Epilogue
Maybe a part of me wants to claim some grand and romantic things transpired over the next three weeks.
But the reality is, it was a blur of throwing up, working, coming home, eating dinner, cleaning, curling up on the couch and watching TV, then going off to bed and making love until we were both too spent to do anything other than sleep.
Perhaps, though, that was what was so wonderful about mine and Sawyer’s story. It was born of extraordinary circumstance and grew around a mystery that removed a year of my life from me.
But it wasn’t wild.
It wasn’t crazy.
It was positively freaking domestic.
And it wasn’t lost on me how crazy it sounded to say a man like Sawyer—who spent most of his young adulthood in trenches, in trees, in deserts and swamplands with nothing but a backpack, a gun, a knife, and his best friend, living the kind of danger that you see in movies—then came home and started a business that involved hunting people down, figuring out mysteries, and trying his damnedest to save girls like me, could ever be described as something as boring, as uninspiring as “domestic.”
But that was the truth.
That was our story.
People with guns didn’t come shooting up our apartment.
I didn’t have a stalker or a dark, twisted past.
His old demons didn’t come to hunt him down.
We simply… settled down.
And I was more than okay with that.
The thing with Michael, yeah, it was more than enough crazy to last me a lifetime. He stole three hundred and sixty-seven days from me. That was time I would never get back. But that loss brought me to Sawyer, who I planned to spend the rest of my days with.
Sawyer -
“No,” Marg snapped, shaking her head at me, blocking our way into the restaurant.
“Marg, no really. The men come now. That’s how this is done,” Riya tried to reason.
Marg made some kind of disagreeing noise and waved a dismissive hand.
“No. This is not how it’s done. There are traditions.
This is not about silly bingo games or diaper pyramids.
This is about women. This is about sharing our stories, about pulling you into a circle of mothers.
This is sacred. Plus, mija, do you really think he wants to know all the details about afterbirth and chapped nipple remedies and… ”
“Yup. I’m out,” I said with a smile, shaking my head at Riya when she tried to small-eye me into staying beside her.
Truth was, she was nervous. While, as a whole, she had taken the unexpected pregnancy as a trooper, there were aspects about it that made her skin crawl. Any talk about birth, for example.
“It’s barbaric,” she snapped when I was reading a passage from one of the pregnancy books I had bought her that she had read up to then after the chapters about delivery.
“It’s natural.”
“She’s going to rip her way out of my body. That’s barbaric. If anything else ripped its way out of a person, there would be none of this ‘oh, it’s so beautiful’ nonsense.”
“Babe, you need to know what to expect.”
“Oh, blood and pain and having to have parts of me cut so other parts of me don’t tear. I got it. It’s cool.”
“That procedure would be called an episiotomy.”
“Who cares what it’s called? It’s horrific.”
I laughed at that, tossing the book and wrapping her up.
Like I said, she was good, if not great, about most things.
That binge she had with Barrett was her last. She drank God-awful green smoothies before each meal, meals that were two-thirds rainbow vegetables and one-third protein.
She took her vitamins even when she was queasy.
She adopted a light but religious workout routine.
She helped me decorate the nursery, though I wouldn’t let her in when we painted it.
When we went to the doctor for the first real ultrasound to hear the heartbeat, she had been more nervous than I had ever seen her, stiff as a board as she lay down and got her belly covered in jelly.
But the second the whoosh-whoosh came from the machine, her arm flew out and her hand squeezed mine harder than I thought she was capable.
But when Marg suggested a baby shower, holy fucking shit did she flip out.
“No. Absolutely not!” she hissed when I told her about the plan so Marg didn’t surprise her.
“Babe…”
“No. No. You don’t understand. They talk about it. They all sit and talk about labor and all the gross things that happen and how they were on the table for freaking twenty hours and had needles stabbed into their spines to stop the pain. Nope. I’m not doing that.”
But when Marg had somehow talked her into it—or, more likely, guilted her into it—she had agreed, but demanded I go with her.
I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of sitting around and having clothespins tagged to my shirt and shit, but if Riya needed me there, I would be there.
That being said, Marg was right. Riya needed to talk to women.
She had never really made any close friendships, which was, in part, my fault.
I had been selfish with her. No one would blame me.
When you had a woman like her in your life, you wanted to keep her all to yourself.
But I wasn’t doing her any favors by being her main source of support.
Especially in something that I could never even remotely understand.
I figured that, seeing as she made the decision to not have children, all the ideas, fears, and resignations about that possibility that most women go through were something she never even gave a thought to. She was having a decade of freaks-out in the course of nine months.
But as much as I wanted to always be her hero, to always be able to solve her problems and smooth over her fears, that wasn’t realistic.
I didn’t understand what it felt like to be pregnant, to have parts of your body no longer belong wholly to yourself, to feel a life growing inside you. And I damn sure knew nothing about what it was like to push that life out.
She needed Marg and the collection of women Marg had gathered, with a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and comfort between them.
I felt like I was letting her down by leaving her there, especially after telling her I would be there for her, but she needed me to leave, whether she realized it or not.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she snapped, ripping her hand from mine and charging past Marg and inside.
“She’s scared,” I told Marg as soon as she was out of earshot.
“I know, mijo,” she said, giving me a knowing smile. “That’s why she needs us. That’s why she can’t have you here to hide behind.”
“Don’t give her any horror stories.”
“Horror?” she asked, looking honest-to-God taken aback at the very suggestion. “No horror. Nothing but beauty here.”
“And don’t be all up in her face about how this makes her a woman, or nothing will compare to the love she has for a baby she gave birth to.”
“Mijo,” she said, shaking her head, “being a mother has nothing to do with giving birth. I know she was adopted, and I know this will be her only birth baby. But no one here is going to make her feel like less because she is making that choice. She’s going to be a great mother.
To this baby and to all the babies or children you two bring into your lives in other ways.
But that’s not what today is about. Today is about not making her want to stick her fingers in her ears and hum anytime someone mentions childbirth.
It’s not as scary as they make it sound on TV.
” She reached out then, placing a hand on my cheek in a way she did when she was proud of me.
“You, you are such a good man,” she said, her eyes watering up.
“You worry more about her than she worries about herself. But you can trust her with me.”
With that, she gave me a watery smile and moved inside.
And I took my ass over to Brock’s place to get a drink.
“Heya, Pops,” he greeted me at the door. “Thought you’d be knee-deep in pink ribbons by now.”
“Riya needed some girl time,” I said, pushing past him and into his kitchen to get myself a drink.
“You guys settle on a name yet?”
“Don’t,” I warned, shaking my head.
The name. Jesus fucking Christ, the name.
Never having named anything ever before, not even Slim—who Tig had inadvertently named after I had had him for a week and used it to greet him one day in lieu of a name. After that, it stuck.
We had searched every ever-loving site. We had bounced names off each other until we were blue in the face.
Nothing felt right.
I was starting to worry the poor kid would just leave the hospital named “Baby Girl Anderson.”
There was a high likelihood of that at this point.
“Just got back from Barrett’s,” Brock said oddly, drawing my attention away from my whiskey.
“Is he working on a case for you?”
“Nah, he wanted my opinion on his baby gift to you guys.”
“Oh, fuck. Is this some retaliation shit for the goddamn guinea pig? I swear to fuck I tried to talk her out of it.”
Brock snorted, giving me a grin. “He talks a good game about it, but he loves that stupid rodent. It’s good for him to have something to go home to that isn’t a coffee machine, an empty bed, and takeout menus.”
“What is it then?” I asked, genuinely curious.
Barrett, being Barrett, wasn’t exactly the type to go all soft-hearted at the idea of a tiny human.
I once slapped him behind the head when he said to an old friend of ours that it looked like all the other babies and it was completely impossible to tell if it would look like either of the parents for a full six months to a year, and that she wouldn’t be interesting until a good five years from then.
I didn’t think he was even paying all that close of attention to the fact that Riya was getting close, let alone planning a baby gift.
I found myself somehow comforted by the fact that Brock had okayed whatever it was. Not that he knew any more about babies than Barrett did, but he was at least a bit more schooled in social graces.