EPILOGUE
DAKOTA
“That’s the third time this week Cruz has made arroz con pollo,” Dante says, his fingers combing through my hair. My head is in his lap, my feet in Eli’s, and I have zero intention of moving until food is placed directly in front of my face.
“The baby wants what the baby wants,” I reply.
“The baby is the size of a bell pepper. You’re the one eating us out of house and home, angel.
” Brady is stretched out on the floor beside the couch, one hand resting on the curve of my belly.
Eighteen weeks. Too early for kicks, but he keeps his palm there anyway, patient as a man waiting for a phone call he knows is coming.
“Say that again and I’ll make you drive back out for more orange juice.”
“I’d do it.” He tips his head back to look at me, upside down, blue eyes soft. “You know I’d do it.”
He would. He drives twenty minutes out of his way twice a week for the one brand that doesn’t turn my stomach, and he’s never once complained.
None of them have. Not about the 2:00 AM pickle runs, not about the crying over commercials with dogs in them, not about the week I couldn’t stand the smell of coffee and banned it from the house entirely.
Eli, a man who mainlines black coffee like it’s a food group, drank cold brew in his truck in the driveway for seven days and never said a word.
Our house. Five bedrooms, a fenced yard, a kitchen big enough that four large men can cook in it without throwing elbows.
A huge master suite with a family bed that comfortably fits all five of us.
We signed the papers fourteen months ago, all five names on the deed because Dante found a lawyer who specializes in exactly this kind of family and Eli read every line of every document twice.
Eli’s thumb traces slow circles on my ankle. He’s got a pregnancy book open on the armrest, reading glasses low on his nose, and there’s a highlighter tucked behind his ear like he’s breaking down fight film.
“It says here the baby can hear us now,” Eli says. “Recognizes voices.”
“Then the baby already knows Cruz never shuts up,” Dante says.
“Heard that!” Cruz’s voice booms from the kitchen, followed by his laugh. “Baby loves my voice. Baby kicks for me first, I’m calling it now.”
“You can’t call dibs on the first kick,” Brady says.
“Just did,” he shoots back.
The pregnancy wasn’t planned. Not exactly.
We’d circled the idea for a year, careful conversations that started hypothetical and got less hypothetical every time.
Then my period was late, and the test was positive, and I sat on the bathroom floor and cried while four men crowded into a doorway built for one, their faces running the full spectrum from terrified to lit up like Christmas.
We don’t know whose baby it is. We decided not to find out, a conversation that lasted until three in the morning with all of us tangled in the bed that eats up most of the master bedroom.
“Four fathers,” Dante had said that night. “Genetics is just paperwork.”
Cruz appears in the doorway now, dish towel over his shoulder, flour on his forearm for reasons I don’t want to investigate. “Lunch is up. The baby needs to eat.”
“The baby or me?” I ask.
“Same difference, sweetheart. Come on.”
Getting off the couch is a production. Eli helps me sit up.
Dante steadies my elbow when I stand. Brady scrambles to his feet and walks beside me to the kitchen like I might tip over on flat carpet.
I’m not even that big yet. I could still put any of them on the mat, and they know it, but they hover anyway.
Sometimes it makes me want to scream.
Mostly it makes my chest ache in a good way.
Cruz loads my plate before I can reach for the serving spoon, and I don’t fight him on it because the rice smells like heaven and I’m past the point of pride.
“Victor called this morning,” Eli says. “He wants to know if you’ve thought about the coaching offer.”
I bite my lip. “I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
I chew, taking my time. Six months since I hung up my gloves, and the question still lands in a tender spot.
Retiring was easier than I expected and harder than I let on.
The fire that carried me through twelve amateur fights and a professional career didn’t go out.
It changed shape. Banked itself into something that wants to build instead of break.
“Tell him yes,” I say. “After the baby. Women’s program, the way we talked about. Girls who show up with nothing but a duffel bag and a bad story.”
Dante reaches over and squeezes my hand.
“He’s going to lose his mind,” Cruz says. “He’s been trying to get you on staff for a year.”
“He’s been trying to get me on staff since the day I walked in and dropped you in front of everybody,” I reply.
Cruz straightens. “You did not drop me.”
I narrow my eyes. “I dropped you twice.”
“It was slippery.”
“It was a dry mat and a clean double leg, and Eli saw the whole thing.”
Eli doesn’t look up from his plate. “She dropped you twice.”
Cruz points his fork at each of us in turn. “This is a hostile household.”
Brady is laughing into his water glass, and Dante has his eyes closed the way he does when he’s memorizing a moment, and I sit there with my hand on my belly and let it all wash over me. The teasing. The absolute ordinariness of five people eating lunch on a Saturday.
Two years ago I ran from a life not worth living. I thought safety was the most a woman like me could hope for. Four walls Gerald couldn’t get through and a cage where the violence had rules.
I was so wrong about what I deserved.
After lunch we migrate to the living room, same as every Saturday, bodies finding their spots without discussion. I end up in Cruz’s lap with Eli against my side. Brady claims my thigh as a pillow. Dante stretches out with his feet across Eli’s legs, and Eli lets him.
The TV plays on low. Somebody put on the interview again, the one from six months back, and nobody moves to change it.
There we are on screen, the five of us on a couch that isn’t this one, in clothes Theo picked out because he insisted we couldn’t go national looking like we dressed in the gym lost and found.
Going public was Dante’s idea, Victor’s blessing, Theo’s production.
A sports journalist who’d covered Victor’s story since the beginning, a controlled narrative, the ethics laid out clean: I’d retired, Eli coached fighters outside of the relationship, the guys trained under different staff.
No entanglement. No violations. Just five people who loved each other and were done hiding it.
On screen, the journalist asks Brady the question that made the clip go viral.
What would you say to your family, if they’re watching?
And Brady, my Brady, who spent years believing his own heart was a sin, looks straight into the camera and says: “I’d say I found what you always told me family was supposed to be. Just took me leaving to find it.”
The real Brady lifts his head from my thigh. “I still can’t watch that part.”
“I can,” Cruz says. “I watch it every week. I cry every week. It’s a whole routine.”
Brady clears his throat. “You cried at the ultrasound.”
“Everybody cried at the ultrasound,” Cruz replies.
“Eli cried the hardest,” Dante says.
“Eli will not be discussing it,” Eli says, and pulls me closer.
I feel the smile he presses into my hair.
The response to the interview wasn’t all roses.
Nothing ever is. But the hate got drowned out by something none of us saw coming: Letters.
Emails. People stopping us at the grocery store.
A kid at the gym who told Cruz, voice shaking, that he showed the article to his parents because he didn’t have the words himself and we did.
Oath is something bigger than a gym now.
The waiting list runs months, and ever since the interview, the cross-town rivalry with Ironside has gotten complicated in ways that have nothing to do with fight cards.
Micah keeps getting matched against their top dog, Zane Butler, and the two of them circle each other at weigh-ins like the hatred is a language only they speak.
Cruz has fifty dollars on it being something else entirely.
Jonah’s been reviewing film with one of their trainers three nights a week, which nobody believes and nobody says so.
Even Theo’s assistant, Sloane, has two fighters.
One of ours, one of theirs carrying her coffee like it’s a title belt.
And Remy, Kai, and Finn have gone from mentor and students to something the three of them haven’t named yet, so quiet and steady together it makes my throat tight to watch.
Fight for who you are. Fight for who you love. It’s painted over the main cage, and it used to be a motto. Now it’s just a description.
“Victor and Theo’s anniversary is next month,” Dante says. “First one. Theo wants to do a thing at Eclipse.”
“Theo always wants to do a thing at Eclipse.”
The wedding made national news last spring.
We sat in the front row, all five of us, and I held Eli’s hand while two men who paved our road promised each other forever.
Victor cried. Victor, who could bench press a car, stood up there in front of God and the cameras and wept like a child, and Theo wiped his face with a pocket square and never let go of him once.
“We’re going,” I say. “Obviously we’re going.”
“Obviously,” four voices say together, and Brady snorts at the unison.
Gerald doesn’t come up in conversations like this anymore.
He exists in a file folder now, a case number, a thirty-year sentence in a facility six hundred miles away.
He’ll be an old man before he breathes free air, and the woman he’ll come looking for won’t exist anymore.
She’s already gone. She dissolved somewhere between a locker room and a courtroom and a delivery room five months out, replaced by someone he never got to touch.
I told my therapist everything, eventually. All of it, the parts I’d only ever given these four men in pieces. She asked me once if I forgave my mother, and I told her the truth: I don’t know. Some doors don’t need to be forced. Some just need to be closed gently, and left.
The chapters I’m writing now matter more than the ones somebody else wrote for me.
The flutter comes while we’re halfway through a movie nobody’s watching.
Not a kick. Softer than that. A ripple, like a fish turning over in deep water, and my breath catches before I can stop it.
“What?” Cruz’s arms tighten instantly. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” I press my hand to my belly. “Baby’s moving.”
The couch erupts. Brady sits up so fast he nearly cracks his skull on the coffee table.
Dante is upright in half a second, and Eli’s book hits the floor, forgotten, and suddenly there are four hands on my stomach, huge fighter’s hands, gentle as anything, waiting for a flutter they can’t possibly feel from the outside.
“I felt it,” Cruz whispers.
“You did not feel it,” Dante says.
“I felt it. Little tap. Right there.”
“That was Dakota’s lunch.”
“It was the baby. Baby kicked for me first. Called it at lunch, everybody heard me.”
“It wasn’t even a kick,” I say, laughing now, laughing so hard the flutter comes again, and this time I grab Eli’s hand and hold it flat against the spot. “Here. Wait.”
We wait. Five people holding their breath over a bell-pepper-sized human who has no idea what they’re about to be born into. A house with too many bedrooms and a yard with a fence. Four fathers. A mother who used to think love was for other people.
Eli’s eyes are wet. He doesn’t hide it anymore.
“Hey, little fighter,” he says quietly, bent low over my belly. “We’re all here.”
“We’re always going to be here,” Brady says.
“All of us,” Dante says.
“Every day,” Cruz says, and kisses my temple, and I close my eyes.
I think about the woman on the bus. Three hundred dollars, a duffel bag, bruises on her wrists she kept wrapped so nobody would ask. She thought she was running away. She had no idea the gift she was running toward.
Some people search their whole lives for the place they belong.
I found mine in a converted warehouse in Virginia, in a cage with rules, in the arms of four men who saw me at my worst and stayed anyway.
Who taught me the difference between being kept and being cherished.
Who never once asked me to be less broken than I was and loved me until the broken parts learned to hold.
The baby flutters again. Cruz swears he feels it. He doesn’t.
He will.
This is my happy ending.
And it’s only just beginning.
Thank you for reading Filled!