Page 51 of Promise Me This

“That’ll be Niamh with Leona,” she says, drawing out Leo’s name longer than necessary.

“That it will be.”

Her pale-blonde eyebrow arches, unimpressed, when Niamh turns the corner on the landing and comes thundering down. Right on her heels is Leo, looking brighter than I’ve seen her since the day she showed up on my doorstep. Her hair flows freely, dusting her shoulders with every step. She glances up at me, and though that heaviness still fills her gaze, there’s a bit of light there, too, vying for control.

The air I was inhaling stalls in my throat. My heartbeat trips over itself. Leo pauses on the top step, hand dangling on the railing, bottom lip caught in the vise grip of her pearlescent teeth.

Mam clears her throat, and we’re forced to break our eye contact to look at her. Niamh has disappeared past her into the kitchen, unbothered by the electricity sparking through the air.

“I’m happy for you two,” Mam says, causing Leo to blush and me to start grasping at straws. She holds up a hand to cut me off. “I don’t need to know the details. Just wanted you to know you’re not sly.” She gives me a pointed look. “Never have been.”

She pivots on her heel and marches back into the kitchen, leaving Leo and me alone in the hall.

Leo starts down the steps again, slower this time without a kid to chase after, and maintains my stare the whole way. When she enters my orbit, I catch that citrus scent first, followed by the soft gust of minty air that flows out of her lungs and tickles my face. Goose bumps prick my flesh. All the woman did was sigh, and every part of my body is leaping to attention.

Every. Damn. Part.

“How’d you sleep?” she asks, gaze flitting over my face, my chest, and farther down. I hope beyond hope that she can’t see what’s so obviously there.

“Don’t know,” I say, shaking my head. “Felt like something was missing.”

She tucks her hair back as she flushes deeper, the pink reaching her ears the way it always did when I let her know how badly I wanted her. It’s a part of her that remains the same, and I savor it in the midst of so much newness. Like the silver loop now piercing the rounded curve of her ear, twinkling in the dim hall light, that I reach out to touch.

Her spine straightens, and she looks me dead in the eye, that red tint to her cheeks making her blue eyes sparkle. She’s wearing a little makeup, I realize, and it only serves to make her more perfect than anyone has the right to be.

“Ask me how I slept.”

Her tone, the demure fire burning in her irises, makes me perk up. My hand falls back to my side in a closed fist. “How did you sleep?” I rasp.

A half smile. A delicate hand, grasping my bicep first and then trailing up to my shoulder, which she uses as a perch to pull herself onto her tiptoes. She leans into me, bringing her lips to my ear the same way I did to her last night.

“Soundly,” she whispers, and it carries both the heat of her expression and a layer of relief. “I dreamed of you.”

Before I can respond or catch my breath or grab her waist and drag her into the living room and make love to her against the dusty old books, she turns and lets herself into the kitchen, leaving me gasping in the hall.

Chapter Twenty-One

Leona

My Darling Poppy,

I’m in love with your daddy.

I always have been—always will be, I’m sure—in love with him. It never went away, even after all this time. Even after I met Nick and fell into a simple kind of love and tried to build a life that didn’t revolve around the center of my universe. Nick was a different planet, someone else’s sun, but he did what he could for the time that he was mine. You can love more than one person at once, baby. You can be a good person and a bad person at the same time, too.

When I was pregnant with you, I had to go to the hospital a lot more often than women with healthy pregnancies. They took measurements, let student nurses into my ultrasound room, studied every inch of me from the inside out. For a lot of them, I was a learning opportunity. A cautionary tale. Never a person, never a mother in mourning.

There was one ultrasound tech, though, who saw me as more. She was young, with soft brown skin that smelled of cherry-blossom lotion and an even softer voice. She believed the best in me, and the best in you, too. Every time she located your heartbeat, she’d announce it with the same amount of relief, masked with a blanket of joy. She’d often smile-frown at me and say, “You’re so selfless, love, carrying that baby even when you know how it’ll go.”

I wasn’t what she said, though. I was selfish even then. Selfishly hoping you’d prove them all wrong, sweet girl. That you’d defy the odds. Sometimes when you were especially active at night, I’d imagine you’d be born healthy. Imagine calling up Callum and saying, “You’ll never believe it, but we have a baby!” And he’d bring us home to the rolling green hills and the foxgloves and we’d be happy there, the three of us.

But you didn’t, honey. You did exactly what you told us you would do. You were honest like that, right from the start. You must get that from your daddy.

I haven’t be—

“Leona?” Niamh calls. She’s peeking a single green eye through the cracked door, studying me where I sit at the writing desk.

I drop the pen and use it as a bookmark, close the journal around it, and shift in my chair. I take a deep breath and let it flow out before saying, “You can come in, Niamh.”

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