Epilogue – Imogen
Seven and a half months go by faster than any stretch of my life before it.
I finish my dissertation and pass the defense in March with Ashton pacing a hole in the hallway outside.
He goes back to the company eventually, but not the way he left it, three days a week, home by five, the offering handed to people he trusts and a title that lets him close the laptop without the sky falling.
We move my things into the penthouse one carload at a time, until the closet smells like both of us and Luke stops asking whether I’m staying over or just staying.
My belly goes from a rumor to a fact to a situation.
And then, on a Tuesday I’d circled on the calendar for weeks and she ignored completely, our daughter decides it’s time.
I’ve watched this man talk a hostile board into surrender without raising his voice once.
In here, none of that is worth a thing, and he knows it, and for the first time since I’ve known him he’s not fighting it.
There’s nothing to close, no number to push, no plan that gets us to the far side of this any faster.
There’s just me, crushing his hand hard enough to leave marks, and him letting me do it.
“You can take a break,” I grind out somewhere around hour nine, soaked through and shaking. “Go. Coffee. Find a wall to lean on that isn’t me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’ve been awake two days. You look worse than I do, and I’m the one with a person trying to leave my body.”
“Then we match.” He pushes the wet hair off my forehead, his thumb dragging over my temple, and his hand isn’t all that steady either. “I ran a whole life from the next room over. I’m not doing this one from the hallway.”
“That’s very moving. Give me the ice chips before I divorce you out of spite.”
He hands me the ice chips. He holds the cup like it’s the most important job anybody’s ever given him, and he stays, no suit, no exit folded into his grip, wrecked and sleepless and right there.
Somewhere in the middle of the worst of it I understand this is the thing he could never do before.
Just stay, with nothing in his hands but mine.
“You’re doing great,” he says, at some point when I’ve stopped tracking time.
“Don’t.”
“You are.”
“If you tell me I’m doing great one more time I will throw this ice cup at your head.”
“Understood.” He refills the cup. “You’re remarkable and I’ll keep that to myself.”
Then there’s a cry that isn’t mine, thin and furious and brand new, and the whole room tips sideways, and they put her on my chest, red and screaming and impossibly small, and Ashton makes a sound I’ve never gotten out of him in a year of trying, broken right down the middle.
“There she is,” he says, his voice in pieces, one finger against her tiny fist. “Hi. We’ve been waiting on you a long time.”
Later, when it’s gone quiet and I’m cleaned up and propped against the pillows with her asleep in the crook of my arm, my father brings Luke in.
Luke’s been up all night too, by the state of him, hair a catastrophe, shark pajamas peeking out from under his coat, and he stops dead in the doorway like he’s not sure he’s cleared to come the rest of the way.
“Come meet your sister,” I tell him. “Slow, though. She’s brand new. She doesn’t know how anything works yet.”
He creeps to the edge of the bed and goes up on his toes to see, and his whole face does what his father’s did an hour ago, splits wide open.
“She’s so small.” His whisper is awed. “Her hands are so small. Why are they that small?”
“They grow.”
“You were that small once.”
“No, I wasn’t.” He’s offended by the suggestion. “I’ve always been about this size.”
“You had hands exactly that small,” Ashton tells him. “I’ve got pictures at home as evidence.”
“I’d like to see these pictures,” Luke says, in the voice he uses when he suspects he’s being managed.
“I’ll show you when we get home,” Ashton says.
Luke studies him for a second, then decides to let it go. He leans in close to her sleeping face. “What’s her name?”
Ashton and I look at each other. We’ve had this conversation already, and both agreed on the answer.
“We thought you might pick it,” Ashton tells him. “If you want the job. It’s a big one. Biggest one there is.”
Luke raises his brows. “I get to choose her whole name? Forever?”
“Forever,” I say. “No takebacks. So choose carefully.”
He frowns down at her, and I can see the whole ocean lining up behind his eyes, every fish and shark and creature he’s ever loved trying out for the part.
“Lori,” he says finally.
My breath catches, and across the bed, Ashton goes still.
“Like the starfish,” Luke says, sure of it now, nodding to himself.
“From the beach. The one we found and adopted with our feelings but not with the law.” He reaches one finger out and touches the baby’s hand with the care of a boy who was told slow and means to honor it.
“The starfish was the first thing that was ours. She can be the second one. So. Lori.”
I have to study the ceiling a second so I don’t sob all over my newborn.
“Lori,” I manage. “It’s perfect.”
“Welcome to the family, Lori.” Luke says it formally, like he’s swearing her in at a ceremony. “I’m your big brother. I’m going to teach you every single thing about the ocean. It’s going to take years, so don’t worry, you’ve got your whole life for it.”
“Start her on the octopus hearts,” I tell him. “Ease her in gently.”
“Obviously the octopus first. I’m not going to hit her with the sharks-die-in-tanks one on day one.” He gives me a withering look. “I’m not a monster.”
“High bar,” Ashton says.
“Thank you,” Luke says, and means it completely.
My father’s been standing back by the window the whole time, letting us have this moment. I lift Lori a little toward him.
“Do you want to hold your granddaughter?”
He crosses the room like the floor’s made of glass.
I set her into his arms and show him how, and Harrison Rutledge, who has never once in my life looked unsure of anything, gazes down at this tiny sleeping person like he can’t work out how he got this lucky and is scared to say it out loud in case it turns out to be a mistake on someone’s part.
“Support the head,” he murmurs, mostly to himself. “I remember the head.”
“You remember mine?”
“I remember all of it.” His voice snags on the edge. “Every bit of you. I just spent too much of it sure I had to keep you behind glass to keep you safe.” He looks up at me. “I’m not doing that with this one. I’m going to be the kind that’s annoying about visiting too often instead.”
“That’s the dream, Dad. Annoying in a completely normal way.”
“I can do that,” he says, and for the first time in my life he sounds like he actually believes it.
Then he raises his head, and his eyes find Ashton over the top of the baby’s, and something moves between the two of them that doesn’t need a single word on it.
The man he built. The man he nearly tore back down to parts.
The man who handed him back the thing he thought he’d lost for good, because Ashton didn’t only give him a granddaughter.
He gave him me, too, the whole long road back to a daughter who spent her life keeping him at arm’s reach.
Harrison gives him one small nod, proud and grateful in the same motion, and it nearly takes me apart a second time.
Ashton comes back to the bed and sits down on the edge of it, careful of the baby, careful of me, and for a moment the four of us are just here in the gray morning light.
My father and Luke are bent over Lori, counting her fingers, arguing in whispers about whether she has my nose or Ashton’s, Luke holding firm that she has a dolphin’s nose, which isn’t one of the options.
“It’s not a dolphin nose,” my father says.
“It could be,” Luke says. “Dolphins have very small noses.”
“That’s blowholes,” Ashton says.
“Still counts,” Luke says, and my father, Harrison Rutledge, laughs out loud in a hospital room at six in the morning, and it’s the best sound in the whole building.
Ashton leans in and presses his mouth to my forehead, and lets it stay there.
“I love you,” he says against my skin.
“I know.” I turn my head until my lips find his jaw. “We’re married, remember? No takebacks.”
“Wasn’t planning on any.” His hand finds mine on top of the blanket and laces through it, open and sure, the grip of a man who finally learned the difference between holding something close and holding it down.
The End.