Page 54 of Until You

chapter

thirteen

Cora

I hear them before I see them.

Not because they’re loud—well, one of them is loud, but we’ll get to that—but because the lobby of Saddle Creek Memorial is a small room and the Blankenship family does not have a small presence.

They fill spaces. They take up air. Not in a suffocating way, but in the way that a fire fills a room with warmth, whether you asked for it or not.

Oliver pushes through the curtain first, my hand in his, and I take one breath and follow him through.

They’re arranged—unconsciously, probably—in a loose semicircle near the waiting room chairs. Kelsie, Addison, and their husbands. Payton is showing something to his sisters on his phone. James and Rebecca Blankenship stand close together the way couples do when they’ve been together for thirty years.

And in the center of all of it, Mimz and Pops.

Everyone is still wearing their anniversary party clothes. Though the men have opened the collars of their shirts and loosened their ties. Mimz, with her silver hair slightly loosened from its updo, her eyes bright and fixed on me with an expression full of affection.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says.

And then she’s crossing the room, and I’m being pulled into her arms, and the smell of her—gardenias and lavender soap closes around me.

I press my face against her shoulder.

I don’t cry. I’m past crying. I think my body has physically run out of the capacity for it. But I hold on, and she holds on, and for a moment, the lobby and the fluorescent lights and all the people watching just fall away.

“I’m sorry to cause all the drama on your special night,” I manage.

“Hush,” she says. Just that. Hush. The word of a woman who has raised children and outlasted every crisis that came with them.

She pulls back. Her hands come up to cup my face—the same way Oliver had held my face in the hospital room, with that particular Blankenship certainty, like they’re not afraid of taking up space when it matters. She looks at me.

“All that matters is your health. Are you all right?”

“Low iron,” I say. “Low blood sugar. The baby is fine. Measuring right on track.”

Her face does something complicated and complete. Something that starts in her eyes and moves through the rest of her, unhurried, the way light moves across water.

“Of course it is,” she says softly. Like she never doubted it. Like she’s been waiting for this news the same way she waits for everything—with total, infuriating, accurate confidence.

Then Pops is there. He puts one broad hand on top of my head—the same way he said good girl when he came home from the cruise to find the house standing.

“You gave us quite a scare,” he says. His voice is gruff. It’s always gruff. It’s the voice of a man who has been ranching since before I was born and learned to say important things simply. “Don’t do that again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And eat your meals, for God’s sake. We have a whole refrigerator.”

“Pops,” Oliver says.

“I’m just saying.” He gives my head one more pat and steps back. “Good girl,” he adds, and I know—I know—he doesn’t mean it condescendingly. He means it the way you say it to someone who has done something hard without being asked. The way you say it when you’re proud.

My eyes sting. I blink it away.

Then Rebecca Blankenship appears, and I barely have time to prepare before she pulls me into the same fierce, certain hug she gave me at the anniversary party. She holds on for a long time without saying anything.

When she pulls back, she’s holding me at arm’s length, her hands warm on my shoulders, her eyes—not quite brown, not quite hazel, Oliver’s eyes—are steady on my face.