Red Lily (In the Garden 3)

“I can’t—just can’t take all this in.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples as if it would stop her head from spinning. “I don’t even know what I’m feeling.” Dropping her hands in her lap, she stared at him. “Harper, you don’t think this is a mistake?”

“Our baby’s not a mistake.” He gathered her in, felt her breath give a hitch as she struggled with tears. “But it’s one hell of a surprise.”

eighteen

HE WENT IN and out of a daze for the rest of the day. There was a lot to be considered, worked out, planned. The initial steps were crystal to him, as clear and precise as the initial steps in any graft.

They would get Hayley into the doctor, get her and the baby checked out. He’d start reading up on baby stuff—womb stuff—so that he understood the process, got sharper images in his head of what was going on in there.

They’d get married as soon as possible, but not so fast it had to be

something rushed and cold and practical. He didn’t want that for Hayley, or when he thought it through, for himself.

He wanted to get married at Harper House. In the gardens he helped tend, in the shadow of the house where he’d grown up. He wanted to make his promises to Hayley there, and he realized, to make them to Lily there, and to this new child who was now the size of a grain of rice.

This was what he wanted, what he had, somehow, been moving toward all of his life. It was something he’d never thought about before, and knew now as surely as he knew his own name.

Hayley and Lily would move into the carriage house. He’d speak to his mother about adding on to it, giving it more space while staying true to the heart and the traditional style.

More space for their children, he thought, so that they, too, could grow up in Harper House, with its gardens, its woods, its history that would be theirs as it was his.

He could see all of that, he could know all of that. But what he couldn’t see was the child. The child he’d helped create.

A grain of rice? How could something so small be so huge? And already be so loved?

But now there was a step that had to be taken before the others.

He found his mother in the garden, adding a few asters and mums to one of her beds.

She wore thin cotton gloves, soiled with seasons of work. Cropped cotton pants, the color of bluebonnets that were already smudged with the greens and browns of the task she performed. Her feet were bare, and he could see the backless slides she’d stepped out of before she’d knelt at the border.

When he’d been a child, he’d believed her to be invincible, almost supernatural. She knew everything whether you wanted her to or not. She’d had the answers when he’d needed them, had given him hugs—and the occasional licks. Some of which he’d still like to dispute.

Most of all she’d been there, unfailingly been there. In the best times, in the worst, and all the times between.

Now, it would be his turn.

She tilted her head up as he approached, absently brushed the back of her hand over her brow. It struck him how beautiful she was, her hat tipped over her eyes, her face serene.

“Had a good day,” she said. “Thought I’d extend it and fluff up this bed. Gonna rain tonight.”

“Yeah.” Automatically he glanced up at the sky. “Hoping for a nice soaker.”

“Your mouth, God’s ear.” She squinted against the sun as she studied him. “My, don’t you have your serious face on. You gonna sit down here so I don’t get a crick in my neck?”

He crouched. “I need to talk to you.”

“You usually do when you have your serious face on.”

“Hayley’s pregnant.”

“Well.” She set down her trowel, very carefully. “Well, well, well.”

“She just found out today. She thinks about six weeks. She got the symptoms—I guess you call them symptoms—mixed up with everything else that’s going on.”

“I can see how that might happen. Is she all right?”

“A little upset, a little scared, I guess.”