Chapter 62
Sayla
Two Weeks After The Finger Incident
Everyone came for Mirna’s birthday. The big four.
Pandora and I cried into one another as soon as we woke up. I was fairly sure Daddy had been sniffing by the end of it all. We were in the danger zone.
Elissa was still young enough—but there was that glint in Daddy’s eyes.
The garden had been transformed overnight. Bunting in cornflower blue and gold strung between the mature trees. Tables draped in white with towers of pink and gold cupcakes that Lydia had been baking since Tuesday.
The frog pond had its iron barricade dressed up for the occasion—Drew had wound cornflower blue ribbon along the bars and hung small gold frogs from each post. Mirna had inspected it with the gravity of a planning officer and declared it acceptable. It was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen.
She was blue all the way through, that one. Elissa was already making her preferences known in pink and purple—at fourteen months she’d developed opinions about her own socks that nobody had asked for.
“God, you both make me fucking sick,” Maya said, appearing at my elbow with Connor on her hip. She made some exaggerated gagging sounds before pressing a kiss to my cheek.
She’d made an honest man out of Callum eventually. Three years, two ultimatums and one very pointed conversation from my mother later—but she got there.
Connor was almost the same age as Adam and she hadn’t changed one bit.
“It’s like you’re trying to repopulate the entire south of England,” she said, watching Mirna tear across the lawn toward the pond fence. “Doesn’t sperm turn to powder after a certain age?”
“Three is a lovely number,” I grinned.
The children shrieked and tore around the garden while poor Elissa tried to crawl after them. My dad was on her in seconds—swooping her into the air before joining the chase.
She was right. I didn’t tell her. That would only add fuel to her fire.
Mum sat with Asher on the garden chairs, sipping tea in the particular quiet way that two people managed when they’d decided they liked each other without needing to say so.
He found her calming among the chaos—and she found him reassuringly unflappable, which was high praise from a woman who had survived three children and two cultures under one roof.
Even Dad went a bit berserk at family gatherings. Especially now there were grandchildren to chase.
Elias was pacing near the rose bed, phone pressed to his ear.
Drama with his girlfriend. Maya had approximately forty-seven opinions about her and delivered them freely and without invitation.
I just kept the lines of communication open and said nothing.
Daddy had quietly commissioned his PI to do a deep dive on the girl the moment my family became his.
He thought that was his business.
It was rather sweet in his usual all-consuming way.
He thought I didn’t know where the cameras were.
Or that Frog Master had followed me on three separate platforms before I’d accepted any of them.
Or that the beekeeping account was his.
My strategic fingering—the middle finger—was a raging red flag to him. An offence against his rules.
He always made me pay for it later and we both knew it.
From father-in-law to husband and father.
He’d made me believe in forever again.
Not the naive kind I’d carried down an aisle the first time—breathless and foolish and completely unprepared. The real kind. The kind earned through rules that changed as I did. Through love that had never once wavered, even when it should have.
The kind that held.
My Daddy Asher.
The End.