Epilogue
Blythe
“I am NEVER having unprotected sex AGAIN!”
I screamed it at the ceiling, at the nurses, at Reid, at anyone who would listen. Another contraction was ripping through me, and I’d been in labor for fourteen hours, and I was absolutely certain that this was the worst idea I’d ever had.
“You’re doing great, baby.” Reid’s voice was strained. He was holding my hand, and I was pretty sure I’d broken at least two of his fingers. “You’re almost there.”
“DON’T TELL ME I’M ALMOST THERE!” Another contraction. “I’VE BEEN ALMOST THERE FOR THREE HOURS!”
“The doctor says-”
“I DON’T CARE WHAT THE DOCTOR SAYS!”
Between contractions, when the room went briefly quiet, I felt his fingers shift on my wrist. Two fingers, pressed light against my pulse, and his lips moving, counting under his breath, the same thing he’d done on the deck of a little sloop in the dark, over a stranger he’d just pulled out of the ocean.
He didn’t know he was doing it. He’d been doing it for fourteen hours.
“I’m not drowning, Reid,” I said, softer.
He looked down at his own fingers on my wrist and gave a broken little laugh. “Humor me,” he said, and kept counting.
I couldn’t exactly blame Reid for the pregnancy. It was biologically Stan’s, conceived before any of this: before the water, before the rescue, before everything. But mid-labor, mid-contraction, mid-definitely-going-to-die, I needed someone to yell at.
“Never again,” I panted. “Never. Again.”
“Agreed.” Reid nodded vigorously. “Absolutely. Whatever you want.”
“I want drugs.”
“You already have drugs.”
“I want MORE drugs.”
The doctor appeared between my knees, her face calm and professional. “Mrs. Navarro, I need you to push on the next contraction.”
“I’ve been pushing!”
“Push harder.”
The next contraction hit, and I pushed with everything I had. Reid’s hand was crushed in mine. Someone was screaming, me, probably, and the pressure was unbearable, impossible, like my whole body was trying to turn itself inside out.
And then.
A different kind of pressure. A release. A sound that wasn’t me, a thin, warbling cry that cut through the chaos like a bell.
“It’s a boy,” the doctor said.
I collapsed against the pillows. Reid made a sound beside me, something between a laugh and a sob, and then there was a baby on my chest.
A tiny, wrinkled, red-faced baby with his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth open and his small fists waving in the air.
“Oh,” I said.
It was the only word I could manage.
“Hi.” Reid’s voice was wrecked. He was leaning over us, his face wet, his hand shaking as he reached out to touch our son’s cheek. “Hi, buddy. Hi.”
The baby stopped crying. His eyes opened, unfocused, newborn-dark, and he looked at us like he was trying to figure out who we were.
“He’s perfect,” Reid whispered. “Blythe. He’s perfect.”
I couldn’t speak. I just held him, this tiny person we’d made, this miracle I’d spent seven years believing I couldn’t have, and let the tears stream down my face.
The nurse helped me get him latched on for his first feeding. Reid sat beside us, his arm around my shoulders, watching with an expression of pure wonder.
“What are we going to name him?” the nurse asked.
Reid looked at me. I looked at him.
“Timmy,” I said. “His name is Timmy.”
“Timothy Michael Navarro,” Reid added. His voice cracked on the words. “After my father.”
The nurse smiled and wrote it down. “That’s a beautiful name.”
She left us alone.
Reid was staring at the baby, at Timmy, like he’d never seen anything so miraculous in his life.
“Timmy,” he said softly. “Hey, Timmy. I’m your dad.”
The baby blinked up at him. Made a small sound that might have been acknowledgment.
“I’m going to take such good care of you.” Reid’s voice was thick. “I’m going to be there for everything. Every scraped knee. Every bad dream. Every moment you need me. I’m going to be the father you deserve.”
I watched him, this enormous man, this brilliant, awkward, wonderful man, talking to his son for the first time. Promising him the things his own father had never gotten the chance to promise.
“He would be so proud of you,” I said quietly. “Your dad. If he could see you right now.”
Reid looked at me. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet.
“I spent fifteen years trying to avenge him,” he said. “And now I get to honor him instead. By raising his grandson. By giving his name to someone new.” He pressed his lips to Timmy’s forehead. “By living the life he would have wanted for me.”
I put my hand on his arm. “You’re already doing that.”
There was a knock, and the door opened a careful six inches, and Rosa Navarro put her head in.
She’d been in the waiting room since the second hour, had driven up from New Bedford the moment Reid called, planted herself in a plastic chair with her knitting, and informed the nursing staff she would be staying.
Now she crossed the room like it was hers, kissed my forehead, kissed her son’s, and held out her arms.
Reid laid the baby in them.
She looked down at Timmy for a long, silent moment. Her thumb moved once across his tiny eyebrows.
“Michael,” she said quietly, to the baby, to the name inside the name, to a man twenty years gone. “There you are.”
Then she looked up at the two of us with wet eyes and her voice went brisk, because that was Rosa. “He’s too skinny. All of you are too skinny. I’m making caldo when you’re home.”
***
We brought Timmy home three days later.
Windrose had been transformed. The nursery was finished, painted in soft grays and blues, filled with all the furniture Reid had panic-bought, the sailboat mobile hanging above the crib.
Bayes was waiting by the door when we came in, and he approached the car seat with the careful solemnity of a knight meeting his new liege.
“Bayes,” I said. “This is Timmy. Be gentle.”
Bayes sniffed the baby very carefully. Then he lay down at my feet and put his head on his paws, clearly prepared to guard this tiny human for the rest of his life.
“Good boy,” Reid said.
The first weeks were chaos. Beautiful, exhausting, overwhelming chaos. Timmy woke up every two hours wanting to eat. Reid and I took shifts, moving through the house like zombies, drinking coffee by the gallon.
Rosa came down twice a week with food in towers of containers, took the night shift without asking anyone’s permission, and ran the kitchen like a harbor.
Bayes, after three days of careful deliberation, dragged his enormous bed down the hall inch by inch and installed it directly under the crib, where he remained, a hundred and thirty pounds of water-rescue dog stationed beneath the smallest Navarro, on duty.
But there were moments.
Moments when I’d find Reid asleep in the rocking chair with Timmy on his chest, both of them snoring softly.
Moments when Timmy would look at me with those dark eyes, Reid’s eyes, somehow, despite biology, and I’d feel my heart crack open all over again.
Moments when we’d all three end up in bed together, Bayes at our feet, the morning light streaming through the windows, and I’d think: This. This is what I was waiting for. This is what I almost lost.
***
The trial happened while Timmy was two months old.
I didn’t attend most of it. Blair kept me updated.
Stan had been convicted, sentenced to twelve years.
Sandrine’s lawyers were the best money could buy, and even they couldn’t make seven years of pharmacy records disappear.
She pled guilty rather than let a jury hear it all read aloud, and the judge gave her five years, less than one for every year she’d fed me those pills, which didn’t feel like enough until Blair pointed out that Sandrine Chadwick was sixty-two and going to serve them in a state facility with a shared toilet and no one to bring her tea.
And she’d lost everything on the way in.
The money. The house. The social standing that had been her whole identity.
My mother testified against all of them, cooperated with everyone against everyone, and walked away with probation, and a town that would never seat her at a table again, which for Priscilla Montrose was the longer sentence.
My father never faced a judge. The banks did it for him: the waterfront parcel first, then the house, then the club membership he’d kept paying out of pure vanity.
The last I heard, he was living in a cousin’s guest room in Providence, telling anyone who would listen that he’d been days away from fixing everything.
And Ivy, Ivy, who had filmed all of it, the foyer and the kitchen and my shaking hands on those papers, discovered that her footage was suddenly worth money, and sold every minute of it.
Some to the prosecutors. The rest to a documentary crew.
The family that raised her to watch could hardly complain that she’d finally found a way to get paid for it.
From a cell, with twelve years in front of him and nothing left to bargain with, Stan signed away his parental rights without a fight.
He didn’t want Timmy. He’d never wanted Timmy.
And that suited us perfectly, because it cleared the last obstacle in the paperwork Marguerite had already drawn up: Reid’s petition to adopt.
It went through the week Timmy turned three months old. Reid Navarro, listed as father. Legally, permanently, on every document that would ever matter. He read the final order four times, and then he framed it, and then he cried in the kitchen while Bayes tried to climb into his lap.
Priscilla and Birdie were still in that rented house in Middletown. The last I heard, Birdie was working at a retail store, and Priscilla had stopped leaving the house entirely. Their charges had resulted in fines and probation, not prison, but permanent records. Permanent shame.
The women who had tried to erase me were erased themselves.
I should have felt triumphant. Should have felt vindicated.
Mostly I just felt tired. And grateful. And ready to move on.
***
The company was called Halyard Montrose now.