Page 152 of Chaos

“I won’t. You aren’t leaving me behind ever again.”

“I won’t.”

“Where you go, I go.”

“Logically, I’m pretty sure I’ll have to do some amount of troop training or tours or visit strongholds and bases.”

“Every single night, your head hits the pillow right beside mine.”

“What if you have to do garden tours?”

“Then you come. Where I go, you follow. Capisce?”

“Italian, now?”

“Mafia-verse. That’s our metric if either of us is traveling overnight somewhere, the other is coming too, and so are these kids in this room.”

He sighs. “They keep multiplying.”

“I know. And it’ll get harder with Maybe.”

“Maybe is the baby?”

“Yes.”

“I heard a study once in the army—rigid thinking actually shrinks brain matter. You literally collapse your brain when you see things as only good or bad, right or wrong, up or down. But you accept the concept ofmaybeand you can actually grow your brain’s capacity to process.”

“Really?”

“I mean … that’s what I remember.”

“So like how a person can maybe poison a man and still be good?”

“There’s no maybe there.”

“Or how another person can smother a guy in a hospital bed and still be an incredible human.”

“Maybe.”

I grin. “Definitely. Or how … maybe this life will still be really good. Even without all the stuff that made it easy before. Maybe it’ll be harder, but … maybe because we have to fight for it so hard, it’ll be that much better?”

“Yeah. We can see the threats and the fear … and we can say … maybe it’ll be good.”

I like that. A lot. “You call her the blueberry?”

His throat moves against my face. “Yeah.”

“Did you know my mom’s name was Briony?”

He shakes his head.

“B for Briony. And Ruby. Rubeeee. Maybeeee. Beeeee.” I settle my hand over his heart. “I was thinking we could name her Bee.”

“Like a honeybee?”

It’s stupid, but my eyes burn that he understands immediately why. A honeybee is hope. You need a honeybee to fertilize a flower to have a tomato to feed a person. Without a honeybee we have nothing.

And you could argue a honeybee could maybe sting you, but they could also maybe make you honey or fertilize you a whole crop of sun-warm strawberries.

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