Page 63 of Until You

The windows are glowing. Someone has turned on the lights inside.

I stare.

"Oliver," I say, and my voice comes out wrong. Thin. Like it's been squeezed through something too tight.

"It's twenty acres," he says. He's watching me, not the house. I can feel it. "Twelve of it is pasture. There's a creek along the east property line. The barn needs some work—new roof, new stalls—but the bones are solid. House was built in 1952 and renovated last year. Three bedrooms upstairs, one down. Two and a half baths."

I shake my head slowly. My vision is blurring and I blink hard because I am not going to cry. I am not.

"The kitchen's been redone," he continues, his voice careful and steady, the way he talks to spooked animals and overwhelmed women, apparently. "Big island. Gas stove. That window over the sink faces east, so you’ll get morning light while you⁠—"

"Oliver."

He stops.

I turn to look at him. His not-quite-brown, not-quite-hazel eyes are fixed on my face with an intensity that I have never—not once in my entire life—been on the receiving end of from anyone but him. He looks like a man who has placed every single bet he has on one number and is watching the wheel spin.

"What is this?" I whisper.

He reaches over and takes my hand. Folds it between both of his, rough palms and certain grip, the same hands that held me in this truck when I was just a stranger with a no-names rule and a reckless heart.

"It's ours," he says.

Ours. The word hits me somewhere behind my sternum. Somewhere deep and bruised and tender. A place I've spent my entire life protecting with layers of sarcasm and temporary plans and the firmly held belief that permanence was something that happened to other people.

"You bought a house," I say.

"I bought us a house."

"You bought us a house."

"You keep repeating it like the words are going to change."

"Because they don't make sense!" I press my free hand to my chest. My heart is hammering. The baby kicks—hard, right under my ribs—like they have an opinion about this too. "Oliver, you can't just—people don't just⁠—"

"People don't just what?"

"Buy someone a house!"

"I didn't buy someone a house. I bought the woman I love a home." He says it like it's the simplest sentence in the English language. Like there's no distinction worth making between the two words, and maybe, for him, there isn't. "There's a difference."

The woman I love.

He's said it before. He says it every day now, in fact, in that quiet, matter-of-fact way of his, like loving me is just something he does—like breathing, like working, like putting on his boots in the morning. But every single time, it catches me somewhere I'm not ready for it. Every time, I feel the ground shift a little under my feet, the old foundation of don't count on anything cracking just a little more.

"Oliver, this is too much."

"It's not."

"It is. This is—do you know how much a house costs? With twenty acres? And a barn?"

"I'm aware." The corner of his mouth tips up. "I wrote the check."

"Oh my God."

"Cora." He tugs on my hand, pulling me closer across the center console. His other hand comes up to cup my face, thumb brushing along my cheekbone. I am absolutely crying now. So much for not crying. "Look at me."

I look at him.