By the time the weekend arrived, Violet couldn’t wait for her family to get home. Not that she’d actually be able to tell her brother or best friend about what was going on, but she’d at least be able to hug them. After their long plane flight and drive home, she expected Iris would be fussy and Archer and Franci would be stiff and cranky from their red-eye. Their flight had landed at Sea-Tac on time, and they’d made the ferry, so it was a matter of waiting for the boat to do its long, three-stop trip around the San Juans before finally docking at Oyster Island.
And in the meantime, she and Honu were up to their ears in getting things ready for the newlyweds’ arrival. She’d finished stocking the fridge with groceries, had changed the sheets and aired out the main rooms. With it being early March, spring-green buds were poking out on some of the trees and bushes. The air hadn’t warmed up yet, though, especially on the Pacific-facing side of the island where Archer and Franci’s house hugged the rugged coastline. Once she had a fire lit in the living room, making it cozy for when her family arrived, her to-do list would be all checked off.
She stacked the wood in the grate, leaving space for air like her dad had taught her back when she was a kid and complained about the wind whistling off the ocean. Between the ring outside on the lawn, the perfect place to have a wiener roast during the summer, and this fireplace, where she’d curled up with a stack of fantasy novels every winter, she’d learned how to make fire long before she’d turned ten. Having Archer, and now Franci and Iris, living in the home where Violet and Archer had grown up was hard to believe sometimes. Some parts of it were so familiar, and yet much of it was different to make space for Archer’s adult life.
The Spice Girls posters from her childhood room were long gone. Her shelf full of Tolkien and Gaiman was in her apartment’s living room now. The room where she’d had her first crush had been converted for guests, until recently.
Now it was Iris’s nursery.
Her heart squished. Three weeks without her niece had been way too long. She’d have to make sure she babysat for them soon.
The oven timer went off, and she shuffled to the open-plan kitchen and pulled the batch of oatmeal cookies out of the oven. Then she stirred the spaghetti sauce she’d made and put a pot of water on to boil. She’d have dinner ready for the travelers to dig into the minute they got home.
Honu’s ears lifted a few minutes later. He barked and bustled toward the door.
Franci bustled into the house with Iris in her arms, leaning awkwardly to pat Honu before rushing to Violet for a big baby-sandwich hug. Her red hair was in a travel-mussed bun. Her pale skin was tinted gold but wasn’t even close to Archer’s deep tan.
“Looks like you kept Coppertone in business, Fran,” Violet teased as she soaked in the comfort of holding her best friend. The second Franci pulled away, Violet swept the baby into her embrace.
“I might have a few tan lines somewhere else,” Franci said, cheeks pinking.
“Not many. We did have a very private lanai,” Archer added, joining them and giving Violet a quick squeeze.
“I should probably tell you to keep the details to yourself, but I’m just happy you enjoyed your honeymoon.” She lifted the baby overhead, earning a giggle. “And that you are home, little miss.”
Everyone probably thought Iris was going to be the only baby in the family for a while. Violet sure had a surprise for them.
Months from now. Once I feel confident.
“Vi, did you make dinner?”
“And cookies. I didn’t want you to come home to an empty fridge and have to cook. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Thank you. And please stay. I have a million pictures to show you,” Franci said.
Violet wasn’t going to turn down the invitation. It was better than going home to be alone with her worries.
She clung to her remaining kernel of hope, the one her losses hadn’t been able to steal from her. She would end up with a baby of her own to love.
And hopefully, it would be the one currently nestled low in her uterus. Barely an embryo, still.
She held Iris close, smelling her sweet baby smell. Yes, she needed more niece time. Nothing healed her soul like the weight of a baby against her chest. “I’ll stay, but only if you aren’t too tired.”
“We’re kind of desperate for help, actually,” Archer admitted. “The jelly bean has been clingy. We’ve been spelling each other off, but it’s nice to have her starfishing on someone else for a change.”
“I live to be the rock she fastens to,” Violet said.
She spent the next few hours playing peekaboo with Iris, being regaled by all of the newlyweds’ Hawaiian adventures, oohing and ahhing over the Crayola-blue water and enjoying her own pasta efforts.
She put Iris to bed while Franci and Archer did a bit of unpacking. With the baby smelling of lavender shampoo and snuggled into the sweetest polka-dotted fleece sleeper, Violet gave her a bottle and watched her little eyes start to droop.
“You want a cousin, little love?” she whispered.
Iris’s heavy gaze latched on to hers, bright and deep, holding the secrets of the world.
“I think I might be able to give you one. I sure hope I’ll be able to.”
Iris’s mouth was busy, sucking back the bottle of pumped milk like she hadn’t eaten in days. But she didn’t take her focus off Violet.
“I’m worried,” she whispered to the tiny face. She kept her tone soothing, not matching her words at all. “More than worried. It’s like being frozen.”
Sucked into the spell of infant eyes, so new but so wise, her mind calmed.
One step at a time.
Emotions swung wild during pregnancy, and sometimes the giant ball of overwhelming feelings needed to be pieced out into manageable chunks.
She also encouraged her parents-to-be to lean on their birth partners. Relying on Matias when she couldn’t manage her nerves was a good place to start.
“I hadn’t planned on trusting someone again,” she said.
Ugh. What an awful sentiment to mumble to this brand-new soul. What kind of life did she want Iris to have? A lonely one, or one rich with connections?
“I’ll try harder. Promise. He seems to want to be a daddy.”
She had to be honest with herself. She desperately wanted him to succeed.
“I can do that without falling in love with him.”
Iris blinked, a tiny baby challenge.
“I can. I have to. Love would mix things up too much.”
Iris let go of the nearly empty bottle with a pop of her lips. She cooed.
Violet’s heart melted a little more. “You’ll be such a good big cousin.”
A squawk.
“I promise. You’ll love it, even if all the attention isn’t on you anymore. You’ll have to keep my secret, though.” She stroked Iris’s hair as the baby’s eyelids drooped. “I don’t want to get your mama and daddy’s hopes up.”
She knew pregnancy loss needed to be normalized. But did her private pain need to be exposed in the process? What would her clients think if they knew she couldn’t manage her own emotions, let alone support them with theirs?
She squeezed her eyes shut. Her clients. She couldn’t play the ostrich when it came to her practice. She’d have to tell Wren and needed to jump on inviting the newly graduating midwife for an interview. She couldn’t wait until her second trimester to start preparing for maternity leave.
Stroking Iris’s back, she started making a mental list, thankful for the concrete task.
Matias sat at the end of the bar, sifting through a small stack of résumés. With shelling out money for rent now, he needed to get serious. Step one was expanding The Cannery’s staff to free himself up more. Earlier in the week, he’d hired a couple people, a friend of Nic’s, who’d recently turned twenty-one, to tend the bar, and a retired fishing boat cook who was bored with not working and was available for part-time hours in the kitchen. But to make an actual go of it, he’d need to free himself up entirely. He needed someone more experienced.
At least he had Clara arriving. She’d sent over her résumé, and she’d worked in a number of restaurants in between teaching assignments in high school home economics.
He tapped his pen on the table. It would be worth asking if she was willing to take on a managerial role.
He dialed her number. When she answered the phone, she sounded surprised.
“Something wrong with my application, Matias?”
“No, something right. How would you feel like taking on more responsibility?” He explained his predicament with needing someone who could handle supervisory tasks.
“Well...” Her tone turned uncertain. “You’re just meaning the pub? I can’t be much help in the brewery. I have celiac disease, so beer is way out of my wheelhouse.”
“I’m looking for someone who can handle the front-end staff, scheduling, food orders, that sort of thing. I should have enough hands in the kitchen, unless there’s a staff shortage. Then you might need to cover. Are you able to work in a kitchen that isn’t a dedicated gluten-free space?”
“Sometimes I wear a mask to be safe, but yes. The cooking itself, I have no problem with. Somehow, I manage to teach a few hundred teenagers to do it each year.”
“Way more of a challenge than Albie. He’s a softie, when you get to know him.”
She laughed. “It all sounds like fun. I’m looking forward to the change of scenery for a few months.”
They talked out a few more details before he thanked her profusely and said goodbye.
Letting out a sigh of relief, he muttered, “One problem down. One to go.”
He was quickly coming to realize he’d need at hand with the brewery, too. He couldn’t get one up and running alone.
The stool two over from his squeaked as someone sat down in it.
He glanced to the side.
Oh, hell no. The universe had to be joking.
“Anything of yours on tap?” Lawson asked.
“You assume I’m willing to take your money.”
“Well, damn. If you’re offering free drinks, I won’t turn you down.” Lawson’s grin was still as cheeky as ever. Christ, the guy had made Matias laugh once upon a time.
He nodded at James, his new bartender. “Do me a favor and pour two pints of my IPA from a new growler?”
James nodded and flew into action, seemingly eager to please.
When he slid the two brimming glasses over, Lawson thanked him before turning to Matias. “Reminds me of us back when we were getting started. Young and full of energy.”
“Naive,” Matias muttered.
Their grand plan had been for Lawson to use his chemistry degree as head brewer and for Matias to take care of the numbers, but Matias had soon found he loved experimenting with hops and malt as much as his partner did.
Lawson held the brew up to the light and then took a tentative drink. His eyes widened as he slowly set the glass on his coaster.
“It’s... Damn.”
“Just a basic IPA.” He played around with flavors sometimes. Not on this one. He’d been working to perfect this recipe for a couple of years.
“Yeah, that’s what makes it so good.” Lawson frowned. “It’s better than mine.”
“I know.”
That’d been the whole point. Thorny IPA had been the flagship beer of the conglomerate’s specialty brewing branch, meant to compete with smaller craft breweries. The whole upscale operation bore Lawson’s name. He had more gold medals to his name than a star athlete. His willing admission of Matias’s hard work was unexpected.
Matias waited for the fizz of victory to wash through him. It didn’t. What was praise, even earnestly given, in the face of all the possibilities they’d lost?
“I’ve been cocky,” Lawson said.
“Mmm.” Matias pushed up his reading glasses and looked over Denny Harris’s work experience section. He sighed. Denny had a heart of gold, but his patchy history of odd jobs in the community wasn’t going to cut it. He flipped the résumé to the back of the pack.
“Figured I’d come home, make some apologies and then look to start up a new label,” Lawson said.
Matias jerked, then grabbed the bar to make sure he didn’t slide off the stool onto his ass. He pinned Lawson with a glare. “You wouldn’t.”
“Not here.” Lawson cupped his glass with both hands and stared into the golden liquid. “Heard you’re looking to expand.”
“It’s time.”
“Good for you.” Lawson cleared his throat. “If I can help in any way... I have some decent connections, if you want them.”
Matias squinted. “I do not.”
Lawson nodded. “Understood.”
He didn’t push again, sitting there in silence.
Matias both appreciated and resented the lack of conversation. He was left to his paperwork, and there were only so many times a person could scan the same five résumés.
By the time Lawson had finished his beer and left a twenty on the bar, Matias was pretty sure he was going to be reciting Taylor Larkins’s education history and mission statement out to unwilling victims at whatever nursing home he terrorized in his nineties.
He couldn’t bring himself to hear about whatever contacts Lawson had built in five years of being the golden boy of west coast brewing. But letting the guy walk out with his head held seemingly high was untenable, too.
He left the résumés and his beer on the counter and stormed out after his ex-friend. “It’s not that I don’t want your connections,” he called across the parking lot.
Lawson froze with his hand on the handle of the goat farm’s old pickup. His eyes glinted in the beam from the streetlight overhead.
“I don’t trust them,” Matias continued. “I don’t trust you. What you did to me, and what you did to Violet—it’s not so easy as an ‘I’m sorry.’”
Lawson’s resigned grimace churned up a whole lot of feelings Matias would much prefer not to feel.
Nodding, Lawson got in the truck and drove off.
Matias stared across the parking lot, clenching his fists.
He hated the temptation curling in his belly to ask for Lawson’s contacts. He couldn’t risk tying himself up with someone unreliable. Learning to live with his ex-partner being on the island was one thing. Actually believing Lawson wasn’t the same person as he was five years ago was entirely another.
The dark windows of the back side of Violet’s building caught his eye. No lights shone from her apartment or her office, not that she’d be seeing expectant parents or newborns this late at night. She’d be on the ferry, most likely. She was still making up the appointments she’d had to reschedule after her client’s long delivery last week. Being a solo midwife demanded flexibility. He knew she was already worried about balancing her own child with her job’s unusual schedule.
God, he didn’t have the mental space to donate to Lawson, not when he had Violet to worry about. She was his priority right now.
Turning to reenter the pub, he pulled out his phone.
Matias: On your way home yet?
Violetta: I missed the ferry :(
Violetta: Good thing I don’t have Honu anymore, or you’d be on rescue detail again
Archer and Franci had gotten home a few days ago, much to the excitement of their dog. It was nice for Violet to have one less responsibility to juggle.
Only to be replaced by a much, much bigger one.
He got the impression Violet saw a child as a gift, not a responsibility. Leaps and bounds past his own parents, who’d considered him neither. If it weren’t for his aunt and uncle, who knows what his formative years would have been like.
Violet would throw herself into motherhood. She’d be there for every step of her child’s life.
Our child.
Incredible.
And with the phenomenon came the undeniable need to take care of her.
Damn ferry. It already would have been a late night had she made the eight. Now she wouldn’t be home until after eleven.
Matias: Want dinner?
Violetta: No, I’m good
Violetta: Actually
Violetta: It’s not too much trouble?
Me: It’s in my literal job description
Violetta: You really don’t have to. I can make myself a pot of mac and cheese or something.
He scowled, then typed, The mother of my child deserves mac and cheese baked in an oven.
Three dots bounced on the screen for what felt like a minute.
Finally, a response popped up.
The mother of your child?
His cheeks burned. He’d gone too far. They weren’t ready for those kind of connections.
He blew out a breath, thumbs hovering, not knowing how to respond.
I was not expecting you to call me that, she continued before he could sort his own thoughts.
Regret crept along his skin. He’d made it weird.
Matias: Sorry
Violetta: No no no
Violetta: It’s not a bad thing
And then the three dots bounced again, for long enough to know it had been a bad thing and she was just trying to make him feel better.
Jamming his phone in his pocket, he stalked back into the pub and cleared away the job applications before making his way into the kitchen. Mother of my child—and a whole lot of self-directed cringe—rang in his head for the next few hours while he multitasked, quizzing James on cocktails and putting together a pan full of noodles, béchamel, bacon and three different cheeses topped with breadcrumbs. He could put the rest up as a special for tomorrow. And when Violet finally got home, he was going to treat her to the biggest damn serving of cheesy goodness she had ever seen.