“You love me,” he says again, this time an affirmation, like the wonder of the words is beyond all human comprehension, but somehow, someway, they exist and are real.

  “Make love to me,” I say, wrapping my arms around his neck.

  He leans down a little and swoops me into his arms, striding into the suite bedroom without a backward glance, and I’m kept from the sights of Anchorage as I experience the bliss of Gideon’s body loving mine all afternoon.

  ***

  Gideon

  Finding out that she loves me is a game changer.

  I don’t know why it shocked me so much, but it did.

  I guess it’s because Addison is a formidable woman. When I think of the trajectory of her life—her nightmare childhood, graduating at the top of her high school class, propelling herself through Stanford on scholarships, and working at a top LA law firm—it’s inspiring. It’s impressive because beating the odds is always impressive. She’s a living, breathing Lifetime movie, yet somehow—by some miraculous stroke of luck—she’s ended up here with me. Loving me.

  “I’m relieved about Kieran,” she says, as we walk hand in hand from the courthouse to the Glacier Brewhouse, where we’re having lunch. “He deserved every penny.”

  “Did you doubt he’d get it?”

  She shrugs. “You never know until you know.”

  Kieran Flanders was awarded the entirety of Howard Greene’s estate, including a parcel of land in Cordova worth almost a million dollars.

  “What do you think his life will look like now?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, adjusting her fingers before squeezing mine tight. “He has no fingers or toes. His face is misshapen. I don’t…I don’t know.”

  “You don’t think someone will see past all that? Love him in spite of it?”

  “In LA,” she says, “the pressure to be perfect was intense. I got used to it for a while, you know?”

  I think about the first time I ever saw her—wearing tight jeans, knee-length black boots, and a poufy little parka with diamond buttons—and smile when I consider how she looks now in black leggings, black flat shoes, and a simple gray T-shirt. She looks comfortable now. I think Alaska’s rubbed off on her a little. In a good way.

  “Where’s he from?” I ask her.

  “San Diego, which is a little more relaxed than LA, but not by much.”

  “He has a lot of land up here now. Might make out better living somewhere away from a big city.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But even Cordova might feel too close to Valdez.”

  “You really hate Valdez,” I say with a sigh.

  “Don’t you understand, Gideon? Valdez was the place my brother went for adventure and ending up dying. It’s the place on earth that holds my deepest despair.”

  Hearing this hurts my feelings a little because it’s also the place where we met. As though she can sense my feelings, she follows up this thought by saying:

  “I’ll always be grateful that I met you. Always. I love you, Gideon. You know I do. But I can’t live there. I can’t embark on a new chapter of my life there. For me, even in the height of summer when the skies are sunny and there are flowers everywhere, the skies will be gray, and the landscape will be cold and white. It’ll always be a place of loss for me.”

  I understand what she’s saying. I do. But I’m used to Valdez. I know people. I own property. It’s my home and has been for almost fifteen years. There are other folks from my village living there. It’s small and comfortable but still bigger and more modern than Tatitlek. The thought of picking up stakes and moving to a big city like Anchorage is daunting. And maybe that makes me a pussy, but I can’t help how I feel.

  And yet, I think about yesterday in our hotel room, our bodies moving together, hearing her say that she loves me, and feeling free to tell her I love her too. How can I give that up? How can I be happy in Valdez knowing that the woman I love is five hours away? And when the inevitable day arrives when she tells me she’s met someone or she’s getting married, will my regret be so bitter as to choke me? Will I know that I had my chance with this amazing woman—to be a family with her and our daughter—and I passed it up because I was too scared to take a leap of faith?

  “You got quiet,” she says.

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “Want to share with me?”

  “I’m not saying I’ll move here with you,” I tell her. “But I’ll…I don’t know…I’ll think about it. I’ll try to warm up to it.”

  She stops walking, turning to face me, and her face blossoms with such a huge smile, it’s impossible for me not to smile back. Making her happy makes me happy. There’s no point in denying it.

  “Do you mean it?”

  I nod. “No promises. I’m an Alutiiq kid from a tiny village, but…yeah. I’ll try.”

  She throws her arms around my neck, showering my face with welcome kisses. “Thank you.”

  ***

  After lunch, we cross the street to check out the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, where Addison is thrilled to note that Miss Saigon visited the theater in May and Phantom of the Opera will be performed for a week in August. Anchorage Classical Ballet has student recitals twice a year, and Addison collects a brochure for “when we enroll Ella.” There is also a Writer’s Conference in September and several opera screenings that she pledges to attend.

  I haven’t been to the theater in many years, but the appeal isn’t lost on me, especially the fare at Cyrano’s Theater Company, which occasionally includes classic Greek plays like Antigone and Oedipus Rex on its annual roster.

  We make our way to the Anchorage Museum and Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center and walk hand in hand through the various halls, checking out the many art and cultural exhibits before the museum closes at six o’clock.

  The sun won’t set until almost midnight, so we walk through Town Square Park, buying hot dogs for dinner and stopping to listen to a free concert in the park. Addy says that folk music isn’t her favorite, but when I lean against a tree and she sits between my legs, with her back against my chest, I think it might be mine. We’re one of those couples I used to envy; sitting together on the lawn while a banjo player picks out a sweet melody and a woman with a deep, husky voice sings emotionally about finding true love.

  Maybe I haven’t been fair to Anchorage in lumping it in with every other big city of the world. Or maybe it just looks different because I’m in love with the mother of my baby, and everything looks and feels better knowing that she loves me too. I meant what I said about warming up to a possible move. She’s proving her commitment to me by moving from California to Alaska. Joining her in Anchorage, and making a fresh start together, would be my chance to prove my commitment to her. Compromise, right? We both give a little. We both move forward. Happiness doesn’t arrive fully formed on anyone’s doorstep. We have to create a happy life together.

  When the concert’s over, after a long day of hearings and sight-seeing, my woman’s too tired to do anything but walk back to the hotel, change into pajamas, and crawl into bed. I follow her there, pulling her into my arms, and listening to the deep, easy sound of her breathing as she falls quickly to sleep.

  I can do this, I tell myself. I can sell my house in Valdez and move with her to Anchorage.

  Hell, if she’s beside me, I can do anything.

  At least, that’s what I tell myself.

  Chapter 13

  Gideon

  The hardest thing about relocating to Anchorage, as it turns out, is getting Addy not to help on moving-in day.

  A moving company packed up her LA apartment and drove her belongings 3,300 miles north to Anchorage, while I rented a truck in Anchorage and took care of packing up and moving myself from Valdez.

  But we agreed. Today, she’s supposed to sit on the deck or in the living room of our new house and call out instructions to me or the movers. Instead, she’s opening boxes, moving things around, unpacking, and generally doing way too much for a woman who’s thirty-four weeks pregnant.

  “Will you please sit down?” I ask her.

  “I’m pregnant, not disabled!” she insists, sliding a large box off a pile, then leaning forward to open it.

  Careful to avoid injury, I take the scissors out of her hands, swoop her into my arms, and carry her out to the deck, which wraps around our house. There, I sit myself down in an Adirondack chair and hold her against my chest.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” I mutter.

  “I’m not!” she says, struggling to get up.

  “Can you just relax for a second?” I ask. “Look at the city. We got this house for the view, remember? Let’s enjoy it.”

  She nestles against me, laying her head on my shoulder. “You’re just trying to make me rest.”

  “Correct,” I say. “But it doesn’t suck having you in my lap, either.”

  When we returned to Valdez after our July visit to Anchorage, I told her I’d move with her at the end of August, and she finally gave up her hotel room at the Best Western, staying with me at my house as we made preparations to move.

  We visited Anchorage three times—twice to look at houses and a third time to sign a contract to buy one.

  We finally decided on a modern five-bedroom house in the foothills of the Chugach Mountains, about as far out of town as we could get while still remaining in the Anchorage city limits. A twenty-five-minute drive from the courthouse where Addy hopes to be practicing law by next spring, we have an unobstructed view of the city and Cook Harbor from our back deck. I can’t lie. It’s pretty spectacular.

  “Breathe in the mountain air,” I tell her.

  “I’ve smelled mountain air before. I need to unpack boxes and get our house in order for Ella’s arrival.”

  “We specifically hired people to help us so you wouldn’t have to do everything. I don’t want you doing any heavy lifting, Addy.”

  She picks up a pair of binoculars we’ve left on a table between the chairs. “There’s a helicopter landing on top of the hospital.”

  We also visited Providence Medical Center during one of our visits to Anchorage, checking out the maternity center and prenatal units. With the only Level 3 Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in the state, Addy was satisfied our baby would receive the best possible care from the doctors at the Children’s Hospital when it came time for Ella to receive her surgeries.

  “I finally heard back from Folsom, Hoyt & West,” she casual mentions.

  “Wait! What? You did?”

  “Mm-hm,” she says. “Yesterday. The Head of HR invited me to come in for an interview next week.”

  “That’s great, babe!”

  Folsom, Hoyt & West is Addy’s first choice law firm, but since sending them in her resume in July, this is the first she’s heard from them.

  “Yep.” She sighs. “The problem is, I really can’t start until January. I’d like at least three months home with you and Ella before I go back to work. And I can’t take the bar until February anyway.”

  “Any second thoughts about being a working mom?” I ask her.

  “As long as you’re home with her every day? None.”

  Part of me wonders if she’ll feel the same way after she has Ella; I’ve read about new moms changing their minds about staying at home once they’ve actually met their babies. But I guess we’ll tackle that hurdle if we come to it. For now, Agrippina and Penelope are still being housed in the hangar I rent by the month in Valdez. If needs be, I can move them to Anchorage and resume my tourism business.

  Either way, however, our bank account is full. Between Addy’s savings, the sale of her condo, and the sale of my house, we’ll be flush for a decade or more. Unless we want to work, we could afford to both stay home raise Ella hands-on together.

  She sits up. “Want some lemonade? I’m going to get some.”

  “Promise you won’t unpack or move anything?”

  She makes an exasperated noise. “Fine.”

  “The guys will be done moving everything in by three. We’ll get rid of them, and you can start bossing me around…telling me what to unpack first and where to put everything? Deal?”

  “Deal,” she says, giving me a quick kiss on the lips. “Lemonade or not?”

  “Yes,” I say, “I’ll take a glass.”

  As she goes inside, I review my plan for this afternoon and evening. At three o’clock the moving guys should be finished. I plan to draw Addy a bath with vanilla-scented salts, rose petals, and candles. And then, when she’s trapped under the warm bubbles, I’m going to ask her to marry me.

  I’ve had it planned out for weeks, the two-carat diamond engagement ring set in white gold burning a hole in my pocket. But I wanted to wait to ask her until we were officially moved into our new house. I wanted to start our new chapter, our new life in Anchorage, with a question that would change both of our lives forever.

  But man, it’s been hard to wait.

  She returns to the deck with two glasses of lemonade, handing me one and placing the other on the little table between the chairs as she sits back on my lap.

  “Did your mom mind?” she asks. “About us moving to Anchorage?”

  We visited my mother and Tatitlek one more time before leaving Valdez, and my mother shed some uncharacteristic tears as she waved good-bye to the ferry.

  “Nah,” I say, though that’s not completely true. She wasn’t thrilled that her grandchild would be five hours farther away than she’d originally planned. “There’s a ferry from Whittier to Tatitlek. And Whittier’s only ninety minutes from here. Nothing’s close in Alaska. She knows that. Besides, she also knows you’re from LA. It could’ve been worse.”

  “If you weren’t so beguiling,” she teases.

  “Am I beguiling?” I ask her.

  “Enough for me to stay in Alaska,” she says, grinning at me. Her grin fades a little. “But I’m not actually from LA.”

  “Do you think of Detroit as home?” I ask her. She hasn’t spoken much about her childhood since those first few days when she returned to Alaska to tell me about the baby.

  “No,” she says quickly. “But having a baby makes you think about where you’ve come from, you know? I think about my mother a lot lately. I even…”

  “You even what?”

  “I called her care home to check on her,” she says. “I haven’t done that in years. The bill gets paid automatically every month, and I see it on my credit card statement, but it just says Orchard Meadows. I’ve disassociated myself from what it means.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I didn’t want to speak to her. She wouldn’t have known me anyway, but…I don’t know.”

  I sense she’ll feel better if she tells me everything, but something challenging about having a partner who’s been mostly self-sufficient for her entire life is that she has to teach herself how to share, how to lean on someone. Sometimes, to help her, I have to coax information out of her, but I don’t mind.

  “But what?”

  “Elliot said it helped him to make peace with her…to forgive her.”

  “Kieran told you that, right?”

  “Yeah. And—I don’t know—I wonder if it would be good for me to do that too. Sometime. At some point.”

  “How would that look?”

  She shrugs, reaching for her lemonade and taking a sip. “I don’t actually think I’d need to go to Detroit like he did. I think it’s something I could do from here. Inside. You know, in my heart.”

  “Forgive her.”

  She winces, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe.”

  “How does it help you or make your life better to hold onto the hate you have for her?”

  “It doesn’t,” she says, “but I’ve hated her for so long, I don’t know how to…stop.”

  “Maybe she didn’t mean to hurt you,” I suggest, thinking of Ella’s clefts and knowing that Addy never meant to hurt our daughter.

  She gives me a look. “Oh, she had no idea that her monster boyfriends and husbands were abusing us? When they were smacking and burning us right in front of her?”

  “No. She saw. But maybe she just didn’t know what to do. Maybe your mother’s childhood was difficult too. Maybe things happened to her that made her the way she was. Maybe you forgive her because there’s no way to know everything that happened to her to shape her into the person she was.”

  “Maybe,” she says.

  “Most people aren’t born monsters,” I say. “People who become monsters are the product of something terrible.”

  She nods. “You’re right.”

  “Anyway,” I tell her, “I’m proud of you. It’s hard to forgive someone who hurt you. Even to think about it.”

  “It is,” she says, “but the thing is, I want Ella to forgive me someday. And that makes me think I need to clean my own house first. I can’t expect something from her that I’m unwilling to offer my own mother, you know?”

  “Yes…but, you didn’t know you were pregnant,” I point out. “You were grieving your brother. You never would’ve taken a sip of alcohol if you’d known it would hurt her. Stop blaming yourself, Addy.”

  “Maybe I will. Someday.” She takes a deep breath, then finishes her lemonade. “I think I’ll go lay down for a little bit.”

  “Are you feeling okay?” I ask her, because she rarely naps.

  “I’m tired,” she says, struggling to sit up.

  As she shifts her weight, I realize that my shorts—my entire lap, in fact—are soaking wet. “Addy…”

  “I’m…wet,” she says, looking down. “Did I… pee my pants? I didn’t. I swear, I didn’t.”

  “Did your water break?” I ask her, sitting up to help her stand. When she does, I can see a steady trickle of liquid stream down her right leg. “Addy, I think your water broke.”

  “No! I’m only thirty-four weeks,” she says, getting upset. “There are no…contractions! No! I’m not…this isn’t right. This is too early!”