“Deviled, bud,” Chris said. “Just deviled.”

  His mother put the platter on the table, and Jed let the twins go first. They clearly wanted the treat more than anyone else. “I’ll take one,” Cherry said with sophistication, and he let her put one half of one egg on her plate. He took four and passed the platter to Chris.

  “Apricot kielbasa,” his mom said before the platter had even gone to Deb.

  “Oh my goodness,” Cherry said. “That looks divine.”

  “It’s pretty divine,” Jed agreed. “It’s fried sausage with apricot preserves and Dijon mustard. My mama makes the preserves herself.”

  Cherry took plenty of that, and she moaned at her first bite.

  “Christmas tree veggie tray,” Mama announced, and she set a big tray of vegetables that she’d arranged into a Christmas tree. Broccoli made most of the tree, with red and yellow peppers as the strings of lights, and bits of cauliflower and cherry tomatoes for bulbs.

  “I like these sugar peas,” Jed said, snatching a couple from the branches of the tree. They made it look like the Christmas tree shape, what with their pointed ends, and he took a lot of the ranch dip too. “Mama makes this from scratch too.”

  “This is so cute,” Cherry said. “Jed, put those peas back so I can get a picture for my mama.” She reached to take the peas from his plate while he still spooned dip onto it, and he watched as she rearranged them, then stood to snap a picture. She looked at it with adoration on her face, and Chris elbowed him.

  “Ow,” Jed said, swinging his head toward Chris. “What was that for?”

  “You’re salivating over her,” he said under his breath.

  “No, I’m not.” He glanced over to Easton, who watched him too. Daddy was too busy with the apricot kielbasa to notice Jed. “She took my sugar snap peas.” He reached for them again and told himself not to stare at Cherry anymore.

  Easier said than done, but he felt like he did a decent job as Mama kept bringing out food. She brought the main dishes one right after the other until the table groaned with candied ham, mashed potatoes, country gravy, roasted corn pudding, green bean casserole, and his favorite, roasted carrots and Brussel sprouts.

  “I didn’t know you ate vegetables,” Cherry said as he piled his plate high with them.

  He scoffed and handed the pan to Chris. “I do if they’re good,” he said.

  “Or someone else makes them for him,” Easton said.

  “Like you’re roasting veggies at your house,” Jed said, stabbing a half of a sprout. It was sweet and tangy from the glaze, and he over-exaggerated how much he liked it.

  “Now don’t fill up on veggies,” Mama said. “There’s plenty of desserts to come.”

  Jed grinned at her, because he had room for anything else she might bring out. He checked on Cherry to make sure she had what she needed. She leaned closer, so he did too, and she said, “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a mother say not to fill up on veggies.”

  He chortled, then burst out laughing, which he knew was far too loud for this intimate Christmas meal. “Sorry,” he said as Daddy gave him a glare.

  “My goodness,” Mama said from her spot right next to Cherry. “She must be someone special to get you to laugh like that.”

  “Ma,” Jed said at the same time Cherry said, “I’m sitting right here.”

  Jed looked from her to his mother, his heart firing at him hard. He swallowed quickly and said, “She is someone special, Mama, and it has nothing to do with making me laugh.”

  “Sorry,” Cherry murmured, her eyes falling to her plate where she pushed her food around with her fork.

  “I didn’t mean anything,” Mama said, blinking at Jed and then focusing on Cherry. “I’m sorry, dear.” She covered Cherry’s hand with hers, and that got Cherry to look up. Mama offered her a sweet smile, and Cherry gave a soft one in return.

  “I’m just not used to being called special, ma’am.”

  Jed put his hand on her knee again and squeezed, hoping she got the message. She was special to him. She absolutely was.

  17

  Will Cooper paused outside his front door and took a deep breath. Way in through his stomach, the way his therapist had taught him. He exhaled, keeping his mouth closed. Again, he breathed, shedding the cares of the day. It didn’t matter that four dairy deliveries had gone out late today.

  Another breath, and this time he blew the air out through his mouth in a long, controlled exhale. It didn’t matter how much work he had to do tomorrow before dawn. He’d get up, and he’d do it. It didn’t matter that once that work finished, he then needed to run to his wife’s shop and help her get closed up for a couple of days.

  He loved working with Gretchen, and then tomorrow night, they’d go collect her daddy from his house in Short Tail, and along with her aunt, they’d celebrate a new year together with his family at the big white farmhouse.

  Lee would be moving in there as soon as Trav’s new place was finished. Mama and Daddy would take this cabin Will currently stood in front of. After all the house jumbling, Will and Gretchen would have a bigger place to raise their family.

  A smile touched his mouth, then his heart, and finally his soul. He opened the door to the scent of baking chocolate, and Gretchen, his gorgeous, beautiful wife turned from the sink at the back of the house. “There you are,” she said. “I was about to send Lee a nasty text.” She smiled at him, and Will knew she’d do no such thing. Even if she was frustrated with the amount of work the Cooper brothers did, she’d only ever talk to Will about it.

  “Here I am,” he said, taking off his cowboy hat and hanging it on the hook beside the door. He ran his hands through his hair as he went through the living room and past the dining room set that had once belonged to Gretchen’s mama.

  He arrived in the kitchen, and he stepped next to her at the sink where she washed out a big glass bowl. “You made brownies.”

  “Mm hm.” She sniffled too, and Will kept his head down as he slid his arm around her waist. He drew her into him, and Gretchen leaned against his chest, her hands still working the last of the batter off the bowl.

  “I love coming home to brownies,” he said quietly, so glad he’d taken his time to leave work behind on the farm, so he could now be Will-the-husband. “But not more than coming home to you.”

  She smiled, rinsed out the bowl, and he let her get away from him as she put it on the towel next to the sink. Only then did she let out her breath and face him. He said nothing, though plenty of questions flowed between them.

  “I’m just emotional,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  “You’d tell me if there was,” he said, not phrasing it as a question.

  “Of course.” She stepped into him and he held her, nothing as sweet as holding his wife in their home.

  “Trav’s house is lookin’ good,” he said. “It’s going to be done by the end of February. We’ll move in March, and that’s plenty of time to have everything set up for when the baby comes.”

  “I’d say so,” Gretchen said, her voice quiet too. She moved back and wiped her eyes again. “I almost told Maggie today. I seem to burst into tears at the strangest times.” She shook her head, and Will watched the frustration roll across her face.

  “We can tell everyone tomorrow night,” he said. “Then it’s just done.”

  “Is it too early?” she asked.

  “Baby, I don’t know stuff like that,” Will said with a smile. He knew his wife was pregnant, and she’d told him she was due July twelfth. That was what he knew, and he didn’t much care about pregnancy announcement protocols. He knew he was beyond thrilled, and he couldn’t wait to be a father.

  Watching Rissa and Spence the past couple of months as they’d become parents had been fascinating for him, and Trav and Shay would have their little girl in only three more months. As fit as Shay was, and as fast as she ran, even she’d slowed down. She and Will still ran together most mornings, and he’d barely been able to keep up with her pre-pregnancy.

  “You just tell me what you want me to do,” he said. “And I’ll do it.”

  “We should tell them,” she said.

  “Great.” Will tried to keep his voice even and calm, but he suddenly couldn’t stop smiling.

  “You’ve been dying to tell everyone.”

  “I can’t deny that.” Will glanced over to the stove, and saw the brownies still had almost an hour before they even came out of the oven. “Am I makin’ dinner?”

  “It’s your specialty,” she said. They’d been eating at the farmhouse about half the time these days, because Will really liked more quiet in the evenings, and Gretchen sometimes worked late in her chocolatier shop.

  “I don’t know about specialty,” he said, but Gretchen got out of the way so he could open the fridge to see what they had inside. He didn’t want to spend the evening in the kitchen, not when he could lay his head in his wife’s lap and let her brush her fingers through his hair while she watched something on the television. Or she’d text with her employees or her daddy while Will ignored his phone completely.

  He always paid for that in the morning when he walked into the administration office, but Lee was starting to get the idea that Will didn’t want to work all the time. In the past couple of weeks, the texts had slowed in the evening, as Lee and Rose got closer and closer to their wedding day.

  “Breakfast?” he asked, and Gretchen said, “I’ll make chocolate coffee.”

  He fried sausage links and scrambled eggs, and together, they put dinner on the table for the two of them. Will liked sitting down at an actual table and eating, and as he reached for Gretchen’s hand so they could say grace, she caught him off-guard with, “Do you want a boy or a girl?”

  Will recovered nicely and took a handful of sausage links, really focusing on the task so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “Honestly?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Honestly, always, honey.”

  He smiled when she called him honey, as she usually made his name into a term of endearment.

  “I’d prefer a girl,” he said. “Then maybe she’ll have some of your more personable qualities.”

  “Oh, she’ll have red hair,” Gretchen said with a smile as she took a big scoop of scrambled eggs. “And you do realize that you have two sisters and neither of them are all that…personable.”

  “I think they’re trying,” Will said in defense of Cherry and Clarissa. “And with more of you in her than me, she’ll have a better chance.”

  Gretchen laughed and covered his hand with hers. “You realize that the baby is fifty percent of both of us whether it’s a boy or a girl, right?”

  “I took genetics once upon a time,” he said dryly.

  “And your mama is the sweetest woman in Texas, and that she still got the five of you.” She grinned at Will, who decided to breathe out and embrace who he was: a Cooper.

  And yes, Coopers had tempers, and they argued, and they shouted at family parties. But the Coopers knew how to forgive too, and they knew how to change, and they knew how to love deep.

  “I suppose whether she’s a girl or a boy, she’ll still be a Cooper,” Will said.

  “That’s right,” Gretchen said, grinning. “Now stop hogging the sausage and pass it over here.”

  “You haven’t even given me a drop of the chocolate coffee,” he shot back, and they swapped food for drink and continued their meal. As they cleaned up together, Will took a moment to embrace his very normal, mundane life.

  “I love you, Gretchen,” he said as she loaded the last coffee mug into their dishwasher.

  She turned into his arms and looped hers around the back of his neck. “I love you too, Will.”

  He kissed her, every time like the very first time.

  Shayla Cooper rested her hand on her pregnant belly and watched the bare branches bend in the breeze beyond the bay window. The farmhouse held plenty of Cooper cowboy noise, but she didn’t hear it at all. Not even her husband’s voice could penetrate the bubble she’d created for herself.

  Someone sat beside her, and Shay did turn when her mother-in-law put her hand on her wrist. She offered Chrissy a smile, but it shook, as it had been for the past several days. Chrissy said nothing, but then again, she’d never had to before.

  Despite her own hardships, Chrissy had been over to the small house where Shay and Trav lived several times in the past couple of months, helping to pick out the items they’d order for the nursery. Their new house wasn’t finished yet, so Shay hadn’t actually ordered anything. But she had it all ready to go once everything finally fell into place.

  Trav went by the build every single day, but Shay had stopped doing that. She almost wanted it to be a surprise when Travis finally drove them up to their new house and walked her inside.

  “Only a couple more months now,” Chrissy finally said.

  “Until the house or the baby?” Shay asked.

  “The house,” Chrissy said. “Three for the baby. Plenty of time to get moved and set up.”

  Shay nodded and went back to gazing out the window. “Chrissy,” she said, turning her hand and sliding it into the older woman’s. She never spent any holidays with her own family, for despite finally getting married, the chasm between her and her mother seemed bottomless.

  Another wave of emotion overpowered Shay, and she honestly couldn’t wait to have this baby so her hormones would go back to normal.

  “Yes, dear?” Chrissy asked in that quiet, gentle, yet so powerful way she did.

  “Our little girl only has half a heart,” she said, the words coming out even and well-practiced. Because she had practiced them. Over and over she’d said them to herself, inside her mind, to her reflection in the mirror, with the doctor, to Trav, over and over and over.

  They hadn’t told anyone yet, and Shay felt this invisible barrier between her and everyone else—sometimes even Trav—and she hated it.

  “You can’t keep the sixes,” Trav yelled from the table, where he played games with his brothers, their wives or girlfriends, and his sisters and their significant others. Shay hadn’t wanted to get involved in that. Not today.

  “Yes, I can,” Will yelled back. “Get the rules, Lee.”

  “He’s right,” Rissa said, which didn’t indicate if she meant Trav or Will. Either of them could’ve been right for all Shay knew.

  Outside, the branches bent in the breeze as it blew into a wind, and they couldn’t do anything about it. They simply went with it, and Shay felt like she needed to be more like the boughs of the trees.

  Bendable. At the very least, she wanted to be flexible enough to allow the Lord to shape her into who she needed to be, so she could learn to be the mother of a baby, then a child, then a teenager, then a woman, who only had half a heart.

  “You’re having a girl?” Chrissy asked, seemingly not even hearing the part about the health issues of the baby. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

  Shay turned away from the wintery backyard. She normally didn’t mind winter in Texas, because it didn’t snow. Everything just turned brown, and because of Travis, she’d learned to find beauty in all the shades of the earth, especially browns.

  “Did you hear the part where she only has half of her heart?”

  “It’s a miracle what modern medicine can do these days,” Chrissy said, her smile firm and intact. She squeezed Shay’s hand, which admittedly barely felt like much to Shay, and leaned her head against her shoulder while everyone continued to argue around them. “I don’t know much, Shay,” she said. “But this I do know: God would not have given you a baby with only half a heart if you could not handle it.”

  “Okay,” she said, because she didn’t want reassurances. She wasn’t sure what she wanted. She and Trav had already argued about this privately, and he hadn’t known how to reassure her either. That was when she’d told him she didn’t want such things. She knew she was a strong woman. She ran her own company, with plenty of creativity and vision for their monthly subscription boxes, new clothing lines, and continued innovation in the outdoor products she sold.

  “I’m sorry this troubles you,” Chrissy said.

  “Thank you,” Shay said quietly. Troubled was a good word for how she felt, as there didn’t seem to be a solution to this. She couldn’t make the rest of her daughter’s heart grow. The doctors had assured her and Trav that babies and children and people in general lived happy, long lives with only half a heart.

  They were monitoring everything now, and Shay had a myriad of extra doctor’s appointments on the horizon.

  “Hey,” Trav said, and Shay looked away from the outdoors again. He tore his gaze from his mother to look at her. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she said, scooting to the edge of the couch so she could stand. Trav extended his hand, and she took it. “Sorry, were you talking to me?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But it wasn’t anything important.” He helped her stand, and his grip on her hand stayed far firmer than his mother’s. “Gretchen, Rissa, and Rose are going to put a movie on in the sun porch, and they wondered if you wanted to join them.”

  Shay looked toward the door that led out to the sun porch, and sure enough, the women had gathered there. Even Cherry had gone, and she alone turned to look at Shay, questions in her eyes. She felt so removed from them for a reason she couldn’t name. She hated the feeling, but she couldn’t swallow it away despite her efforts.

  “I suppose you’re going to be talking business,” she said, glancing over to Lee, who stood at the table with a bag of chips in his hands. Will sat across from him, a tablet in front of him. But none of the Coopers played games on devices, least of all the men.

  Definitely business.

  “A little,” Trav said. “Daddy’s going to show us a few things, and then Will got a new tracking system for his deliveries he wants to show us.”

  “Dinner will be in about an hour,” Chrissy said, and she pushed herself away from the back of the couch too. Trav helped her stand as well, steadying her for much longer than he had Shay.