But I could wait. I wanted to do what was best for Lindsey and the baby. The time would come soon enough. But for that evening, I was just excited to get to spend some time with her. It was a race week, and I had several meetings with vendors and clients. It left us barely seeing each other throughout the week. I spent the night at her apartment, but by the time I got home from the office, she was already at the bar and didn’t get home until well after I went to bed. We got a few minutes together in the mornings, but I was seriously missing her.
Things were going to be different soon. We already talked about our schedules and how we needed to coordinate them so we could spend more time together, and more time as a family. Lindsey had no intention of giving the bar up. It was the legacy of her father and her grandfather. But she was willing to hand over much of the responsibility of day-to-day running of the bar to her staff.
Especially some of the older staff who knew the bar as well as she did. She could trust them to take care of the place she loved and keep it running well while she spent more time at home.
Which was soon going to be my house. The lease was up on her apartment in three months, and she had no intention of renewing. Instead, she would move into my house so she could spend the end of her pregnancy there and we’d be ready to bring our baby home. There would be plenty of space for Remy to have his own room as well as a playroom. When the baby outgrew a bassinet in our room, a nursery right down the hall would offer comfortable, private space, but still easy access for us for feedings and changings during the night.
It felt like everything was truly falling into place.
As soon as I walked into the apartment, I heard mumbling and some of the nonsensical words she was training herself to use instead of profanity.
“Babe?” I called out. “What are you doing?”
“I’m back here,” she called.
I followed her voice to the second bedroom. Lindsey used that room for pretty much anything she could think of. She liked to call it her mansion in a box. She replicated the all the fancy, luxurious rooms in mansions right there in that little second bedroom.
A pile of books perpetually right on the edge of toppling over made one corner of the room her library. A rocking chair and an old recliner that had been her father’s sat close together in a pool of sunlight coming from one of the windows, making it her sitting room. An air mattress, a pillow, and a vacuum bag full of bedding against the other wall created a guest room.
My favorite was the gift-wrapping room. It consisted of dozens of rolls of wrapping paper for various holidays and occasions propped up against the wall in the closet next to a small set of shelves stacked with scissors, tape, ribbons, and other accessories.
Now it looked like she had designs on giving the room yet another purpose. She stopped in the middle of the beige carpet with various pieces of wood scattered around her. The papers gripped in her hands looked crumpled and bent like they’d been subjected to being balled up and tossed aside quite a number of times already.
“What’s going on in here?” I asked.
“I’m trying to put together the cradle,” she said.
I laughed. “Why? The baby isn’t even coming for another seven months. And by then you’re going to live in my house. Why are you putting the cradle together now, here?”
“I just wanted to prove I could,” she said. “Remy’s cradle was antique and handcrafted. It was Grant’s, too, so it’s not exactly an heirloom to pass down to this baby. So, I bought a kit to put one together. I just wanted to see if I could do it, but it’s more confusing than when I tried to put together my entertainment center.”
“You don’t have an entertainment center,” I said.
She looked back at the papers. “Exactly.”
“Isn’t Remy coming for his first weekend stay next week?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, looking around. “I’ve got to do something about this place before that. But this thing was delivered first, so I thought it would be fun to try to put together. It’s not fun.”
“I can help you,” I told her. “But my father is pretty handy. Woodwork is one of his favorite hobbies. It’s not something most people know about him, but he’s actually really good at it. I could ask him if he could make the baby a cradle.”
“That would be wonderful,” she said. I reached down and took her hands to help her to her feet. Gathering her gently in my arms, I kissed her. Lindsey sighed and wrapped her arms around my waist.