That’s when he shocked me again. I was standing in the middle of a baby shop. Our first trip to one, and it was together after finding out we were having a girl.
“You don’t think we should wait?”
Walking over to a display that had tiny white rompers hanging from the type of hangers I’d expect to find in one of those bear building stores, he said over his shoulder, “No. Our daughter has DNA from three of the strongest families in the world. I want to celebrate today by getting her some things that we can keep once she grows out of them. I also want to start looking at nursery shit and general baby shit for her. The average pregnancy lasts between thirty-seven weeks to forty weeks. With it being your first one, we could even go as late as forty-two, but given how sick you’ve been, I don’t want to get complacent in case they end up inducing you. So, we need to stock the nursery, decide on furniture, and make sure we’ve got all her stuff ready because we might only have another twenty-one weeks until she’s here with us.”
I was standing and staring at him with my mouth open when a smartly dressed lady came over and introduced herself. “Hi there, I’m Angela. Welcome to Baby Booties Boutique. How can I help you today?”
Still holding the little romper, Elijah joined us. “Nice to meet you, Angela. I’m Elijah, and this is Sadie, and we’ve just found out that we’re having a little girl, so we came in to get some stuff for her to mark the occasion. I was also hoping you might know where we could get something to help us break the news to our families?”
Beaming at him, she clapped her hands together excitedly. “That’s wonderful news, congratulations both of you.”
And then she was off. I always thought Cynthia was a psycho in a shop, but this woman beat her hands down. She was talking faster than any ear would be able to keep up, showing us everything, and discussing what babies needed with Elijah like it was a lasagna recipe. What was even more shocking was that he knew what she was talking about and even had things to add to the list.
By the time we were done, I’d used the employee bathroom twice, had drunk an entire bottle of water, and Elijah was carrying a pile of shit, including a stuffed tiger with a pink bow and the softest pink blanket with white dots embroidered on it over to the till.
Once she’d rung it all up and I’d tried not to have a heart attack at the amount that it’d all come to, she helped us carry the bags out to the truck, reminding Elijah about what he’d bought to tell our families.
Because we couldn’t get together to do a gender reveal, and to be honest, it wasn’t really my sort of thing to do, we’d had to get inventive. We were arranging a group Zoom call, with his family and mine on it, to break the news to them all at once. All I needed was family, I didn’t want a party with dramatics and flare, it just wasn’t me.
As we headed for home, he reached over and picked my hand up and kissed it, not saying anything. That one sweet gesture and the way he held it afterward was more than enough to soothe the shock and mild panic running through me at how the day had turned out. As always, when I was spinning out of control, he found a way to bring me safely back down to earth.Chapter NineteenElijahGetting such a large group of people together at the same time wasn’t as easy as it sounded. We had time differences to think about, jobs, commitments, kids… It was like organizing a trip to Times Square with two hundred toddlers in tow.
When we’d gotten home, we’d organized the call for four o’clock in the afternoon two days later. Sadie’s friends were going to log in with her Nan there, and her brother was on his base in Portsmouth again, so it worked out for everyone.
There was just the small matter of one last detail that I wanted to finalize.
I’d been about to do just that when Sadie had walked out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel, and my plans had gone downhill. Which was why I was currently lying on the bed as she moved slowly up and down my length, squeezing me tighter than a fist.
There was nothing about her that I didn’t find beautiful, not one thing. Even her white-blonde eyebrows and eyelashes did it for me now that the dye on them had disappeared. But seeing that tiny little bump, knowing it was my baby inside of her… there were no words for how gorgeous it made her.