not really a write-your-own-vows kind of girl,” Nora had said—chucked some flowers into the lake, and that had been that.
The best part of every day was the end of it. After Penny’s bath, they would all pile onto the bed and play two songs: “Hey Jude,” and “Penny Lane.” It had been the grief counselor’s idea, and at first he’d felt weird about it, but now he loved it. Nora and Jake would sing and try to make Penny laugh.
Which she usually did. She laughed easily, his Pen. She embraced new experiences—she’d just started solid food this week, in fact—with gusto, delighted by nearly everything she encountered. Watching her reminded him that while being open to the world could have a cost, it could also have a payoff that was immeasurable.
She was laughing now, in fact. He blew raspberries on her belly while she screamed in delight.
“Hey!” Nora stuck her head into the room. “I thought we had to leave. I thought it was imperative that I get home by four so we could hit the road for the mystery trip.”
“It was. It is.” He planted one last kiss on Pen’s chunky belly and snapped her into her new onesie.
“Is that…” Nora came closer. “Is that a Detroit Tigers onesie?”
“Sure is.”
“Oh my God, are we going to a Tigers game?”
“Home opener versus Blue Jays.”
“Are you kidding me?” She started jumping up and down. “Ahh!”
“Yeah, I mean, that was one of the whole points of moving to Moonflower Bay, right? And you haven’t gone yet.”
They dropped Mick at Jake’s dad’s house and managed to escape after only ten minutes or so of Dad and Jamila losing their minds over Penny—and hit the road. Nora made moony eyes at him the whole way.
That was the other thing about meeting her more than halfway. It paid off so profoundly. She was so ridiculously easy to please that it almost felt like cheating. Zombies and Tigers and trout melts by the lake all had the pixie doctor turning into a gooey pile of mush.
So yeah, the whole meeting-halfway thing wasn’t work at all.
Leave it to Jake to think of this.
The Tigers were the one item in the new-life to-do list she hadn’t gotten around to yet. But to be fair, she hadn’t known that her new life was going to involve a husband, a kid, and a house you had to walk through a lake to get to, so she’d been a little busy.
They’d been in a cocoon since Penny was born, one made of sleep deprivation and endless feedings and the clinic and Jake’s counseling, which she sometimes went to with him. Work. Good, important work, all of it. Which meant it had been a good, important cocoon they’d been in. She wouldn’t have traded it for anything. But an outing like this was a total thrill.
At the stadium, Jake hoisted Pen into a baby carrier. Nora tried to tug the diaper bag from his shoulder, but he wouldn’t surrender it.
Nora had noticed, early in her friends-with-benefits phase with Jake, how easy it was to be with him. It still was. And she still marveled over it. She had been so adamant, when she got here, about not getting into a relationship, afraid that to do so would mean bending herself to fit into someone else’s life instead of living her own.
But it turned out that if you fell in love with a guy who liked your hair and didn’t mind zombie movies and never let you carry anything, you didn’t have to worry about any of that.
“We’re sitting here?” she asked as he led them to a spot about twenty rows up behind the catcher. He knew she was a center field aficionado—she had told him about how her grandma used to take them all to games, and they’d sit dead center.
So okay, maybe she’d spoken too hastily about Jake’s magical powers to make her happy. The man had to have one flaw.
“Yup.” He settled into his seat, extracted Penny from her carrier, and turned her around so she was facing the field. “Home base.”
Oh.
“I was thinking,” he went on, his eyes twinkling, “about the age-old question of what is home base. We talked about it so much, but we never figured it out. But in retrospect, it was obvious.”
“It was?”
“Yeah.” He gestured in front of them. “Home base is home base.”
She laughed. “Literal home base.”
“Yeah. First base is rolling around nearly naked in a pink room. Second base is talking about