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“They did, after they ate weed brownies at a mushroom festival.”

I’m too tired and Lithuanian to know if he’s joking. In any case, from my limited encounters with Iggy and Jekka, it feels legitimate.

Poet steps away to release the chickens. A dozen feisty birds swarm into the yard and I spot Aras’s favourite. She has a bent wing and a crooked beak, and she is as obsessed with Poet Whitlock as we are.

He almost trips over her as he comes back to me. “I need to get the tractor out.”

“I know. I will make you breakfast.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

Actually, I do. Poet was too busy absorbing my morning insulin routine to grab himself anything from my fridge and if him fucking me doesn’t kill me, the thought of him working all day on an empty stomach just might.

I distract the bird who wants to follow him everywhere while he escapes to the barn. Then I move to the hen house for eggs and raid the poly-tunnel for the stash of produce Poet sets aside for himself.

It brings me face to face with the extra raspberry canes I know he planted for Aras. They won’t fruit until the autumn and even then it will be a small crop until they grow stronger next summer.

Aras is already excited about it. Truthfully, so am I. Because I have not stopped to wonder if Poet and I will still be close by then. Again, it is as though my soul has accepted a reality I’m not fully in tune with yet. A feeling that intensifies as I let myself into the farmhouse and find Aras’s spare wellies already stowed in the hallway, a dinosaur crayon on a nearby windowsill. The kitchen cupboards hold the sports drinks and high energy snack foods I need when juice and nuts aren’t enough. If I look, I see myself and my son in every corner of Poet’s home and it doesn’t feel deliberate.

It feels natural.

It feels like fate.

Though, the couch that wasn’t in the living room two days ago gives me pause.

I go back outside and cook Poet breakfast in the morning sun. He comes back as I’m tipping sautéed greens and an omelet onto a wooden board. “Why is my sofa in your living room?”

“What?”

I jerk a thumb at the farmhouse. “That was mine until Rubi stole it.”

“Rubi stole your couch?”

“Swapped it,” I concede. “For one I could sleep on when I was too tired and sick to crawl upstairs. He promised I could have it back when I was better. I was right not to believe him.”

Poet sidles into my personal space. “It was here when I came home last night. I can put it on the truck this afternoon, if you want?”

I laugh. “I do not want. It was the first furniture I bought when River moved out and I like that it’s found its way here. The real question is if you will ever find the time to sit on it.”

“Give me a reason to sit down, Oscar, I’ll do it.”

Want laces every word. Invitation. We stare at each other for a loaded beat, and then I kiss him as if we’re still in my bed and I do not know how I stop, save that I really do need Poet to eat before he goes to work for real.

He laughs too, nipping my jaw. “You sit on it, I’ll sit on it. How’s that?”

“Promising—”

Poet whips around. His smirk disappears, not in alarm, but attention, his head tilted at something I can’t yet see.

Someone.

Dav appears at the fence and lets himself through the gate.

Poet relaxes. “That answers that then.”

“You didn’t think he’d come?”

“I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again.”