Epilogue
Whitney
“Should we put Santa gifts out for her?” I whisper as I reach over to lie Stella down in her crib.
Ryan gives me a look, motioning us out of the nursery. When we close the door partway and walk down the hallway, he turns to me. “Whit, she’s ten days old. She’s not going to even wonder when she gets older if we did anything for her first Christmas.”
“Logically I know that, but what if when she’s older, she asks for pictures?”
“Then she’ll have them of all of us with her at her grandparents’ opening gifts. Babe, don’t overthink this. Let’s just go to the living room, make sure everything is turned off, and sleep while she does. You know as well as I do she’ll be up in a few hours and we’ll be dragging ass tomorrow.”
He’s right. We’re still trying to get on a schedule and it’s been harder than I imagined it would be. “Sounds like a great plan to me.”
I almost don’t want to go any further down the hall than our bedroom.
There’s a part of me that wants to ask Ryan to make sure everything is shut down and put away, but I know that’s unfair to him.
He goes back to work in a couple of days, and we definitely need to be on some sort of routine before he does.
I don’t want him tired, out there trying to take care of the public.
My foot hits the living room carpet and I glance at our tree. There’s a table sitting in front of it that wasn’t there earlier. “What’s that?” I give Ryan a look.
“Not sure,” he shrugs. “Why don’t you go check it out?”
I shoot a look over my shoulder as I walk over to the small table. On it is a box that says “open me”. I do as it asks, seeing a piece of paper inside the box that instructs me to “turn around”.
I do and immediately I gasp and my hand covers my mouth. Ryan is there, on one knee with a ring in his hand, extended towards me. I feel the emotion, the tears already at the surface. There is zero chance of me keeping my shit together.
“I don’t have anything earth-shattering to say to you, babe.
Nothing I haven’t already showed you with how I treat you, and nothing that can mean more than me telling you I love you,” he starts, before he takes a breath.
“I just wanna spend the rest of my life sleeping next to you, sharing truths and lies, and hearing you laugh so hard you snort.”
The laugh I let loose now is a watery one, and I’m overcome with emotion for this amazingly perfect man that chose me.
“It’s not gonna matter when I’m forty-five and you’re thirty-five?”
He grabs my hands, kissing the back of both of them before he looks at me, his eyes as dark as I’ve ever seen them. “I’m not going to give a fuck when you’re one hundred and five, and I’m ninety-five. It will never matter to me.”
I believe him with everything I have. Somewhere in the middle of this ordinary life we’ve been sharing, our fairytale started. It wasn’t with a glass slipper, or some extremely monumental event in our lives.
“Yes, I’ll marry you.”
He leaps off the floor and folds me in his arms. Those arms are the strongest I’ve ever felt, my favorite place to be. As he slips the ring onto my finger. I realize our happily ever after started with too much wine and a drunken pew pew.