Epilogue Bring Him Home
alyssa
Julian woke me up with kisses. Long, slow, intentional kisses that had become our morning ritual, pulling me up from sleep.
He kissed my shoulder first, then the side of my neck, then the place under my ear that tickled. I smiled before I opened my eyes, knowing where I was. In our bed, in our home, with my fiancé wrapped around me like morning was not allowed to start until he said so.
“Julian,” I breathed, not even pretending to be annoyed.
“Mm?”
His hand slid over my stomach, drawing me back against him, and then his lips found mine.
We didn’t say anything for a while after that.
Just kept kissing like he had nowhere to be, and the world outside our room could wait.
He kissed me like I was kept. Like he was too.
By the time we pulled apart, my breathing was uneven, and his hand was still caressing my back.
“You trying to make me late for court, Mr. Wade?”
“You’re not due in court until ten.”
“You checked my calendar?”
“I live here,” he said, like that answered everything.
I laughed, and he kissed the corner of my mouth again, softer this time. Then his hand slowed on my back and he looked at me seriously.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” he said. “For a while now. I want to run it by you, and I want you to tell me the truth about how you feel. Not the answer you think I want.”
I pushed up on one elbow. “Okay.”
“I want to adopt Micah.”
Everything in me went still. Julian kept his eyes on mine.
“Legally. My name on his. If you want that. If he wants that. I’m not deciding it for either of you. I’m asking.”
I couldn’t answer right away. I couldn’t do anything right away.
Malik had given Micah his blood and his name and not much else.
Fatherhood to him was a bill to pay, a roof to keep over our heads, and a thing he got credit for because he came home at night, even when he was not really there.
And the one time my son had needed him to care for him, to be present, he had been in our bed with another woman while Micah fell and split his head open.
I still carried that. The guilt and shame of having chosen a man who could fail my baby so completely.
Then Julian came into Micah’s life and never once treated him like extra weight. He taught him how to stand up for himself. Took him to the barbershop. Learned his games. Corrected him. Protected him. Made space for him in his homes, and in his heart.
He had already given Micah more than I would have ever asked for.
More than I knew how to ask for.
“Julian,” I whispered, and my voice faltered.
I put my hand on his face. “You have been so good to him. So good. You didn’t have to be.
You love him. You make time for him. You correct him like he matters and listen to him like he matters and show up for him like he matters.
You’ve given him a kind of fathering I thought he’d never get to have. ”
Tears slid down my face. “So yes. I would love that. I would love for him to have your name. I would love for the world to know what we already know. That he’s yours too.”
Julian’s eyes glistened, but he stayed quiet.
I pressed my forehead to his. “You have to ask him. Not because I don’t want it. I do. More than I can say. But because he deserves to choose it with you. Man to man, the way you two do.”
Julian closed his eyes for a second, then he opened them, and nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll ask him.”
He asked Micah the next afternoon, the two of them out on the back porch.
I watched from the window without hearing a word of it.
I saw Micah’s mouth drop open, eyes wide as he looked up at Julian, then launched himself at him hard enough that Julian had to catch him.
My heart was so full, I couldn’t help but cry watching the two of them.
Micah never asked permission or announced a decision after that. He just came into the kitchen a few days later, got a juice from the fridge, and said, “Dad, can we ride our bikes on the trail later?” like he’d been calling Julian Dad his whole life.
“We’ll see,” Julian replied in a voice that wasn’t his usual steady.
And that was that.
The process started not long after Julian asked him, and the paperwork went through two weeks before Julian and I got married.
So when Micah stood beside Julian, Zhaire, and his uncles at the wedding, he stood there as Micah Wade first. My son became a Wade before I did, and it couldn’t have been more perfect.
It was made official in a courthouse, with a judge and a pen, and we celebrated with balloons and a cake that said Micah Wade.
Julian surprised him with the puppy Micah had been begging for.
When it came time to name him, he didn't hesitate on Diesel.
Julian looked too pleased that his name pick won.
Micah brags that he has two birthdays now.
Six months into officially being Mrs. Wade, and three months after we agreed I’d stop taking the pill, I locked myself in our bathroom with two tests on the counter, both of them saying the same thing.
A baby. Julian was going to be a father from the very beginning this time. He’d taken care of his brothers and Simone, and he’d walked into Micah’s life and become his dad. But he’d never gotten a beginning. The first kick, the first words, the first everything. He was going to get it now.
I couldn’t make it to dinner before I told him. He was at the stove when I came down, and he turned the second he heard me, looking me over. “You feeling better?”
“Yes. I figured out what’s wrong with me.” My heart was going fast.
“Did you ever think you’d end up here? Married. Father of two.”
“Father of one,” he corrected me.
“For about seven more months, yeah.” I brought the tests out and set them on the counter.
He looked at them. Looked at me. Looked back at them, and I watched it move across his face in order: understanding, then joy, and then, right behind the joy. Fear.
He set his spoon down carefully. “You’re pregnant?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“We’re having a baby.” Then his expression changed, worry creeping in. “Are you okay? How do you feel? When did you— how far along?”
“Julian.” I placed my hands flat on his chest. He covered my hands with his, and I felt the slight tremor running through his fingers, the joy and the fear stacked so close they were the same thing. I didn’t need him to tell me where the fear lived. I knew whose ghost was in the room.
“I’m happy,” he said quietly. “Extremely happy, Lyss. But… I need you to know, I’m probably going to be a lot about this.”
I studied his face, seeing the vulnerability he was trying to manage. I slid my arms around his waist and lay my head on his chest. “Julian Wade, I would expect nothing less.” I pulled back and looked at him. “And honestly? I’m looking forward to the princess treatment on steroids.”
The tension in his shoulders eased slightly. “You mean that?”
“I mean it. You need to hover? Hover. You need to research every doctor in the state? Go for it.” I smiled up at him.
“Hovering and help I didn’t ask for and a car seat you’ll research for six weeks?
I know who I married. You think I don’t want that turned up for this?
” I put his hand on my stomach, the other playing in his beard.
“Take care of us. However you need to. I won’t fight you on it. ”
His shoulders let go, and he pulled me in and spread one hand wide against my back, and breathed out slowly.
“Okay,” he said.
I knew there would be hovering and worry and a version of protection that would probably drive me crazy at least once a week.
And I wanted it. I wanted my husband to take care of me.
I wanted to be covered by him. I wanted to be nurtured and fussed over and held through every terrifying, beautiful part of bringing this baby into the world.
I wanted to love him down and let him love me back in all the ways we both never knew we’d been waiting to love somebody.
And for once, I did not feel guilty or weak for wanting that.
I stood in my kitchen in my husband’s arms and thought about the woman I’d been years ago in a different kitchen. Smaller and disappearing, married but lonely, living a life that looked complete from the outside but was hollowed out in every place that mattered.
She never would have believed the life she would have on the other side of that.
I thought about how a few weeks after the wedding, I’d had a new sign made for the door.
Alyssa Carter-Wade, Esquire.
I’d stood on the sidewalk the morning they installed it, watching my new name settle into the glass.
I never took Malik’s name. At the time, I told myself it was professional and practical. Easier for work. Maybe all of that was true.
But maybe some part of me had known even then, long before I could admit it out loud, that taking the name Chambers would not be a place I could rest. That I would need every bit of Carter to survive that marriage.
The grit. The survival skills. The stubbornness.
The part of me that knew how to carry too much, swallow hurt, and get up anyway.
Carter was my mother’s name. The name she gave me. The name she’d worked under, struggled under, raised five children under, and still managed to make mean something. My mother had made mistakes. So had I. So had every woman I knew who was trying to survive with more responsibility than help.
But Carter was not shame to me. It was strength.
It was Valencia Carter getting up when she was tired.
It was her feeding us, correcting us, praying over us, loving us the best way she knew how, even when that love came wrapped in fear.
It was every hard lesson I had to outgrow and every useful one that kept me standing.
I was proud of that name. I was proud of her. And the name Wade did not take that from me.