Somebody Like You by Beth K. Vogt Page B

were Sam’s tools—which he intended to find. Because whether Haley liked it or not—and she didn’t—he was putting up the toddler swing. That was his plan and he was sticking to it.
    He hit the garage door control, dodged boxes, deposited his box underneath the tree, and circled it. Yep. There was a perfect branch to suspend the swing from. Not too high up. He’d noticed a large tree in the backyard, but it didn’t have any low-hanging branches adequate for a swing. And some of the top branches looked . . . old. Brittle.
    After opening the box, he read through the directions to figure out what he needed to complete the job—and realized tools were unnecessary. He wasn’t going to hang the swing today, not when the directions stated to store the swing indoors when temperatures dropped below freezing. It was only February—still plenty of opportunities for that to happen.
    So much for surprising—and defying—his sister-in-law. Hetucked the directions in the box and confronted the disarray in the garage. There was no method to this madness, as boxes were just pushed and piled on top of one another. Words were scrawled on several of them, and a closer inspection revealed them to be labeled LIVING ROOM or BATHROOM or BEDROOM CLOTHES . If he couldn’t hang the swing, maybe he could rearrange the boxes into some sort of order.
    After forty-five minutes of shoving and repiling, Stephen stepped back to survey his progress. Sweat dampened his shirt, and the layer of dust coating his hands lodged in his throat and nose, prompting mild bouts of coughing. All of the boxes marked BEDROOM were in one area. Kitchen boxes were closest to the door leading into the house. His stepmother had taught him to unpack the kitchen first when they moved into a new house. Boxes labeled CLOTHES were stacked next to the bedroom boxes. And all of the boxes marked GARAGE were piled over by the workbench, with the ones labeled TOOLS on top of the stack. It was a start.
    Would Sam have been glad his brother planned on putting a baby swing in the tree? Maybe not. His shoulders slumped. After their father remarried, Sam had made it clear that his life was with their mom—that it didn’t include their father. Sam’s decision to live with his mom when they’d started high school began the slow erosion of their relationship.
    Stephen needed to man up and admit there was a part of him that had heaved a silent breath of release during his high school years. At last, he was just Stephen Rogers Ames. The only Ames brother—except for the few holidays he spent with Sam and his mom, and as those had gotten more and more tense, they became less frequent. The one letter Stephen sent him after college graduation . . . what happened to that? Probably gone missing in the midst of Sam’s moves with the army. Or tossed in the trash, unread.
    He’d willingly lived a lie—and so had Sam. And now Stephen would pay for their choices for the rest of his life.

    What time was it?
    Haley opened her eyes, shoving her hair out of her face with a groan. Why oh why had pregnancy made her a drooler? She rolled from her side onto her back, wiping the warm moisture from her lips. Lovely. If Sam were here, he’d make some sort of crack about having to rethink why he’d married her.
    If only she could dredge up a laugh.
    She swung her legs over the side of the bed. No lying around and definitely no lying on her back, not when her bladder insisted she get up. Everything she’d ever heard about pregnant women making multiple trips a day—and all through the night—to the bathroom was coming true. At this rate, she’d spend the last month of this pregnancy in the bathroom.
    A few minutes later, she smoothed Sam’s ARMY STRONG T-shirt over her tummy. “Try not to use Mommy’s bladder as a pillow, okay, buddy?” She stilled as movement fluttered beneath her hand. Most of the time, she could ignore what was happening—how her body was morphing into something