Epilogue
Patrick
supposed there were advantages to having a sister-in-law as a midwife.
It saved him the worry of transporting his wife to hospital, though Jamie had rented a helicopter just in case.
It was sitting behind Patrick’s house, waiting patiently.
And Sunny was waiting just as patiently, ignoring his pacing, ignoring Madelyn’s swearing.
“What in the hell was I thinking?” Madelyn gasped as she clutched the side of a birthing tub Sunny had demanded be imported. She looked around desperately. “This is too much.”
“It’s transition,” Sunny said serenely. “Just hang on.”
“Hang on!” Madelyn shouted. “You go through this and then tell me to hang on, you—”
Patrick listened, openmouthed, to a very long list of names his wife called her beloved sister. He gaped at Sunny as she turned and smiled at him.
“Would you believe,” she said, unruffled, “that Madelyn worried that women in labor didn’t have enough breath for long, involved sentences?”
“That wasn’t a long sentence,” Patrick ventured. “It was a long list of very foul names.” He looked at his wife. “Really, Madelyn, perhaps—”
“And you,” she said, gasping, with tears streaming down her face, “you—”
The list was even longer. It was in Gaelic.
He decided that he would perhaps have to have a word with Robert MacLeod.
Too many foul words had been taught to his wife for his comfort.
If she would just throw in a few nice ones, he would feel a great deal better.
He’d heard stories about the joy of childbirth, the overwhelming nature of the experience, the bonding that occurred between husband and wife.
In reality, it looked like a lot of work to him.
And he suspected that his wife wanted to kill him.
Nay, he didn’t suspect it. He knew it.
But two hours later the work was done, his daughter had made her entrance into the world, and his wife was looking up at him with love in her eyes and tears streaming down her face.
Sunny handed him the baby.
Patrick accepted her, that small, helpless creature that had lived nestled under his wife’s heart for a se’nnight shy of ten months, stared down into her fathomless gray eyes, and found himself rendered quite speechless.
His life shuddered from the joy of it.
He met Madelyn’s eyes. “She’s beautiful,” he whispered reverently. “Thank you.”
She smiled through her tears. “She is.”
He held the baby as Sunny tended to Madelyn, gave her up to her aunt’s loving arms to help Madelyn out of the tub, then knelt down by the bed as Madelyn held her ten-minute-old daughter and put her to her breast. Madelyn looked at him.
“What should we call her?”
He’d thought about it for months. Almost ten months. A name for the first flower to bloom in their garden.
He hoped Madelyn would agree with him.
“I have a name in mind,” he began.
“What is it?”
He paused, looked at the wee babe, then back at his love. “I think,” he said slowly, “that we should call her Hope.”
“Oh, Patrick,” she whispered.
“It’s what you brought me. Twice now. First when you came into my life, and now again with the gift of my daughter.”
His heart settled within him and whispered contentedly of peace.
And beautiful things blooming in his garden.
And of hope.
It was enough.