Page 41 of The Devil Gets His Due

“You can still go to Coachella. I mean, God only knows why you’d want to, but—”

“It’s not about Coachella, Graham! It’s that I’m never going to be one of those girls again, and I feel like I barely got started being one of those girls.”

It still sounds like it’s about the weight to me because what else has changed? But I know not to say it aloud.

Now. I know itnow.

“I don’t understand. You will look exactly like those girls in a year. You’ll be able to go to Coachella. What’s the difference?”

She finally meets my eye. “When I meet Harry Styles and Machine Gun Kelly backstage and they’re like,‘hey,let’s go to Amsterdam’, you know what I’ll have to say?‘Sorry, Harry Styles. Sorry, Machine Gun Kelly. I have to go feed my baby.’”

I am at a loss for words. Mostly because I can’t imagine that she’s serious, and I’m a little worried she is.

“Sorry, Harry Styles and Machine Gun Kelly, but I’ve got to get home and sew a Pilgrim costume,” she continues. “Sorry, Harry Styles and Machine Gun Kelly, but I have to chaperone a school field trip in the morning.”

“Just out of curiosity, how long would you call them by their full names? At what point do you just call themHarryand, uh,Machine Gun?”

Her mouth twitches, a reluctant smile at last. “I’m pretty sure his birth name is notMachine Gun. And shut up. You see my point. I’m never going to be fun again.”

There’s a part of me that wants to say,“this is what I’ve been trying to tell you, dammit. Parenthood is serious. It’s time to stop fucking around.”But there’s this weird, unexpectedly soft thing in my chest that keeps me from doing it.

Keeley has spent her whole life rebelling against the status quo, refusing to let anyone tell her how an adult has to behave, and she still wants to refuse. It’s for the baby’s sake that she’s giving in. Maybe it feels like she’s losing her whole identity in the process.

“You’re still going to be fun,” I say, pushing her chips toward her. “You’ll betoofun. You’ll be the mom who suggests our kid teepee someone’s house and gets arrested for providing minors with alcohol. And I’ll be the boring dad who has to come bail both of you out of jail.”

“You’d only have to bail out me,” she whispers with a guilty shrug. “They don’t take you to jail for minor in possession. They just write you a ticket.”

I laugh, that soft thing in my chest growing a little bit more, though I wish it wouldn’t.

Because she has no idea how or why she married me—and she’d never have done it sober—but I’ve known, all along, exactly why I married her.

23

KEELEY

My father emails, reminding me about the invite Shannon sent last week. As if I want to go to this dumb party for Karl when all I got when I graduated from med school was ane-card.

But I suppose this is a golden opportunity to spring my new husband and future baby on them before one of those things disappears, as long as I can get my future ex-husband on board with the charade.

Graham works out every single day at ass o’clock before he joins his extremely loud East Coast Zoom meetings. On weekends he pampers himself with a sixteen-mile run, followed by weights or a few hours of surfing. Whatever he chose this morning, he seems to have returned from it.

His door is open so I walk in. The bathroom door is cracked and I can hear water running—therefore, there’s at least a fifty percent chance he’s not doing anything embarrassing. I’ll take those odds.

I knock. “Are you clothed?”

“What?” he shouts.

Sounds like a“yes”to me. I push the door open to find him in nothing but a towel. He’s got the razor angled, right along the top of his jaw. The wonderful thing about fit men is that every action, small to large, is a symphony of musculature. He could be lifting a beer to his lips or hunting down Bin Laden with the rest of his SEAL team and it would mostly look the same, the muscles of his back bunched delightfully—rhomboid minor, rhomboid major, latissimus dorsi.

His eyes go wide. “What the fuck, Keeley?”

I shrug. “Iaskedif you were clothed.”

“And I didn’t answer because, obviously, I didn’t hear you.”

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

His gaze meets mine in the mirror. It’s another of those little moments ofknowing. When all the bullshit aboutwhy-are-you-so-boringandwhy-is-all-the-TV-you-watch-garbageis swept away, and there’s just…us:

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