She’s got herself curled up on my bed like she owns the place—legs crossed, hair clipped back, flipping through one of them baby catalogues like it’s the Argos Christmas special and not oh look, here’s 400 ways to bankrupt AJ Lynch by spring.

I’m half-watching her from the floor where I’m sitting with a bag of crisps, pretending to care about whatever’s on the telly, but really, I’m just watching her nose scrunch every time she sees something daft.

“Look at this,” she says, holding the page up like it’s Exhibit A in the trial against overpriced baby shite. “A silver-plated dummy. Who needs that?”

“Posh babies, probably,” I mutter, smirking. “Royal babies. Celebrity babies.”

“Unborn Lynch baby does not need this.”

“No arguments here.” I pop another crisp. “They’ll be lucky if we get ‘em one of them bibs that says spit happens.”

She grins at that, and my chest tightens in that annoying way it’s been doing since this all started—since she sat me down and told me, and my head went into outer space for about three days straight.

Now though? Now it’s less panic, more… trying to wrap my head around loving something we haven’t met yet. Something that might come out with her nose and my temper. God help us.

She flips another page. Pauses. “AJ.”

“Hmm?”

“When we get the cot,” she starts, slow like she’s testing the waters, “I want the one with the little canopy thing. Like the netting bit. The fancy one.”

“We’re not getting the fancy one,” I say automatically, like I’ve been trained.

She hums. Doesn’t argue. Just keeps flipping. I already know I’ll be Googling where to find that exact cot by midnight.

There’s a beat of silence, then she goes, “When we get the pram, we’re getting one of those neutral ones. Cream. Beige. Minimalist.”

I raise an eyebrow. “We’re getting the one with wheels that move. That’s the only requirement.”

“Mmm.” She leans over, pokes my arm with her toe. “You’ll cave.”

I glance up at her, lips twitching. “No, I won’t.”

“You will.”

I grin now. “Probably.”

She goes quiet again, until—

“When we get a dog, they’ll grow up together.”

I blink. “What dog?”

She shrugs. “The one you’re gonna surprise me with after I push a human out of my body.”

I let out a laugh, falling back against the floor. “Jesus. Guilt-trippin’ me already and you’re only like three months gone.”

She tosses a pillow at me. It bounces off my chest and hits the bag of crisps.

“Reckon I’ve earned at least one golden retriever,” she mutters.

I look up at her. At the girl I accidentally, unexpectedly, completely ended up loving so fiercely it scares me more than the baby stuff does.

“You’ll get the dog,” I say, quietly. “You’ll get the cot with the netting. The beige pram. All of it.”

She looks at me then, not smiling—but soft. Real soft. Like maybe this thing we’re building together isn’t as impossible as it felt at first.

Then I add, just to keep it us: “But I’m drawing the line at silver-plated dummies.”

“Fair enough,” she murmurs, flipping another page.

And just like that— we keep going.