Epilogue
PARKER
Levi barrels down the walkway, his bare feet thudding against the stone path that winds from the front door of our house down to the gate.
“Grandma’s here!” he yells, turning his head just long enough to shout back toward the living room, where Lyra is still struggling to zip her weekend bag. “She’s here! I call first push!”
Behind him, the edge of the beach stroller peeks through the open gate, and sure enough, there’s my mother in her wide-brimmed sun hat, waving cheerfully like she hasn’t just orchestrated the grand escape of three children for an overnight visit at her cottage.
“Hi, sweetheart!” she calls, catching the gate before Levi can slam it shut. “Are you ready for a night at Nana’s?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s already grabbing the stroller handle. Lyra finally appears behind me, hair braided, oversized tote bag swinging from one arm. “Do not let Levi push her until I get there!” she huffs, and then glares up at me. “Tell him, Mom.”
“I’m staying out of this one,” I murmur, trying not to laugh. “It’s your overnight. You all work it out.”
Lyra scowls like I’ve betrayed her, then jogs after her brother, muttering about injustice and boys being the worst.
In the stroller, Lucy blinks up at me with that sleepy, barely interested baby expression that says she’s more intrigued by the breeze than her siblings’ drama.
At nearly eight months old, she’s the most unbothered baby I’ve ever known.
Which is a miracle, really, considering the circus she was born into.
“Did you pack the extra bottles?” my mom asks as she hoists her beach tote higher on her shoulder.
“Four bottles, six bibs, and enough diapers for a small village,” I reply. “And don’t forget, the pacifier clipped to her onesie is the only one she’ll use. If it gets lost, good luck surviving the night.”
“Parker, please,” she scoffs, adjusting the brim of her hat. “She’s a baby, not a time bomb.”
“She could be both. I keep waiting for her to act out like her siblings did at her age, but she’s too chill.”
“It’s living on the beach. I’ve mellowed too.” My mom chuckles, and then she leans in and kisses my cheek. “Don’t worry. We’ve got this. Enjoy your night.”
She looks at me for a beat, that mom-glint in her eyes like she knows exactly what kind of night we have planned.
I don’t confirm or deny. Just smile. Let her walk away with my kids and the stroller and the small, shining piece of my heart that is Lucy’s sleepy gaze, and then shut the gate behind them.
And breathe.
This is the first night all three of the kids are spending away from home. First real overnight since Lucy was born. It’s so quiet that it starts to eat away at the peace I should be feeling.
Because I know they’re safe. I know she’s just down the shore, tucked into the cottage the guys had built on our property. My mother now lives a literal ten-minute walk from our front door. It’s a little further than our old apartment building, but distance is good for us.
So much has changed since the apartment.
A year ago, I was barely making rent, working part-time, juggling school drop-offs and split-shift logistics while hoping the air-conditioning didn’t give out again.
And now, I live in a house with more bathrooms than I know what to do with, Harrison’s name on the property deed and Gavin’s architectural preferences stamped all over the place.
Jack is in charge of the stereo system, of course.
There’s an entire sunken reading nook in the library that Lyra has claimed as her “thinking throne,” and Levi has a small jungle gym setup on the back patio that probably violates every HOA guideline on the books.
Thankfully, there’s no HOA.
There’s a view of the water from every room.
A wraparound deck. A pool I didn’t ask for and now refuse to live without.
Our bedroom takes up half the top floor, and Lucy’s nursery shares a wall with it—something I insisted on while I was still pregnant, even if the house had to be reconfigured to accommodate it.
Her crib sits under a window that looks out at the beach.
At night, with the right moonlight, the whole room glows.
This is my life now. And I still don’t believe it half the time.
The men— my men—have made sure I never forget how far we’ve come.
They say it in the way Jack puts Lyra’s hair in lopsided pigtails every morning with the precision of a dad who Googled six tutorials.
In the way Harrison carries Lucy with one hand and chops vegetables with the other, nodding along to my work rants like he’s personally offended by every email I get.
In the way Gavin holds me still sometimes, just long enough to remind me that I don’t have to keep moving to prove I’m worth this.
I’ve never been more exhausted. Or more in love. Or more absolutely sure that we’re building something that matters.
Behind me, the screen door creaks open, and Harrison steps out with a glass of wine in one hand and a knowing look on his face. “They gone?”
I nod. “Just now.”
He walks over, sets the glass down on the porch rail beside me, and wraps an arm around my waist. His palm settles low, just above my hip, warm and steady. “Think your mom suspects what kind of night we have planned?”
I lift an eyebrow. “She told me to ‘enjoy myself’ with a smirk, Harrison.”
“Ah. So, she definitely knows.”
“She knows everything.”
He kisses my temple. “You ready to be worshiped?”
I smile into his chest. “God, yes.”
Once Harrison pulls me inside, I shed the final layer of lingering tension. For the first time in months, I hear the hush of our space. The waves in the distance. My own thoughts.
It’s been a year since everything blew up and settled into this—whatever this is. A domestic dream made entirely of chaos, caffeine, and the kind of love that shouldn’t exist outside of fairy tales. And I wouldn’t trade a second of it.
Even the messy parts. Especially the messy parts.
Like the two stalkers we picked up after the VT press coverage hit its stride. Apparently, being a high-profile polyamorous pregnant person was enough to warrant a few unhinged deep-dive threads, which led to some guys taking up too much interest in me.
Gavin warned me, of course. He said celebrity-adjacent press cycles came with their own ecosystem of weird. But nothing prepares you for finding out that someone made a Pinterest board of your outfits—or worse, a fanfic series about your “poly billionaire baby drama.”
Jack still brings that up sometimes when he wants to make me groan. “Episode three had great character development,” he’ll say, completely deadpan. “I like how they made me a secret Russian prince.”
That’s how we knew we needed better security.
So now we have it. A team installed cameras discreetly and made sure every entry point in the house is locked up tighter than a Pentagon server. I fought it at first, but then Lucy was born, and suddenly safety felt like something holy.
The birth was fast. Faster than I expected. Gavin drove me to the hospital, Jack kept yelling from the back seat about the bag we forgot, and Harrison held my hand the whole way, calm and solid even when I threw up in his lap.
Lucy came into the world pink, loud, and absolutely perfect. She looked like Lyra the moment she opened her eyes, but with Gavin’s nose and a tiny fist that latched around Harrison’s thumb like she was claiming him on sight.
I’ve never cried so hard in my life.
We didn’t announce it to the press until a week later. Darla handled the rollout. “Smart and personal,” she called it, and honestly? She nailed it. A single photograph, a caption about joy, and the internet lost its mind for all the right reasons.
The foundation Harrison and I started launched two months later.
We named it The Marigold Project, after my favorite flower—and because we didn’t want anything too obviously connected to our names.
It’s quiet work, behind the scenes, but it matters.
We focus on outreach for unhoused teens, providing not just shelter but wraparound services—counseling, mentorship, legal support.
It’s not perfect. But I’ve never felt more useful.
Harrison built the advisory panel carefully. I swear I saw him cry once after our first roundtable meeting, but he blamed it on the allergy meds. Jack rolled his eyes for ten minutes straight.
Speaking of Jack, he’s become the world’s most obnoxiously proud dad. He calls Lucy “the tiny overlord” and lets Lyra sit on his shoulders whenever she wants, even when we’re in the middle of Trader Joe’s. Levi worships him, obviously. And honestly? So do I.
All three kids call them Dad, Daddy, and Pops now. Jack is Dad. Gavin is Daddy. Harrison—somehow, hilariously—is Pops, and even though he pretends to hate it, I catch the way he softens every time Lucy babbles it at him from her highchair.
Gavin, for all his cool composure, has folded completely into fatherhood.
He’s the first to hold Lucy in the morning, the last to check on her at night.
He read every parenting book we bought—twice—and has a running spreadsheet of developmental milestones that he updates with such dedication that our pediatrician offered him a job.
He also has a relationship with his father now.
With his stepmom. With siblings he’d never met until last fall.
There was a moment, just before Christmas, when his half brother handed Lucy a handmade ornament and Gavin had to excuse himself from the room.
When I followed, I found him standing on the balcony, eyes red, holding his phone and staring at a photo of his teenage self like he was trying to speak to someone across time.
I didn’t say anything. I just took his hand.
Vivian, as far as we know, moved to Thailand.