Epilogue Family Beginnings
SIMONE
The sun does its best through the wisteria, but the North Garden is built for secrets.
All around me, the vines slouch over brick walls, shouldering their way through trellises with a kind of lazy elegance.
By two in the afternoon, the whole patchwork is lit up—petals like tissue paper, benches like altars, each corner promising privacy if you’re desperate enough to need it.
I’ve got a library’s worth of books fanned out on the stone table, highlighters capped and uncapped in a little field around my elbows, and a baby, three months out of the womb and already suspicious of academia, hooked in the crook of my left arm.
Emmy has a way of curling her fingers around my lanyard and yanking, as if she’s trying to declare independence from all institutional forces.
Today, she’s got a grip on a fistful of my hair, smearing it with sweet potato puree from lunch and the dampness of her own perfect mouth.
She’s quiet, for now. There’s a bottle of breastmilk balanced in my hoodie pocket, sweating in the heat.
My phone is wedged between Ethics in Higher Ed and the battered copy of Emerson’s Essays I keep telling myself I’ll read for real this time.
The air smells like wet grass and sidewalk chalk—leftover from whatever summer camp they ran on this quad in the morning.
For a minute, I can almost convince myself I belong here. Not as a cautionary tale or departmental punchline, but as a woman who is, against all odds, keeping it together.
Then Emmy lets out a noise like a deflating tire, and my moment is gone.
I wipe the drool from her chin and check the time. Still twenty minutes until my TA meeting, and I’m supposed to have finished annotating a hundred pages of Kant before then. I manage five, maybe, before the world comes back into focus in the form of Liam’s shadow gliding across my table.
He’s carrying two coffees—one black, one with a swirl of oat milk on top, foam stenciled with a clumsy heart.
He’s traded his suit jacket for a cardigan, but the effect is still the same: alpha male disguised as gentle intellectual, all muscle, broad shoulders and a penetrating blue gaze.
His eyes sweep the garden, the books, the baby.
He smiles, and the lines around his mouth deepen, evidence of too many late nights and too much laughter.
He hands me the coffee first. I can feel the heat even before it lands in my palm.
He leans over, brushing his lips against my forehead, then lowers himself to Emmy’s level.
She locks eyes with him, the way only babies and predators can, and he returns the gaze, solemn for a heartbeat before breaking into a goofy, side-of-the-mouth grin.
“May I?” he says, already unfastening the Moby wrap with one hand.
I surrender her, and she goes without protest, her head lolling against his chest as he settles onto the bench beside me. He kisses her temple, then mine, and the smell of his aftershave cuts through the leaf mold and earth.
“You look radiant,” he says, and I snort, because I’m pretty sure I’ve got spit-up on my hoodie and at least three different kinds of pen marks on my hand.
He glances at my notes. “Master’s finals?” he asks.
I nod. “The existential terror is real.”
He sips his coffee, watching a bee orbit the wisteria above us. For a second, we’re just two people pretending this is what they always dreamed about—a family picnic in the sun, not the aftermath of a year-long collision.
He bounces Emmy gently, and she lets out a blissed-out sigh. “She’s going to sleep through the night soon,” he predicts. “I can feel it.”
“Keep dreaming,” I say, but there’s no malice. We’re both too tired for irony.
He shifts, arranging Emmy more securely on his lap. “We should talk wedding plans,” he says. “The sooner the better, before Andie gets too into it.”
My laugh is a little too loud. “You’re not wrong. She wants to do it in a Catholic church, with all the pageantry. Full lace, incense, the whole nine yards.”
He gives me a sly look. “You could pull off lace.”
I shake my head. “I was thinking something more casual. Outdoor. Maybe here, actually.”
He looks around, considering the possibility. “The North Garden has a certain dramatic appeal.”
“It’s where we met,” I remind him.
He smirks. “We met during office hours. You weren’t wearing panties, if I recall.”
I roll my eyes.
“I meant the first time you saw me as a person and not just a sex toy.”
He relents, raising his cup in a mock-toast. “To non-hierarchical romance that involves lots of sex toys.”
We clink our paper cups, and for a moment, everything is easy.
He leans back, stretching his arm behind me on the bench. “My family’s lake house is always an option. Fewer prying eyes, more plausible deniability.”
“Less likely to get Andie arrested for public intoxication,” I add.
He grins, takes a long drink, then watches Emmy’s chest rise and fall, slow and steady.
“Do you ever regret any of it?” I ask, and the words come out before I can stop them.
He looks surprised, but not offended. “Regret? No. I’d do it all again. Even the part where you almost killed me in the hospital lobby.”
I flush at the memory, but he squeezes my thigh, reassuring.
He’s quiet for a second, then says, “You know, when I started paternity leave, I thought it would be an excuse to work on my book. But it turns out, all I want to do is stare at her. Or you.”
He makes it sound romantic, but I know he’s struggling. The poetry hasn’t come easy lately; the days blur together in a fog of diapers, nap schedules, and endless, hungry hours.
I brush a petal from his shoulder. “You’ll get back to it. It’s just a season.”
He nods, but I catch the doubt in his eyes.
“Speaking of seasons,” he says, changing the subject with the finesse of a man who’s spent a lifetime teaching undergrads to pivot in a thesis, “Did you see what she did yesterday?”
He gestures to Emmy, who is now snoring in his lap, a tiny fist clutched against his shirt.
I shake my head.
“She rolled over. Nearly made it all the way,” he says, pride and awe commingling in his voice.
I feign shock. “No way. You’re lying.”
He sets the baby down, careful not to jostle Emmy, and gets down on the grass, lying flat on his back.
“Watch,” he stage-whispers, then demonstrates the laborious, wriggling process by which our daughter achieves a 90-degree turn before getting stuck and shrieking for help.
I laugh so hard I almost drop my cup.
He props himself up on his elbows, grinning at my reaction.
“You’re a dork,” I say.
“I’ve always been a dork,” he admits. “You just never noticed.”
I reach out, pull a blade of grass, and drop it on his chest. “I noticed. I liked it.”
He returns to the bench, reclaiming Emmy and tucking her head under his chin. For a while, we sit in companionable silence, the kind that comes from knowing you’re exactly where you should be.
After a minute, he says, “You’re going to ace those finals. You know that, right?”
I let the warmth of it settle inside me. “I want to believe you.”
He turns to face me fully, blue eyes cutting through all my defenses. “You survived fibroids, motherhood, grad school, and me. You’re unstoppable.”
My throat tightens. I don’t cry, not anymore—not in public, not with witnesses—but I squeeze his hand, hard, and he squeezes back.
I lean in, kiss his cheek, the taste of sunscreen and sweat and coffee.
“You’re my favorite disaster,” I say.
He laughs, careful not to wake the baby.
When Emmy stirs, he rocks her, humming tunelessly.
I watch them both, and for the first time since I was a kid, I want the future. I want it to keep happening, day after day, exactly like this: sun, and garden, and a man who loves me enough to make me believe in every impossible thing.
Somewhere nearby, a church bell rings the hour. I gather my books, my notes, my baby, my whole unwieldy, beautiful life, and prepare to walk into whatever comes next.
But not before I let myself savor the moment—just one more minute—sitting in the dappled gold, surrounded by everything I never thought I could have.
The way home is a mile of sidewalk raked with leaves, every tree a cathedral in early September.
The campus drops away behind us and Century’s old stone buildings shrink in the rearview; up ahead, the neighborhood is all manicured lawns and dormer windows, the kind of place that thinks it can keep the world’s sharp edges at bay with a good HOA and regular fertilizer.
Emmy is dead weight against my chest, her breath a damp pulse through the cotton of my shirt.
She’s started that phase where sleep means total surrender—head back, mouth open, little arms limp as flower stems.
Liam holds the diaper bag over one shoulder, a bouquet of textbooks and half-read magazines clutched in the other arm.
He looks softer in the daylight, the edge worn off by new parenthood and the ten thousand micro-chores of keeping a baby alive.
We walk with that peculiar intimacy of long-term couples: no need to talk, but sharing a whole language of shrugs and glances and suppressed laughter.
He says, “You know, I never thought I’d be one of those parents who schedules naps with military precision. And yet here I am, plotting our escape route like a five-star general.”
“Never say never,” I reply, adjusting the wrap so Emmy’s cheek nestles more firmly against me.
We cut through the park, skirting a clump of teens playing ultimate frisbee with the kind of reckless optimism only the young and uninjured can muster. Liam steers me around a patch of mud, then squeezes my hand with the hand that’s not carrying a small library.
I let the silence ride a while, savoring the dappled shade and the way the wind whips stray strands of my hair into my mouth. I want to tell him something, but the words are awkward and angular, and I keep twisting them in my head to see if they’ll fit better.