Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
In the bedroom, she slips from my arms and stands by the window, the river’s shine ghosting her profile. I come up behind and wrap her again, palms smoothing low over the place that will be a curve soon enough. We stand like that until the world quiets, until our breathing syncs, until the only thing that moves is the snow and the pulse under my hands.
We go to bed and talk baby names and breakfast foods until the sentences turn to softer sounds, until words stop being useful, until the night has one job and it does it—holding, warming, keeping. When we finally fall into the kind of sleep that only happens after joy, the house hums its contentment and the river carries the sound of tomorrow down to somewhere with more light.
Before I close my eyes, I look toward the doorway. The mantel is out of sight from here, but I picture the shadowbox anyway: the stack of what we survived, the picture of who we’re becoming. The past isn’t gone. It’s mounted. We honored it. Then we turned toward the fire and each other and the little life that just put its first mark on our wall.
“Leave the porch light on,” I murmur.
“Always,” Savannah says, already drowsy, already mine. “From inferno to forever.”
The End