I’m not familiar.

Caroline mentioned that she, Gracie, and Kelsie, one of Oliver’s sisters, co-own the bakery downtown.

Henry is a big guy too. Maybe stockier than Oliver, but not as tall. Though from what I’ve seen, the youngest in the family, Payton, is the real giant.

All the Blankenship men have an easy confidence. The kind that isn’t faked. But rather comes from growing up knowing exactly where you belong and who belongs to you.

A completely foreign feeling for me.

He makes a joke about brisket. About grass fires. The crowd laughs. He glances back at Gracie, and the look on his face when he sees her is so unguarded it makes my ribs ache.

“Y’all already know Gracie,” he says. “But tonight I get to introduce her as my wife.”

Ah, so this is why Oliver needed a new place to live.

The crowd erupts. Cheers and whoops and about damn time and laughter that sounds like love sounds when it has a whole town behind it. I clap along with everyone else. I mean it, too—even though I barely know these people, there’s something about watching someone stand up in front of everyone they’ve ever known and claim the person beside them that hits me somewhere deep and primal and tender.

Gracie looks a little stunned yet still radiant, and Henry looks at her like she’s the only fixed point in a spinning room, and I think—unbidden, unwanted, unstoppable—and all I can think is that’s what it looks like when someone chooses you.

I’ve never been chosen.

Not like that. Not in front of people. Not out loud.

My hand drifts to my stomach.

I don’t mean for it to happen. It’s become instinct over the last few weeks—this unconscious migration of my palm to the soft curve below my navel, fingers spread wide, like I’m holding something in place. Keeping it safe. Reminding myself and the tiny life inside me that we’re here, we’re real, we exist, even if no one else knows it yet.

I catch myself. But not before I feel Oliver’s eyes on me, on my hand, in particular. I quickly reach for my water glass and take a careful sip.

But the ache doesn’t leave. It sits behind my sternum, heavy and warm, and I know exactly what it is because I’ve been carrying it for fourteen weeks.

Longing.

My entire life, I’ve wanted to belong to a family. I might not get chosen the way Gracie just did, but I do choose my child. I will make my own family, and no one will ever be able to ask me to leave.

I excuse myself from the table before I start crying because I can feel the heat of the tears pricking at my eyes. Because if I let myself think about the way Oliver looked at me at the table earlier. Telling me I looked nice in my green dress… I might just lose it.

There’s so much love and affection in the air tonight, it’s like they’re piping it in off that barbecue smoker. I just need to recenter myself. Focus on getting the slideshow set up.

Henry and Gracie move to the dance floor. The band plays something slow. The crowd settles into the warm, golden haze of a party that’s found its rhythm.

For a moment, I just watch them dance.

She fits against him like she was designed for the space, the same way Mimz fits against Pops, the same way every couple on that cornmeal-dusted floor seems to have found their particular geometry. I watch Henry’s hand at the small of Gracie’s back, and I remember—vividly, physically, like a bruise being pressed—Oliver’s hand in exactly the same place. In a bar. On a dance floor where everything started.

My eyes sting.

I blink hard and look away.

Then Rebecca is joining me over where I’ve set up the equipment. My stomach does a slow, nauseating roll that has nothing to do with the baby and everything to do with terror.

Because this is it. The thing I made. The hours of scanning and sorting and crying over photographs of people I’m not related to. The project I buried myself in, so I didn’t have to face the conversation waiting at the end of the hallway.