A Little Change Of Plans

“Do what?” they both asked him.

“Give each other that female look. You know what I’m talking about.”

“How is Molly feeling?” Pam asked, deftly taking control of the conversation. “How far along is she?”

“I guess fine. Six months.”

Pam looked taken aback. “Six months already? And you didn’t know about this at all?”

“I haven’t talked to her in about that long.”

“Well, if she needs a hand with anything at all, tell her she can always call your sister or me for professional mother advice.”

“She won’t have to. She’s Molly. She’s got everything under control.”

Pam’s eyebrows disappeared underneath her wispy bangs. “You think a woman going through her first pregnancy, and perhaps an unexpected one at that, a woman who also runs her own business and not too long ago bought her own home, has got everything ‘under control’?”

Adam paused midfold and ruminated a moment. Molly popped into his head—pinstriped, efficiently quick-moving Molly, holding a stack of folders in one hand and a phone in the other. “Sure.”

Then his mental picture suddenly warped and changed. Molly’s midsection expanded, popping two blazer buttons. Overwhelming tears rolled down her cheeks, the shocking tears he’d heard on the phone. The tears that drove him to propose marriage to a woman who was his polar opposite in every imaginable way.

“Sure,” he repeated, but this time the word sounded a little bit false.

This plan had made a whole lot more sense before his family started asking questions.

Hadn’t it?

He bent and dragged a pair of sneakers off his closet floor, and emerged just in time to see Janine and Pam exchange another one of those looks, but this time Adam deliberately ignored it. Just because they had a history of always being right, didn’t mean they would be right when it came to Molly. Or him.

Adam parked in front of Molly’s house, but Molly, absorbed in the garden patch underneath a front window with her back to him, didn’t appear to hear his car. He sat and watched her.

The muscles in her back worked underneath her thin white T-shirt as she bent over doing who knew what in the dirt. Every few seconds, she flipped her dark masses of curls over her shoulder, only to have them slip down her front again. And every few minutes, she toppled over.

She was sitting on a little stool low to the ground, and she seemed to be having a difficult time keeping her balance. She kept catching herself before actually hitting the grass, but he could interpret the mounting frustration in her body, just a little bit more with each time she righted herself. He didn’t have to see the expression of grim determination on her face to know it was there. It was her most popular look.

When he saw her pick up a little shovel and fling it with annoyance to the ground, sending bits of soil flying, he decided it was time to save her from herself.

He got out of his car and slammed the door. Her head snapped around. Now, that look, Adam thought, was not a familiar one on Molly. Nervous, unsure, lacking confidence and maybe even a little…scared.

He raised his hand in greeting and she got to her feet, kicking the stool away from her. She turned, and—

Whoa.

She approached him, and a wry smile curved up one corner of her top lip. She tugged down the hem of her shirt as she walked. “Notice anything different about me?” she asked when she stopped in front of him.

“Just the most obvious thing,” Adam answered. “Nice rack.”

Molly’s eyes widened, but then she crossed her arms over her breasts and, Adam noticed, tried and failed to not look pleased. She’d complained as long as he’d known her about what she called her hereditary flat chest, and although he’d never found her physically lacking in any way whatsoever, he had a feeling that she’d consider pregnancy breasts a bonus.

The truth was, there was quite a lot different about Molly today, and it wasn’t just her breasts or the swell of her midsection. Her hair seemed thicker somehow, curls a man could lose his hands in if he ventured to touch them. And her skin, always smooth and clear, seemed somehow purified, bright, like a light had been switched on inside her and was radiating out from every pore on her face, her neck, her arms. A trickle of perspiration ran down between her collarbone and disappeared into the new crevice between her suddenly lush breasts, and Adam felt his own upper lip grow damp in response.

He blinked.

For years, he’d had physical reactions to Molly. A man would have to be blind and deaf and one hundred percent oblivious not to be affected by her in any way. But the reaction was different now, stronger, needier, now that he was faced with the softer, more feminine, more vulnerable Molly. The woman that he was about to marry and live with for a year.

He swallowed and waited for her to speak, but she didn’t appear to know what to say next, either, so they stood regarding each other in silence.

He saw her eyes travel down to his shoulders, down his torso, all the way down to his beat-up sneakers and back up again. Her neutral expression didn’t change, and Adam supposed that was a plus. She could have curled her lip in disgust, thinking, This lazy, unmotivated guy who makes me mental is going to save my career?

It’s you who doesn’t understand me, Adam thought back at her. You don’t know why I am the way I am because I never told you. I never told you everything about my father because I don’t talk about that, ever, with anyone.

But, he continued in his mind, I will rescue you. I will be the hero because I have a feeling this is the only time in your life that you ever needed one.

“Want to see the house?” Molly asked, and Adam was startled at the subject change before he realized it wasn’t one, that they hadn’t been really communicating and that his assurances to her were still only in his head.

“Sure,” he said, and allowed her to lead him inside. “What were you planting?”

“Mums.”

“That’s appropriate. Mums for a new mum. If, you know, you were British.”

Molly chuckled at the weak joke and ushered him through her front door.

The last time he’d been to Molly’s Danbury Way home, she’d just moved in and there were neatly taped, unpacked boxes stacked in almost every corner. Now the boxes were gone and every room was vibrant with color and style—ruby and saffron pillows piled on the sofa, tiny bud vases on end tables sprouting pussy willows, shaggy, ropey throw rugs on the shining wood floors. A stranger would instantly know that Molly paid obsessive attention to the smallest details, and that this house was a manifestation of a longtime dream of how a home should be. Molly’s sweeping hand gesture as they entered the warm living room, the sunny kitchen and the flowery bathroom, conveyed her pride in her hard work.

In all the rooms—except one.

At the top of the stairs, next to her bedroom, one door remained shut.

“What’s in here?” Adam inquired, opening the door.

“Oh,” Molly said, “that’s the nursery.”

Not that you could tell. The walls were a flawless white, the window covered only with open blinds. Early-evening light angled in between the slats, illuminating the bereft emptiness of the rest of the room.