Page 46 of Rust and Bloom

I know that's a selfish thing to keep movin' the goalpost. To want his babies around me for the rest of my life after God already gave me him.

But I ask anyway. I want it anyway.

And there is not a single thing in this world that can reach into this bathroom and take this joy from me if today is the day that dream decides to begin.

My phone buzzes against the inside of my purse like a small, insistent heartbeat. I dig for it with the hand that isn't currently gripping the edge of the bathroom counter like it owes me something.

"Who's that?" Legion asks, his voice low and close behind me.

"Mercy," I say, and I'm already smilin' before the picture even loads, because Mercy texting me is always its own kind of miracle, and I'm thinkin' if we're pregnant right now, if today is actually that day, there is no better person in the world to share it with second. She's gonna lose her mind in the best possible⁠—

Then the picture loads.

And I stop.

It's a perfectly normal photograph, the kind my mother would've composed in thirty seconds flat—good light, clean background, genuine joy on the subject's face.

A girl and her pony. Mercy's new pony, the one she hasn't stopped braggin' about since it arrived, donated by some anonymous benefactor she talks about like he hung the moon.

But it's not Mercy's face I'm starin' at.

Because standing next to her, one arm slung around her shoulders like he belongs there, like he has always belonged there, like he is some kind of benevolent stranger who wandered in from the good side of the world and decided to stay⁠—

Is Marcus.

Marcus, with that sly, practiced smile that photographs so well and means absolutely nothing.

Marcus, with his slick hair and his Georgetown Law hands and his very particular understanding of leverage.

Marcus, who told me in a voice so calm and even it barely qualified as a threat that he had ways of makin' sure I remembered what I stood to lose.

My stomach doesn't drop. It crystallizes. Goes cold and hard and perfectly, terribly still, the way water does the moment before it turns to ice.

Another text loads before I've finished processin' the first one.

This is him!!!

my beafactor is here to chek pony and make sur I take care of him good

he taking me to dinner now

hope you having fun

tell legion hi!!!!

The exclamation points land like small, cheerful detonations. She's so happy. She's so perfectly, completely, dangerously happy, and she doesn't know, and I cannot tell her, and Marcus knows that too—which is exactly why he's there, why he's smilin', why he sent this, because he didn't have to.

Mercy texted me on her own and he let it happen because the message wasn't in the photograph.

The message was the photograph.

"Fuck yeah!" Legion's voice comes up behind me. His hands on my shoulders and the heat of him at my back. "Fuck yeah, baby! We're pregnant!"