Epilogue
SEVEN YEARS LATER
LYDIA
I can’t stop twirling my wedding ring, one of the many fidgets I do when I’m nervous, and right now…I’m pretty freaking nervous.
I know what I’m feeling is right. I’ve prayed about it way too many times and double and triple-checked with God to make sure I wasn’t hearing things. It’s crazy. I know it’s crazy. Bash is definitely going to think it’s crazy…but I know we’re supposed to do this.
I’m sitting at the dining room table, waiting for Bash to come home.
The time feels like it’s ticking by entirely too slowly.
He had a long morning of clients and then went straight over to the college he currently volunteers at, which is partnered with his nonprofit organization.
He’s been nonstop all day, and I don’t know if that’s going to make telling him this less easy to digest or not, but I just can’t wait any longer.
I could barely get any work done today at the hospital because my mind was going down a rabbit hole of what our future is going to look like. Every family I met with, and every child I got to talk to, all made me realize more and more how much I now know this is the right decision.
My legs are tucked under me, and the light is softly flooding in through the windows of the house, warm on my arms. I lit all the fall candles to feel a little more grounded, and because Bash says it makes it feel more like fall, even though the North Carolina air is still a little warm right now.
The front door clicks. Keys drop into the dish by the door, and I hear the soft thud of his bag against the wall.
His voice calms my mind instantly. “I brought you a smoothie, even though it’s the color of moss; I promise it’s still sweet like you like.
I know you probably haven’t eaten as much as you should have today,” he says, smiling at me.
He steps fully into the room—tie loose, the day’s edges still clinging to his shoulders—and the whole room exhales. He hands me the drink, leans down, and kisses my hair. “Hey.”
I grab the drink and lean into him. “Hey.” My voice does that small thing it does when I’m about to jump off something high. He catches it. He always catches it.
“What’s up?” He pulls out the chair across from me and sits.
I wrap my hands around the drink, like it’ll help me be brave here. “I…um, I—”
He knows my signs, my tells, and every way I overthink things. I think he can tell this is serious, but in a non-urgent, bad kind of way, so he smiles at my nervousness, which makes me have to now bite back my own smile. “What is it, Babe?”
I take a deep breath in. “Okay…this is going to sound crazy, but…I think that…”
Just spit it out. The worst that can happen is he thinks you’re crazy, and we both already know I am.
“I think Paisley…” I start tapping on the side of the drink, and Bash reaches over, taking my hand in his, silently telling me it’s okay.
I swallow.
“I think Paisley is our daughter,” I finally blurt out.
He blinks. Not confused, but surprised. Then his mouth does the ghost of a laugh. “Really?”
I nod…a lot, nervously.
He squeezes my hand and then looks down at where my hand is resting on my stomach. “But…you’re pregnant, Lyd?”
“I know, I know. It’s crazy.”
He shakes his head. “Not crazy…just a lot.”
“I know how insane it sounds, but I just…know. From the first night she fell asleep on our couch, with the TV glow on her hair and her shoes still on…I looked at her, and something in me said she was home. Not just in this house…but with us.”
He leans back and exhales. For a second, panic rises up in me because silence can feel like rejection coming, rejection for this idea I have of us all being a permanent family.
Then he says, very gently with a smile, “I felt that the first day, too.” He huffs out a little laugh.
“I just never said it out loud because it seemed insane and…felt impossible.”
“Are we insane?” I ask, and now the laugh that comes is half-hysterical. “I’m twenty-seven. I still feel like a kid myself most days. And we’re about to take on two kids?”
“Probably,” he says, looking at me and letting his smile grow wider. “But the good kind. The ‘God, please meet us in the deep end, cause we’re about to jump’ kind.”
I cover my face with both hands for a second and then drop them.
He takes my hands back and holds them, his face switching back into confusion. “Okay, but how would this even be possible? CPS is still focused on reunification. Last you told me was that they were still trying to track down her mom. We were just…the safe place. ‘A few nights’ that became months.”
“That’s the thing.” I stare at the table so I don’t lose my nerve. “I got a call from her caseworker today. Her mom signed her rights over this morning.”
His face changes. Shock first. Then the kind of tenderness that looks like relief, too. “She…did?”
I nod, the pressure behind my eyes building.
“They’re naming us as the adoptive placement if that’s what we want to pursue.
” I get emotional with the reality, and then get scared.
“This is crazy. We can’t—I can’t…” I shake my head, doubt creeping back in.
“What if we’re not ready for all of this?
What if we screw it up? What if I screw it up?
What if I’m a terrible mother? I’ve had enough anxiety about screwing up the small human in my belly we haven’t even met yet, and now…
how do I take in a little girl who’s already seen more than she should have?
Who’s been through what she’s been through in the short six years she’s been alive?
What if I don’t know how to be what she needs? ”
The room gets very quiet, and before my anxiety can take full rein, Bash—my steady, maddeningly kind, never-in-a-hurry husband—pushes his chair back and kneels in front of me. He takes my hands and sets one on his shoulder and one under his palm on my stomach, every part of him saying I’m here.
“Lydia, you are exactly who she needs.” His eyes flick to mine, and I can see how he believes it enough for the both of us.
“Everything you’ve lived, everything you’ve survived…
that’s why you are the perfect mother for her.
Not just anyone can be what that girl needs because they haven’t been where she is…
but you have. Have you ever thought that she was put in our laps for that exact reason?
That your coworker came to you because she saw parts of you in that little girl?
That you can show her exactly what she needs because you know what you needed back then?
That you became a social worker to help give kids like her a better chance at life, and now you get to personally give her one?
” He pauses, making sure I’m listening to him.
“You’re not going to screw her up. You’re protecting her from more pain.
You’re stopping the cycle for her. You’re keeping her out of the system.
You get to walk her through feelings only someone who’s been there can understand.
We get to be the people who give her a safe place to land. ”
I shake my head, feeling the tears welling up in my eyes. He leans down and presses his forehead against mine, and rubs slow circles around my growing baby belly with his thumb.
“You’re already a mom,” he says. “You’ve been mothering that little girl since she showed up with nothing but a small bag of clothes on the first day.
You’ve been mothering me too…for years now.
” He laughs a little at himself. “And I’ve watched you mother yourself back to life.
You won’t be perfect, but you’ll be present…
and that’s all it’s gonna take to change her whole world. ”
I want to argue. I want to list every way I’m still a work in progress…but the list is long, and he already knows it by heart. I simply breathe and try to allow his words to become something I can hang on to when I’m scared.
“Say the practical stuff,” I manage to get out. “Say the parts that make it real. So I don’t think I’m dreaming.”
He sits on his heels, still holding me. “We finish up paperwork. We do the home studies. We go to the trainings and roll our eyes at the parts we already live and take notes on the parts that are new. We meet with the attorney. We do the waiting game.” He swallows.
“And then we throw Paisley the most ridiculous adoption party with more confetti than is environmentally appropriate. Everything bright and pink because she’s just like her aunt, who she already loves too much and bonds with over their odd obsession with pink and glitter and watching Winx Club.
Plus her mom, whose secret favorite color is also pink, but will never admit it,” he says, winking at me.
A laugh slips out of me, wet and ridiculous. He grins.
“And in the meantime,” he says, “we do what we’ve been doing.
Breakfast and bedtime. Braiding hair badly.
Hanging sight words on the fridge. Taco Tuesdays.
Prayers that just sound like talking. Loving her loudly and proudly the way she deserves.
Letting your parents and mine spoil her like they already knew she was a permanent part of this family too. ”
My parents. It still shocks me that I can say those words, even after all these years. I couldn’t be more grateful for Sarah and Mark—my mom and dad.
I’m about to be a mom…I am a mom. Wow. This is insane.
I look at my husband’s face, the one I once begged God to let me keep, and I think I might burst from the gratitude. I’m not the same girl I was ten years ago. I still sometimes don’t understand how I’ve been able to come this far, but I’m thankful that I have.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay.”
He stands and helps me up with him, pulling me into his chest. He smells like coffee and that cologne I pretend not to like because he’ll drown himself in it if I say the words. His hand drifts back to my stomach.
“Hey, Peanut,” he says into my hair. “Your sister is…a comet. I hope you like sparkles.”
I snort into his shirt. “You can’t say that. You’ll make me cry again.”
He kisses the top of my head. “That’s allowed.”
We stay like that. The house is quiet, the kind of quiet I used to beg for when I was eighteen and everything inside me sounded like sirens…but it’s a different kind of quiet now, one that feels peaceful.
Footsteps shuffle down the hall, the small, heavy, sleepy kind. We break apart just as Paisley appears in the doorway, hair a storm of bedhead curls, a big T-shirt with a cartoon astronaut eating ice cream on it, and cheeks creased from her pillow. She blinks, then smiles.
“I’m awake,” she says, voice still raspy from sleeping. “I had a good nap.”
“You did?” Bash asks. It’s all sweet and genuine and full of that toddler talk that’s so cute on him.
She walks across the room, and I kneel so we’re eye level. She comes straight into my arms like a magnet. That was pretty new; she wasn’t like that when she first got here. Now she barrels into me.
I love this little girl. I love this life.
Bash wraps around both of us, one big arm across Paisley’s back, the other circling me, fingers landing instinctively where the baby is.
We are ridiculous, a three-person huddle near the dining room chairs, but I don’t care.
If someone broke in right now and told us to freeze, I’d say sure and happily stay like this forever.
Paisley tips her head back to look at us. “Can we have breakfast for dinner?” she asks. “Pancakes shaped like stars?”
“Obviously,” Bash says, scandalized that this would even be a question. “We are a star-pancake household.”
I look at her. Really look. At the little scar on her eyebrow, at the fear that no longer lives in her eyes.
I think about the girl I used to be, staring at the ceiling and wondering if God had fallen asleep and forgotten to check on me.
I think about how far I’ve come since being that girl.
I think about how it’s not this little girl’s fault that anything bad in her life has happened, and that thought always slaps me in the face, knowing the same thing applies to me, applies to the little girl inside me who’s still trying to heal from a world that wasn’t gentle with her.
I stand slowly, and Bash doesn’t let go of my hand. We watch her pull a step stool to the counter, watch her pull out the mixing bowl like we’ve done a hundred times together. He tugs me into him again, chin on the top of my head, and whispers, “We’re really doing this.”
I look down at our joined hands, at my ring catching the light, his wedding band nicked from too many IKEA builds, the gold bracelet that has Isaiah 43:1 engraved into it, and I nod. “We are.”
He turns me to face him, and there’s that look, the one from the football field the night he told me he loved me, the one from our wedding when I thought my chest might actually split open from the love. “You know what I hear when I look at you?” he asks.
“What?”
“Kept,” he whispers. He kisses my forehead, then my mouth. “You are kept.”
I feel the baby flip, like he’s amen-ing.
In the kitchen, Paisley bangs a whisk against the bowl like a drum, then laughs loudly at the little show she’s putting on.
I just stand there, watching how crazy it is that this is my life now. It’s nothing I could have ever dreamed up, because it’s better than anything I ever thought I deserved.
“Okay, team,” Bash calls out, making his way over to our little girl. “Star pancakes, coming in hot.”