“I know.” He smiled and moved his phone super close to his face, so all I could see was his eyes. “I just thought I should tell you something before you go.”

“Yeah?”

“I love you. You are amazing. You will be amazing. Your daughter will be amazing. And I am so excited to meet her tomorrow.”

He’d never said it outright before. Not the L word. And I never in a zillion years would have thought he’d say it to me as I was about to go launch a kid out of my wahoo, and yet somehow, it was the perfect time. It was exactly when I needed to hear it. We’d been dating for months, we’d beaten around the bush by saying how much we liked each other, how good spending time together was. We’d said, “I love spending time with you.”

Never “I love you.”

Knowing Leaf, knowing how seriously he took sex and commitment, I knew he meant it. He wouldn’t have thrown it out willy-nilly at the six-month mark just to placate me so I didn’t freak out about having the kid I’d known was coming for almost a year. He’d saved it for the exact right moment—when I could swaddle my frantic rabbit heart in it and find peace when no peace wanted to be found.

“I love you, too,” I blurted before the tears started. “So much. I love you, Leaf.”

“Go, be excellent for me.” He kissed the camera. “I love you.”

An hour and twenty minutes in a car with Mom clenching on the steering wheel like she wanted to strangle it, with Mormor griping about how she drove in snow, with me in the back seat breathing through increasingly painful contractions.

This was not the Larssens at their best.

“Watch out for the stop sign,” Mormor said.

“Ma.”

Mom had that warning voice—the one that suggested she’d bake someone into a pie if she had to.

“Brake now so you have time to slide,” Mormor said.

“Ma!”

“Can the two of you knock it off?” I growled from the back seat, both of my hands clasped on my stomach. “I don’t need this right now.”

“You are upsetting Serendipity. Hush, Astrid.”

I stared at the back of Mormor’s head, hoping it would spontaneously combust or maybe catch fire, just for a little while. I loved her, but she was obtuse sometimes.

Okay, like half the time.

“We’re almost there, kiddo,” Mom assured me. She’d said it fifty times over the course of the quasi-epic journey. I officially had trust issues. Every time I looked out the window, I just saw snow, some more snow and a little more snow after that. I couldn’t tell where we were—only the dulcet tones of the GPS with its crisp British accent kept us on course.