Page 74 of Love and Gravity

He shook his head and shoved a handful of trail mix in his mouth. “This is all chocolate,” he said.

She shrugged at him. “It was either that or dinosaur chicken nuggets.”

“You didn’t have to bring snacks, but thank you.”

“What do you mean?” she asked with a furrowed brow.

“I mean, you don’t have to take care of me,” he told her in a rush. Where the push back was coming from she didn’t know but she had a suspicion it came from her thinking too long on the before times. It was a space she didn’t like to linger in. Anton’s reply made her freeze.

“What?”

He glanced toward her. “You’re always taking care of everyone. You don’t have to do that with me. Maybe I want to take care of you,” he said, surprising her.

“I’m not always taking care of everyone,” she replied, but then she scrunched up her face. “I mean, I don’t think… Am I always taking care of everyone?”

“Yes.” He ate another handful of trail mix as he navigated through the city. “I’m not saying it’s bad that you do. I know you care about them, but it’s got to be exhausting, right?”

She shook her head. “No, I love to do it. I don’t really see it as taking care of people. It’s just what I do. I’m the lab manager. I manage the lab, and that includes the scientists.”

“I’ve had more than a few lab managers, and trust me. That’s not what they do. You make the labs a home.”

“Well, isn’t it?” She leaned back in her seat and cradled her coffee mug.

“Isn’t it what? A home?” He pulled a face. “I’ve never—until seeing you and yours—thought of a lab as anything but a place of business. It’s where I go to work, not live. I’ve never done anything but be manic and drink coffee in my lab. Couple break downs now that I think about it.”

She turned over his words and sipped her coffee. What he was describing sounded foreign to her, but then again she had never had any lab experience until she’d become Lou’s intern while living in Arizona.

Grace didn't suppose the mechanic’s garage had ever really constituted a lab, other than in her and Lou’s minds. Lou had always been content to let Grace run things as she saw fit. And that had meant making the lab into a home, a safe place to land, somewhere that everyone felt valued, seen, and heard. Grace had never seen the responsibility of making her people understand that they were, in fact, her people, a chore. It was something she enjoyed immensely. With all the moving around for work Lou’s career now demanded, it was a lovely feeling to not miss home. Because the labs and the minions within it were her home.

Though Grace supposed she’d never truly had much of a home life. Her family had been distant, cold even. Preferring to simply exist within the same walls, rather than making a functioning family unit. She supposed that happened when said family lost a child. Grace had been all of nine years old when her older sister, Lilia, had drowned.

It hadn’t been anyone’s fault, it had just been one of those freak accidents you heard about on the news, felt bad for a moment about, and then moved on, because it was a random family whose name you had already forgotten. Except, in Grace’s case, it hadn’t been a random family, it had been hers.

There hadn’t been any moving on when her family had been forever changed one summer day at the community pool.

Lilia had been thirteen years old and Grace nine years old. Those four years had seemed like a lifetime of experience to Grace, and she’d thought the older girl had hung the moon.

Grace had been her shadow until Lilia hadn’t been there to follow anymore. From that day, it was like someone had sucked the light and love out of the Muñoz home. Grace had gone from the spoiled baby of the family to just being another checkbox to tick for them, not a real person with her own desires and personality.

Her parents had fed, clothed, and gotten her to school, but other than that they had little interest in her life. Try as she might, Grace had never been able to fit whatever it was her parents needed from her. Her mother had laughed often and loudly before Lilia’s death, so had her father, so had all of them. Or at least, that’s what Grace’s childhood memory told her.

Sometimes she wondered if she had made up a world where everything had just been better when Lilia had been alive. Maybe her parents had always been dismissive, short-tempered and aloof, and she was recalling those earlier days through rose-colored glasses. Her doubt at a made up world only lasted for so long though, and photos in the family albums that Grace only looked at when she was sure her parents were gone told her otherwise.

Things had been better when Lilia lived. Those photos were proof. Proof that they had been better. All of them.

Things would have been so much better if Lilia had lived.

To make up for it Grace, it seemed, had inherited her parent’s missing measure of love and softness. Those special things Lilia had inspired—laughter, hugs, and community, were all things Grace craved and vowed to find again for herself. And while most women would have set out to find a partner, someone to love and marry, have a family, Grace had found what she’d wanted most with her place beside Lou and the science brigade. It was uncanny how effortlessly she’d fallen into it, but now that she had she couldn’t imagine her life without them. Her world, she’d even dare to say, was her role in looking after them.

“It’s not taking care of. It’s just…they need some help.”

“You baby them.”

She frowned at him. Wouldn’t a sane person baby something if it was their whole world? Even still, she said, “I do not.”

He turned onto the road that led out of the city and shook his head at her. “All I’m saying is you don’t have to worry about me. I can fend for myself.”

“I like doing it,” she replied, voice soft. She lowered her eyes to her hands. “It’s not work, or a bother, for me.”