Kevin shrugged. “I wish things were different between Beth and me, but if I push, she’ll just push back harder.”
They heard Mary’s voice getting louder, so that was the end of the conversation. A few seconds later, the three most important women in Kevin’s life walked into the kitchen. His mother kissed his cheek. Beth, who was holding Lily, gave him a small smile and maybe it was his imagination, but he thought he saw some apology in it.
Lily was awake and squirming, but she wasn’t squawking for a bottle yet. He peeked inside the receiving blanket she was cuddled in and brushed a fingertip over her cheek. She wiggled and—in a total shocker—Beth laughed softly.
“She definitely knows her daddy,” she said, “even when it’s the lightest touch.”
Kevin had pushed and prodded Beth into this dinner because he wanted his parents to have some time with Lily and because Beth needed to get out of her apartment, but it pained him. The togetherness without being together was even more pronounced now that Lily was born and it chafed. Sometimes a little and sometimes, like now, more than a little.
Mary stepped up beside them. “While Lily’s content, I want to take some pictures for the family album. You two go sit on the couch with her while I get my camera.”
Just like that, the anxiety was back in Beth’s face. He put his hand on her back and guided her toward the living room before she could argue.
“I already know what you’re going to say,” he said in a low voice. “Let her take a nice picture of you and Lily and then me and Lily. And then, please, let her take one of the three of us just to make her happy.”
She sat on the couch and peeled the blanket off Lily to reveal a cute pink dress. “What if someday—”
“Someday if I find a woman who’ll let me in her life instead of slamming the door in my face over and over, Lily still might like having a picture of her parents together.”
“Oh.” He could tell by the way her cheeks pinked up and how she sucked in her bottom lip that he’d hurt her feelings somehow, but she couldn’t possibly believe she could have it both ways. They could only spend so much time in the relationship purgatory she’d sentenced them to.
Mary returned with her camera before Beth could respond to that, if she even intended to. With his parents codirecting the impromptu photo shoot, they managed to get the three shots Kevin suggested, and he and Beth even smiled. They got pictures of Lily with each of her grandparents and then both of them together before she announced she was done by turning bright red and letting out an eardrum-piercing wail.
“She definitely gets her volume from your father,” Mary told Kevin.
Beth finished changing and feeding Lily as his mother put dinner on the table, so they were able to eat in relative peace. His parents had a bassinet and Lily was close enough to Kevin’s chair so she could watch him. Her eyes were brilliant blue and when he grinned at her, she just blinked.
They made small talk while they ate, chatting about Lily and the bar and Joe’s latest book. How Lisa was faring with her boys out of school for the summer. What they were going to do about the fact Brian and Bobby kept sabotaging the spinach in Mary’s garden and trying to blame it on rogue chipmunks.
It was familiar chatter and Kevin felt some of the tension easing out of his body and, with the stress abating, he could think more clearly. It had only been three weeks since Beth had gone through a car accident and childbirth on the same day. While each of the days since had seemed to drag by for Kevin, they had probably passed in the blink of an eye for an exhausted and slightly battered new mother.
For the umpteenth time, Kevin reminded himself he had to be patient. He’d made his feelings for Beth pretty clear, so all he could do was wait for her to sort through her own.
***
It had been three weeks since Kevin first told her he loved her, and he hadn’t said it again since.
She’d hated to do it, but she was running low on groceries—groceries she wanted, at least, rather than what Mary and her mother thought she should have—so she’d asked Kevin to stop at the store on their way home from the Kowalskis’ house. Now he was pushing the cart along behind her, babbling to Lily, whose seat was latched on to the seat of the cart. They probably looked like a real family to any shoppers who took notice of them, instead of neighbors who just happened to have a baby together.
As she tried to focus on the unit price of diapers, she found herself unable to stop dwelling on the question of whether or not he’d meant it when he’d told her loved her.