“She says she doesn’t want a ring?”

West repeated his own words back to him, and Ryder found it astonishingly unhelpful. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I mean, she said she doesn’t want me to get her one. She wants to make it. You know, she’s into all that artisan stuff. It’s kind of her thing.”

“Sure,” West said. “But...a woman shouldn’t make her own wedding ring. That’s like making your own birthday cake or...hell, buying your own Christmas presents, I guess. It’s dumb, essentially. And I would think that most women would actually be not okay with it at all.”

“But she said she was.”

“Danger, Will Robinson. That sounds like one of those things.”

“Sammy doesn’t do that stuff. She doesn’t play games.”

“Maybe she didn’t when she was your friend. But now she’s your fiancée. The future mother of your baby. And that means games come into play.”

“Are you telling me my sister plays games with you?”

West lifted a shoulder. “We play games with each other. Even if we don’t mean to. That’s how it all works sometimes. Because suddenly when you’ve got your feelings in the mix it’s easier to play games than outright say it. Half the time I’m convinced the game is with your own head. I bet she’s not tricking you on purpose, but she’s probably afraid to ask in case you don’t want to do it.”

“Look. That’s all fine for you two, but she and I have been friends for about a thousand years.”

West leveled a serious look at him. “But now you’re more.”

“Not really,” Ryder said, ignoring the tightness in his chest.

“Seriously? You got the woman pregnant, and you’re marrying her, and you’re still going to say that there’s nothing more between the two of you?”

“Okay, it’s more. But I guess more accurately it always has been. It’s not love. I mean, not in love,” he clarified. “But it’s... She’s always belonged to me. And that doesn’t make sense. I know that. It sounds like a whole asshole caveman thing. And it isn’t. It’s more than that. I’d... I’ve spent the past seventeen years protecting her from the world.”

“And now you have to protect her from you, too. Because I don’t care if you think you’re in love with each other or not, there’s a hell of a lot higher stakes when it comes to feelings than there were before you were engaged. Than there were before you were having a baby. That’s just a fact.”

Ryder turned that over in his head for a moment. And he supposed that was probably true. And some of it was that it hadn’t really occurred to him since he had wanted Sammy for quite some time, so the shift for him had more uncovered things he had already known existed, rather than treated him to anything new. But he was sure that Sammy herself had never thought of him that way and so for her it was an entire sea change.