Epilogue 1
Asher
Five and a Half Months Later…
“It’s over,” Cole said as he slapped me on the back in the waiting room of the hospital.
Everyone had left earlier, but Cole, Lauren, and Sierra’s mom were still here.
Lauren and Martha were visiting with my wife in her postpartum room.
Cole and I had stepped out so we could talk while the women were talking about the birth.
My daughter was stable in the NICU, and my wife was doing well after the C-section.
Kaylee Marie Remington had been moderate preterm when she was born at thirty-two weeks.
It had been a planned C-section because it hadn’t been safe to leave my daughter in the womb any longer.
My girl was tiny, but she was healthy. She’d need a stint in the NICU, but she’d grow and hopefully thrive over the next month or so until she could go home.
My wife had undergone a salpingectomy directly following her C-section so we’d never have to worry about another very high-risk pregnancy.
Hell, I’d made Sierra promise me that I’d never have to go through this experience again, and she’d happily agreed.
But…we had our amazing baby girl.
I hadn’t taken a breath in the operating room until I’d heard my baby cry. Hell, I’d wanted to shed a tear myself when I’d seen my wife take our girl into her arms briefly for the first time before my daughter had been hustled off to the NICU.
“All of this feels so damn surreal to me,” I told my brother as we got comfortable in two chairs in the empty waiting room.
Honestly, the last months had passed agonizingly slowly.
Sierra and I had married in the courthouse, with all of our family present, to minimize her stress.
Millie had organized a family dinner afterward with a cake, and my wife had declared that her wedding was absolutely perfect.
Personally, I hated the fact that Sierra hadn’t gotten the wedding I thought she deserved, but she’d seemed satisfied, and I’d been ecstatic when it was over.
My wife had needed to avoid the stress of a bigger affair, and that entire day was a happy one for me. She had, after all, become officially mine that day, but I’d been a little edgy about her overdoing anything during her pregnancy.
“It was worth all of the stress, right?” Cole asked.
“Yeah,” I replied immediately. “I can honestly say that now. But all of this could have turned out differently.”
There had been a few scary moments during Sierra’s pregnancy, and the wait through the last few weeks until they could take the baby had nearly given me a heart attack.
The doctors had needed to take my daughter preterm because the scarring had restricted the space for my child to grow. I’d feared that damn uterine rupture as soon as they’d told me why Kaylee had to come out early.
“It didn’t,” Cole said in a calm, reasonable voice.
“Let it go, Asher. You’ve been a wreck since you found out that Sierra was pregnant.
You’ve supported her all the way, but I think we all know that you and Sierra have been through hell.
Kaylee and Sierra are healthy. The pregnancy is over. Breathe, Asher. It’s time.”
I literally took a deep breath and rubbed the tight muscles in the back of my neck. “These months have felt never-ending, but you’re right. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful. But I’m fucking glad I’m never going to have to go through this again.”
“Sierra looks happy,” he remarked.
The stress slowly drained from my body as I grinned at Cole. “She’s ecstatic. Neither one of us ever planned on having a child. She’s going to be an amazing mother.”
I’d always known that, but I hadn’t really wanted to think about the future during Sierra’s pregnancy because everything had been so uncertain.
I couldn’t say the same for my wife.
Something strange had happened once she’d gotten through her first trimester.
She’d become absolutely certain that she and her girl were going to be fine.
She’d called it intuition.
I’d thought it was wishful thinking.
Now, I was fairly certain that it had been a mother’s intuition.
Sierra hadn’t really been nervous since she’d hit her second trimester.
It had been a little unnerving for me because all I could think about were the risks, but her certainty that everything was going to be fine had helped carry me through those last months.
My family had been a huge help, too.
I’d gotten close to my cousins, and Cole and Lauren had come up to stay with us in Billings pretty often after we’d rented a house to be near the hospital.
Sierra had been heartily supported by the Remington women, and I was grateful that she’d had those close friendships to lean on.
Now, it was starting to sink in that my future could finally start with my wife and my newborn child.
I was a father, and it was going to take me a while to get used to that.
I doubted it was going to take too long.
I’d fallen in love with my daughter while she was still growing in Sierra’s womb.
I wasn’t a religious guy, but I’d found myself praying to a God I wasn’t well acquainted with to let my daughter be born safely.
My love for my child had literally exploded the moment I’d seen her in the operating room.
I’d vowed to protect both her and Sierra until my dying breath, and it was a promise I planned on keeping.
“How’s the therapy going?” Cole questioned.
“Good. I’m going to stick with it until I know I’m emotionally healthy.”
Most of my PTSD symptoms were gone, but I was going to make damn sure that I was equipped to be a good husband and father now and in the future.
I knew I was a lucky bastard to have the life I was going to be living in the future.
Cole nodded approvingly. “It won’t be long until you, Sierra, and Kaylee will be on your way home.”
Home.
Yeah, I’d missed my ranch while we’d been staying at a rental home in Billings, but home was really wherever Sierra and I were together.
Cole and my cousins had been seeing to the horses and taking care of things while we’d been here.
“It will be nice to have my girls back in Crystal Fork,” I conceded, finally able to imagine what the future was going to hold for us.
“It will be nice to have you home,” Cole said hoarsely.
I looked at my younger brother, and it finally dawned on me that the last several months had been hard on him and Lauren, too.
They’d made Sierra and me their priority.
“It’s over,” I said to my brother, repeating what he’d said to me moments ago. “I’ll be there for you when it’s your turn.”
Cole snorted. “After watching you, I’m not so sure I want to go through that kind of hell.”
Oh, he would.
He’d do it because he’d want that child and because his wife wanted it, too.
I hoped to hell he went through a much easier pregnancy than me, but I had no doubt that Cole and Lauren would end up having a family. They both had too much love to share with a child, and they both deserved a family of their own.
After everything Cole and I had been through together, it would feel like we’d come full circle when I saw him holding his child.
In my mind, our life now more than made up for everything we’d been through in the past.
“You’ll do it,” I said with certainty as I slapped him on the back. “And I’m going to be there for it.”
All of his family would be there for it.
We were done being alone.
Cole and I were finally done fighting the whole world.
We were Remingtons, and after a long journey away, we were finally exactly where we belonged.