Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 108 of 115

The empty chair at the table had become their tradition. Now, two months after the first one, Eduardo split wood by the porch of the Victorian house they had built together. The morning was cold. He heard the back door slam, then fast steps on the boards. Kiersten came around the corner, and she was running. She stopped in front of him. Her breath came quick. She held a small paper folded in her hand. Kiersten did not run. She walked slow and sure, measuring each step like she measured a board. Now her eyes were wide and her cheeks were red, and she could not stand still. "Put down the axe," she said. Eduardo set it against the log. For eight years she had carried an empty locket and a wound he once used against her. The doctors had told them both the same thing. No child would come. He had weaponized that once. He waited now, afraid of what news could make her run. "I went to Mirelle," Kiersten said. "At the bathhouse. I felt something new for weeks. I wanted her to tell me I was wrong." She opened her hand. The paper was a note in another woman's script. "She wasn't wrong. I'm carrying a child." Eduardo did not move. The words would not fit in his head. They had asked for this years ago and been told no. They had built a whole life around the no. They had made a tradition to hold a child a body could not make. "That can't be true," he said. It came out before he could stop it. "That's what I said." Kiersten pressed the note into his hand. "She checked twice. It's true." He looked at the paper. The letters swam. His hands, which had hauled flour and split wood and built every wall of this house, began to shake. "We named a girl once," he said. "When we still thought we could." "Mellani," Kiersten said. She had not said the name in years. Her voice stayed steady, but her chin moved. "I remember." Eduardo set the note on the log. He took both her hands. The old Eduardo would have made this moment his, turned it into a speech, a prize he won. He said nothing grand. He only held on. "I'm scared," he said. "I swore I wouldn't be my father. Now there's someone I could fail." "I know." Kiersten did not soften it. "I'm scared too." She looked up at the house they had built from nothing, two front doors opening to one room. "But I don't feel an ending. I feel a start." Eduardo looked at the open door. He had wanted to reclaim a homestead and become a man worth loving. He had not known the house was waiting for this. A room they had not filled yet. A child with a name they chose years before they believed in her.