Dad called out, “Champagne.”
“I think we have some in the fridge in the garage, Mal,” Mom told him, hugging Indy.
I moved in after Roxie moved out and hugged Lee.
“Pleased for you, bro,” I said in his ear.
“Not as pleased as me,” he said in mine, his arms going tight.
That was not in doubt.
I pulled back and grinned at him.
He let me go with one arm so he could lift a hand and touch my cheek.
Then he said, “When he or she gets here, do me a favor. Don’t try to convert them to Scientology.”
I burst out laughing, and when I was done, my brother was still holding me close and smiling down at me.
I heard Amalea murmur, “An unexpected honor, but one nonetheless, to be here to hear this joyous news,” thus proving she was total class.
But I was listening with half an ear because I was fully feeling the vibe, looking at my brother’s smile and experiencing it again, almost exactly twenty-four hours after I’d just felt it.
That feeling you get only a handful of times in your life, if you’re lucky.
That feeling that I was lucky to get often.
That feeling of sheer beauty.
* * * * *
I was curled up in Ren’s armchair in his non-TV seating area downstairs.
It was the dead of night and I’d twisted the chair so I could look out the window at a sleepy street disturbed only by the occasional car.
I couldn’t sleep, and not for the reasons people normally couldn’t sleep.
No, mine were different.
“Jesus, Ally.”
I turned my head to see Ren’s bare chest, pajama-bottomed legs (and the rest of him) through the shadows walking down the stairs.
“Woke up, you gone, not in the bathroom, you worried me,” he kept talking as he moved across the room toward me.
“I’m cool. Just couldn’t sleep,” I told him.
He stopped by the chair and looked down at me.
A nanosecond after his eyes hit me, he crouched in front of me and reached out a hand to wrap his fingers around my ankle.
“Is everything okay, baby?” he asked in his sweet voice.
He’d read me.
“Yes, Ren,” I said quietly, then explained just how okay it was. “Jet is having Eddie’s baby. Ava and Luke are on their honeymoon. Stella’s recorded an album that’s coming out soon. Tex is marrying Nancy. My man has accepted me as I am and I’m looking at office space tomorrow to start the job that I was meant to be doing. Your mom and sisters like me. My dad likes you. And my best friend, who I made a blood pact with when we were kids that she was going to marry my brother, we’d be real sisters and she’d name her daughter after me, is carrying my brother’s baby.” I shook my head. “So maybe it’s no. Everything’s not okay.” I leaned into him. “It’s very okay.”
“And that makes you not able to sleep?” he asked.