I scoff. “You’d really be a werewolf then. Biting everyone’s heads off because you’d want a cigarette so bad.”

“I’d end up in jail.”

“Oh, yeah, no question about that.”

One side of his mouth curls into a smile so handsome I feel it inside my skin.

“You’re handling this with much more grace than I ever would, that’s for damn sure,” he says.

“Grace? Please. I bitch and moan constantly. I’m still waiting on that ‘glow’ all pregnant women are supposed to get. And I’ve offered my soul to David Bowie more times than I can count in exchange for everything from a very large glass of wine to a good night’s sleep. A paragon of happy motherhood I am not.”

He’s looking at me again. Like that.

Like he has no clue what I am. But whatever it is, he kind of adores it.

Adores me, just for telling my messy, often nonsensical truth.

“Good thing you’ve got a Satanist to help you through.”

I laugh. The tickly, happy kind of laugh that runs up and down my sides and lands in the center of my being.

“Satan owes you a solid, huh?”

“Many favors, yeah. Happy to call a few in on your behalf.”

It’s my turn to look at him. The square, solid, masculine lines of his profile.

Feeling rises up inside me.

“What if it’s not okay?” I say quietly. “The ultrasound. The baby. My depression. What if something’s really wrong?”

His eyes meet mine. “Then we’ll deal with it. You and me and David Bowie.”

I smile. The words you and me sticking inside my head.

Maybe this isn’t where I thought I’d end up.

But right now, it doesn’t feel half bad.

Chapter Twelve

Greyson

Venture capital makes for strange bedfellows. I’ve courted baristas-turned-entrepreneurs. Farmers intent to sell their grits, milled from heirloom varieties of corn, to the retail market.

I’ve fielded proposals from foul-mouth chefs tatted up to within an inch of their life and surgeons seeking a second life as restaurateurs. I do business with Harvard grads, hardscrabble fishermen, chemists-cum-distillers with a talent for making the best gin this side of the Atlantic.

But I never thought I’d find myself hanging on every word a chatty ultrasound tech in heart-spattered scrubs utters as she squirts a lube-like substance onto Julia’s belly.

It’s surreal.

And it happens so fast. One second, the tech is flicking the lights off and directing our attention to a TV screen on the far wall.

The next, the inside of Julia’s uterus is on that screen and my heart is pounding so hard my head throbs in time to its beat.

A small black space appears on the screen. Inside that space is a tiny, tiny baby-shaped thing.

“Looks like there’s just one sac,” the tech says, pressing the wand a little more firmly against Julia’s belly. “No twins this time.”

“Thank God,” Julia says. Words tight, like she’s holding her breath.

I lean forward in my chair. “You all right?”