Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 88078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
It took me a second to understand what he was saying, and when I did, I couldn’t stop the small smile that stretched my lips. “It could be a girl, you know.”
“Nope. It’ll be a boy,” he argued, and I knew he was smiling back at me. “Bye, Katie.”
“Bye, Shane.”
I stood silently for a long time in the archway between the living room and the kitchen, watching the kids as they played. It was going to be a long five months.
* * *
The next few months passed slowly and quickly at the same time. It felt as if things were moving at a snail’s pace when the kids and I were waiting on a Skype call from Shane, but when I had a deadline coming up, I had to race to meet it.
Work was going okay, even though I’d had to cut back yet again. I just didn’t have the energy to take on as much and still do my job well, and I hated the thought of giving people mediocre work. I also hadn’t anticipated that I’d still be feeling like shit almost six months into my pregnancy.
The doctors said I was still feeling the effects of morning sickness and I was anemic.
My mom said I was working too hard.
My brother Alex said that I had an alien in my belly and it was sucking the life out of me.
Shane didn’t say anything because I didn’t tell him that I was still sick.
Things had been good since he’d apologized for tearing my head off. Great, really. We didn’t have the chance to talk very much because the kids dominated the Skype calls—with good reason—but we filled in those breaks with emails almost every day. We wrote about everything, from movies we liked—one of the guys in his room had a small DVD player and a fiancée who sent him all the new releases—to what the kids had been up to that day and websites that were driving me insane. I also posted massive amounts of photos on my Facebook page so he could scroll through them whenever he had a moment to spare, marking off every milestone the kids hit, from a lost tooth to sleeping dry all night.
We’d become friends again through our emails, and it felt really good. But it also made my anxiety rise. The closer we became, the more frightened I was that something would to happen to him—and I didn’t want to worry him with things that were happening back in California.
I didn’t want him to know that I was staying awake until one or two a.m. to finish projects and then rolling out of bed six hours later to get Sage ready for school. I didn’t tell him that I’d begun to sit on a stool when I was making dinner because, by five o’clock in the evening, I was completely worn out. I didn’t tell him that, for some ungodly reason, Gunner had started waking up at four a.m. a couple of nights a week, and we’d barely fall back asleep before my alarm went off, usually after I’d busted out my guitar and sung to him—he liked Of Monsters and Men songs.
I was handling it. Sure, I looked like shit except for the nights I knew I’d be seeing him through the computer screen—but hey, I had no one to impress.
We were three months into the deployment when Shane’s birthday rolled around. He’d promised to Skype that night so I spent the whole afternoon getting the boys cleaned up and dressed for the occasion. I’d even picked up a cake on our way to grab Sage from school so it felt like an actual party.
By eight o’clock that night when my computer sounded with an incoming call, we were ready. Barely. My laptop was perched on a stool at one end of the living room, giving Shane a view of the kids as they ran around excitedly and me on the couch with Gunner and my guitar.
“Happy birthday!” the kids screamed as Shane’s tanned face showed up on the screen.
“Thanks, guys!” he answered, smiling huge and fiddling with the earbuds he always wore so he could hear us.
I strummed the first chords to the birthday song, just like we’d practiced, and the kids began singing boisterously while Gunner nodded and watched wide-eyed beside me. Oddly enough, the one-year-old was the only kid with a sense of rhythm.
“We got you a cake!” Keller yelled, jumping up and down, once they’d finished singing.
“You did?” Shane replied, raising his eyebrows. “What does it look like?”
“I’ll get it!”
“Wait, bud!” I yelled at Keller, imagining blue frosting covering the carpet in the living room. “Why don’t you let Sage grab it?”
Sage ran out of the room while Shane chuckled softly. “What have you guys been doing today?”