Epilogue
Kai
Three weeks after the wedding, a manuscript lands on my desk at Hart Press.
“New submission,” Erika says, setting it down with a smile that tells me she knows a thing I don’t. “I need you to read it tonight.”
I frown at the stack of pages. “Tonight? I thought we had dinner plans.”
“Read it first. Trust me.”
She disappears back to her office, and I’m left staring at the manuscript like it might bite me, and I don’t wait for tonight, because I’ve learned a few things this year and one of them is that when my wife tells me to read a thing, I read the thing. I wait until she’s in a meeting to open it.
THE SEQUEL
by E.C. Hart
I flip to the dedication page.
For Daddy.
The world stops. The sounds of the office fade away, the light through the windows brightens and blurs, and the two words on the page rearrange themselves, make themselves real, and I read them again and again and again. For Daddy.
Three heartbeats. I count them, because I can’t do anything else, and then I’m out of my chair before I realize I’m moving, across the office in three strides, through Erika’s door without knocking, and she’s on the phone, and she looks up at me with that smile, that knowing smile, and says “I’ll have to call you back” to whoever it is and hangs up without waiting for an answer, and I can’t breathe.
“Is this real?” My voice comes out strangled. “Erika, is this…”
“It’s real.”
“We’re having a baby?”
“We’re having a baby.”
I lift her out of her chair and into my arms, and we’re both laughing and crying at the same time, spinning in circles in her office while the staff pretends not to notice through the glass walls, and Tessa, at the far end of the floor, doesn’t pretend at all, just stands there with a coffee cup frozen halfway to her mouth, openly gaping at us.
“How long have you known?” I manage.
“Since the wedding. The champagne.” She pulls back to look at me, her eyes bright with tears. “I wanted to be sure before I told you. And I wanted to tell you in a way you’d never forget.”
“I wasn’t going to forget.”
“I know. I wanted to make sure.”
“I’m going to be a dad.”
“You are.”
I cup her face in my hands, this woman who gave me a second chance, who built a company of her own with her name on the door and hired me to count the money, who’s carrying our child, and I don’t say anything, because there isn’t a sentence big enough and I’ve stopped trying to make them, and she reads it on my face anyway, the way she always could.
She laughs, watery and bright. “Don’t look at me like that yet. I’m going to be insufferable. Dora’s going to warn you.”
“Dora already thinks I deserve insufferable.”
“Dora is right about most things.”
Outside the glass, the office goes back to work, and my wife puts her head on my shoulder in the middle of it, in the middle of the day, with the phone she hung up on still lit on her desk, and I hold her and think about all the rooms I wasn’t in, and all the ones I’m going to be in now, the appointments and the middle-of-the-night ones and the small ones nobody counts, and I don’t say any of that either.
I just stand there and hold on. The man who missed everything is going to be there for all of it. Starting now.
The man I was too blind to become until I almost lost everything.
Outside, the city hums with a million lives, a million stories. But the only one that matters is right here, in my arms, carrying our future inside her.
I’m the luckiest man alive.
And this time, I’m never going to forget it.
THE END