They have babies in Iceland, you idiot, you can get the stuff you need there.
Damn it! I wanted something to plan or panic about. Neil was coming back to me.
I had to make it perfect.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I came down the jetway steps with extreme caution, my heart in my throat until Olivia and I stood on solid ground. I’d trained my eyes on my feet, terrified to miss a step and fall while I was carrying her, so I didn’t see the car door open. When I looked up, there he was.
Neil stood beside the sleek black SUV, hands in his pockets. He wore a navy button down, untucked with the sleeves rolled up, olive green cargo shorts, and sunglasses. Only someone who grew up in a cold climate could understand that outfit when it was like sixty degrees out. He smiled wide and met us as we walked toward him.
“There are my girls!” he called. As he got closer, I saw the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t shaved in days, but he didn’t look haggard. When I hugged him, though, I could feel how much mass he’d lost during his hospitalization. It made him seem weirdly fragile.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to let him go. Between us, Olivia shrieked with delight. Any fear that she wouldn’t remember her afi had clearly been unfounded. She grabbed for his glasses, and he pushed them up on his head.
“Afi is so sorry,” he murmured to her, kissing her forehead and the tip of her nose. “I’m going to try not to leave you like that, again.”
“She’s fine, Neil. We’re all fine.” I blinked back tears. “Thank you.”
“What for?” he asked, kissing my cheek as he squeezed both of us closer.
“For doing so much hard work. For choosing to stay with us.”
Tears rose in his eyes, and he gave me his half-smile, the one I had fallen in love with so many years ago. “Come on. I’ve got supper waiting for us.”
He’d already installed a brand new car seat in the back of the SUV, and I stepped past him to buckle her in like a pro.
“You’ve gotten quite good at that,” he said with genuine surprise.
“You’ll be shocked at some of the stuff I’m good at, now,” I informed him, backing carefully out of the range of the doorframe before I stood. “Like bringing a second outfit in the diaper bag, every single time.”
“Oh dear,” he replied, and I knew I didn’t have to elaborate. I didn’t want to mar this joyful occasion with a recounting of catastrophic diaper explosions.
The streets of Reykjavik looked so much different on this visit than they had the first time I’d been in the city. We’d been here for New Year’s Eve once. It had been bitterly cold, bathed in ice, and covered in snow. Exactly like the winters where I grew up. In the summer, though, people strolled the streets with their dogs—which, Neil informed me, required loads of paperwork to own—and relaxed in outdoor cafés. There was a shocking amount of green in the city, on trees I hadn’t noticed in their winter nakedness. When we pulled up to the house, I was delighted to see huge flowering shrubs lining the poured cement walkway.
Since Neil had driven us, we were responsible for getting our own luggage—and Olivia’s—into the house. I’d grown spoiled and soft not dealing with that sort of thing.
“Oh no,” I gasped, slumping over my suitcase. “No, something bad has happened.”
“You stopped working out because I wasn’t there to suggest you keep up your routine, and now, you have no upper body strength?” he teased. “Leave them a moment.”
I almost objected until I remembered that we weren’t in New York, but a city with a crime rate that was negligible by comparison. Nobody would steal my brutally heavy suitcase while Neil took Olivia inside.
The house in Reykjavik could not have been further, design wise, from any of the other residences we owned. Its ultra-modern style clashed a bit with the exuberant theme of the city, which boasted brightly colored roofs, but the house fit in well enough with the modern office and apartment buildings around it. The facade was gray concrete, with plate windows in random patterns that made no sense from the outside but looked perfect from within. Inside, the first floor was open to the third, towering above us. To the right, a floating staircase with a hip-height glass panel and brushed steel railing led up to the second floor. That level housed the living room, as well as a half-enclosed section with some guest rooms. One of those, Neil had informed me, was now a nursery, but as I looked around the sleek polished concreted floors and open backed stairs, I realized the shelf-life of this house was short once Olivia started walking. Crawling would be bad enough; I mentally calculated the gap between the floors and the glass half walls on the upper levels.
Neil handed Olivia off to me, and I carried her upstairs. The bottoms of my feet tingled with every step as I imagined the worst falling scenarios possible. Sure, I’d gotten way more comfortable caring for Olivia, but I always had this constant loop of horrible things that could happen running through my mind. Like an old movie newsreel, but in a theatre built of my worst nightmares.
Parenting fucked you up.
Though the master bedroom on the third floor was a bridge-style loft open on both sides—which would be a problem when Olivia was old enough to be traumatized hearing her grandfather and I having sex, for sure—you could walk right up to the two-story windows in the living room. The house gave me vertigo like nothing else I’d ever experienced, but it had an amazing view of the bay and the mountains.
“Look, Olivia,” I murmured to her, pointing to the crystalline blue sky outside. “This is your home, too.”
Though Neil had been born in England, he’d spent a lot of his childhood here in Iceland, where his father had been born and raised. Neil had brought Emma here as often as he could. She’d been able to speak the language and had thought of the country as her third home. The Elwoods were pretty lucky to be able to consider the entire world their backyard.
The fact that we could give that to Olivia choked me up a little. We couldn’t bring Emma and Michael back, no matter how much we wanted to. What we could do was raise their daughter to be just as amazing and her mother had been. Neil had been a wonderful father; he could do it again, now that he was getting better. As it so happened, I wasn’t too bad at the mom-ish thing, either.
Neil brought our stuff in, and he actually whistled as he did it. The simple, normal domesticity put some kind of life into him.