Epilogue #2
“That’s his surprise,” Brock said, uncharacteristically tight-lipped about the whole thing, which made me nervous.
When I picked up Riya three hours later, I realized that she had been walking around for months with a weight on her shoulders. Because as she walked up to me and gave me a kiss, some obnoxious fucking hat on her head, I realized it was gone. Her shoulders were lax. Her smile was easier.
“How was it?”
“Disgusting. And horrifying. And wonderful,” she said, smiling big at me.
I loaded up the truck, and we made our way home, leaving all the shit to be dealt with later so she could go sit down and put her feet up.
When we walked into the apartment, though, Barrett was already waiting. He had a pink and white wrapped box in his hands and was shuffling his feet uncomfortably.
“The day that keeps on giving,” she said, shooting him a warm smile and doing “gimme” hands at him.
He handed it to her, and she put it on the kitchen counter to open it, me and Barrett on the other side.
It looked like a clothing box.
But when she pulled open the tissue paper (also pink, and I couldn’t help but smile at the idea of Barrett hitting a store and buying any-fucking-thing that pink), what was inside was most definitely not clothes.
It was a file folder.
Riya looked up at him, brows drawn together, but didn’t say anything.
Me? Yeah, I was tense as fuck.
Because I knew how unpredictable my brother was, and I had no goddamn idea what he was up to.
“Oh my God,” she gasped as soon as she opened it. “How did you…” she said, looking up, her eyes bigger than I had ever seen them. “These were sealed!”
I looked at Barrett.
And it clicked.
He had spent weeks, or possibly even months, preparing her baby gift.
What he gave her was the missing pieces in her ancestry.
He got the adoption files and the records about Riya’s birth mother.
“I look just like her,” Riya said, pulling a picture out from a paperclip at the top of the page.
“Yeah, you do,” Barrett agreed.
“What is all of this?” she asked, flipping through the huge mountain of paperwork.
“Everything you never knew about your mother and her family, from their work visas to medical records, old pictures, the connections I could find via social media and genealogy sites. It’s, ah, comprehensive,” he said, looking almost a little embarrassed, rocking back on his heels with his hands tucked into his front pockets.
He was being modest. If I knew my brother, and I fucking did, that pile of paperwork would give her more insight into all her biological relatives than most people who actually spoke to their own relatives every day for twenty some-odd years would ever know.
“Barrett…” she said, looking up, shaking her head, at a loss for what to say.
Barrett, being bad at interpreting such things, was quick to try to explain. “I know you loved your adoptive family and they were all you needed, but with the baby on the way, I thought you might want to know all the medical things at least, so…”
He lost the rest of his sentence because Riya, big belly and all, plowed right into him, hormones and appreciation a heady cocktail that had her sobbing loudly into his neck.
His arms went around her instinctively, but his head swiveled and his gaze turned to me, and what I saw there was pure, undiluted, masculine terror at the sight of feminine tears.
I let her cry on him for a long minute, just because his discomfort was funny as fuck, before I moved in and pulled her against me instead.
The crying was nothing new.
I had come home from work one day to find her sitting on the living room floor crying into Slim’s back. Apparently, she had needed to remove a tick from his belly, and he made a whining noise.
Literally… that was it.
A whining noise caused an afternoon of crying.
Then she would cry some more while trying to explain to me that she really wasn’t a big cryer, that the baby was messing with her, that I just had to put up with it a couple more months and I’d probably not see her cry again for a year.
Hardly a day went by over the past month when she wasn’t soaking through my shirt.
“Don’t worry,” I told Barrett over her shoulder as I ran my fingers through her silky hair. “This is happy, believe it or not.”
That seemed to snap Riya out of her happy cry, sniffling hard and pulling against me. I let her turn but wrapped my hands around her belly, holding her to me.
“Definitely happy,” she told him, reaching up to swipe at her eyes. “Thank you so much. I… I didn’t even know her name…”
“Ari,” Barrett supplied with a small smile.
“I think we have a name,” I whispered down by her ear.
She nodded.
And then she was crying again.
—
“Sawyer, calm down,” Barrett said, only deceptively calm himself.
Calm wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary right then.
It was two hours after Riya had a somewhat seamless birth to our daughter, named Ari after Riya’s birth mother who, as it turned out, gave her up because she got pregnant at fifteen and was kicked out of her parents’ house.
Riya had been a trooper, and Marg had been there with us to help.
All was great.
Ari was six pounds and eight ounces, long-legged, with big, dark green eyes and a whole lot of wispy black hair like her mother. Healthy. She was perfect.
But Riya wouldn’t stop bleeding.
They massaged her uterus.
They did a D I was worried too.
When you hear that your body won’t stop hemorrhaging, you know there is only so much blood in your body and if they can’t find a way to keep it in, you will literally bleed to death.
I was scared. I had just brought a child into the world, and I owed it to her to be there for her.
But I had also seen Sawyer’s face when he saw her for the first time. I saw amazement, awe, wonder, and a fierce determination. And, since I knew him, I knew that determination was to make sure he would keep her safe, happy, and well provided for.
If something did happen to me, if they couldn’t stop the bleeding, she was in good hands.
She would have the best man I had ever met for a daddy.
That was the best thing I could have given her.
So I wasn’t terrified as I was brought into the room, as I watched a bag drip fluids and blood into me, as I slowly got put to sleep, as I knew they would be cutting me open.
She would be okay.
Sawyer -
“Ari, come on, bud,” I called, hearing a crash a minute before a little hellion came barreling down the hallway in a black tutu, a neon green tank top over an orange long-sleeve tee, with a silver scarf around her neck and rainbow Chucks on her feet.
She, God-awful fashion sense aside, was the spitting image of her mother. Really, I don’t think you could see an ounce of me in her, eyes aside. She had her long black hair, her thick black lashes around her eyes, her unique skin tone, her long legs.
She was five, but I knew in about ten years, she was going to make me be one of those dads—the ones with the shotguns and the threats for any boys looking her way.