Epilogue #2
But I knew.
I knew down to my marrow that he was the one.
And, what’s even more important, I believed he felt the same way.
Did I often doubt myself about that, given what I’d been through in the past? Yes. But Owen went out of his way to show me that he was nothing like the men I knew, that he could be relied upon, that he was here for me, my daughter, and anything we could need.
“He’s one of the good ones, right?” I asked Tuna as he stared at me on the bed.
His tail thumped his answer.
Owen - 8 months
“Da-da, Da-da, Da-da!” Adelaide threw out her arm with her sippy cup, accidentally sending it flying across the floor.
I’d never get tired of hearing her say that word. Dada.
Each time I heard it, my heart felt close to bursting.
She wasn’t mine, not by blood. But she was mine in every way that counted.
I was there for midnight feedings. I was there, sneaking her downstairs in the early mornings so Willa could catch up on sleep.
I was there when she was sick, when she got her first real boo-boo, when she got up, when she went to bed, when she said her first word, when she crawled for the first time.
It was three months ago when Willa, uncharacteristically shy, sat down next to me on the couch with Adelaide on her lap and asked me if it would be okay for her to teach Adelaide to call me Dada.
It felt like the biggest gift she could possibly give me. And I planned never to take it for granted.
“Thank God these things are spill-proof,” Willa said as she snatched it up. “The cleaners just finished an hour ago.”
“It’s so strange to see this place so empty,” I said, looking around the vast, hollow space.
Sure, we’d been slowly emptying the place out for months.
Once we stayed at my house, neither of us wanted to leave.
Slowly but surely, things that were necessary or important to Willa found their way into the house, closets, guest rooms, or basement.
Until she and Adelaide were woven into every corner of the home the same way I was. Exactly the way they should be.
But this was a whole new kind of empty. There wasn’t so much as a cup in any of the cabinets. The only thing being transferred to the next owners were the window treatments. And the bottle of wine on the counter.
“I know. I never thought I would leave this house. But it hasn’t felt like home in so long. Adelaide barely even remembers this place.”
That was true.
She’d been at my house for the largest chunk of her life. And, now, for the rest of her time home with us.
“Yeah,” I agreed, feeling the heaviness of the box in my pocket.
I’d had it for weeks.
But I knew that it was a question I had to ask in this house, before we left it in our past.
“Want to take one last tour of the place?” I asked.
“Sure,” she agreed, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in the place anymore. It was in my house. With me. And I wanted to make it clear I wanted her and Adelaide there with me forever.
It was in the primary bathroom that I reached to pull the box out of my pocket.
“You know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what my future might look like. A home. A family. Kids running around. A dog underfoot. Christmas lights. Sunday dinners. All of it.
“And somewhere along the way, I stopped viewing those things as some vague future I might have.” I reached out to take her hand, my fingers brushing over her knuckles. “I started imagining you. You and Adelaide. You in my kitchen. Her running around the backyard with Tuna.”
“Owen…”
“I know it wasn’t supposed to happen. You were a client. I was just supposed to fix your bathroom and move on. Not fall in love with you.”
Willa’s eyes went watery. Her hand was shaky in mine.
“I love you. And Adelaide. I love the life we’ve started creating, even if neither of us meant to build it.”
Finally, I lowered down to one knee.
“I want the ordinary stuff. I want the hard stuff. I want mornings when nobody slept and dinners where the kids are screaming and the dog eats their vegetables passed under the table. I want your good days and your bad ones. I want to be the person you call when something goes wrong, and the person you come to when everything is right.”
I opened the ring box.
“I want to be your husband. And I want to be Adelaide’s father. I want to spend the rest of my life proving to her that she has someone who will always show up for her. And I want to spend the rest of my life showing up for you too. Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” she said, already crying. “A million times, yes.”
I slid the ring on her finger and got to my feet to wrap my arms around my girls.
Willa - 3 years
“I saw that,” I said as Adelaide slipped a piece of carrot to Tuna, who was smart enough to always sit at her feet, a habit he’d picked up when she’d still been in a highchair and hadn’t gotten a hang of how her hands worked yet, so she sent more food flying than she shoved into her mouth.
“He’s hungry,” Adelaide insisted.
“And you don’t love carrots,” I shot back.
Adelaide was too smart to give her an inch, she would always take a mile.
“Ranch?” I asked.
She agreed, then spent the next five minutes driving her carrot sticks through the white dressing, getting more on her face and fingers than she got in her mouth, I swear.
“Where’s Daddy?” she asked, making my heart clutch each time it did when she called him that.
Because he was.
Her father.
In every single metric that counted.
As for Chase, the last I heard, he and his wife were adopting a baby.
Did some part of me ache for Adelaide, that she had a biological father who couldn’t be bothered to help raise her, but was on board with doing so for another baby? Of course. But Owen went out of his way to make sure that Adelaide never felt unloved or unwanted for a single second.
As guided by a therapist, we’d introduced age-appropriate concepts about birth parents and the parents that raise children, about how sometimes birth parents aren’t in a kid’s life, and that was okay because they were loved by the parents that were in their lives.
Adelaide just kind of shrugged it off and moved on.
All that mattered was that she did have a father in her life. And he loved her just as much as I did.
Just as much as he was going to love the baby I just learned was growing in my belly.
I hadn’t planned on having a kid again so quickly. When we talked about more children, we did so in an abstract, “someday” way. But fate had its own timing, I guess.
And if there was ever a couple that was prepared for a baby, it was us.
We had an amazing home. We had experience.
Owen had a thriving business. I had a small consulting business with the clients that came with me after I was fired just a few months after I returned from maternity leave.
The irony was, even with only a handful of clients, I was making more than I ever did before.
Private schools, first cars, college tuition—that would all be covered. But I was working half as many hours. I no longer had to tolerate the rampant sexism or competitiveness at my old company.
Everything was perfect.
It was the right time for a baby.
Which was good, because one was on its way.
“He said he’s on his way home. He can’t wait to watch you at karate. So bring your plate over so I can put your gi on.”
I was just finishing pulling her hair into a braid when Owen came into the house, pausing to pet Tuna before making a beeline for us.
“Daddy!”
Adelaide launched herself at him, and he snatched her up for a big hug, then set her back down because she said she had to go bring her baby doll to karate too.
“Owen,” I said.
“Yeah?” he asked, coming up to press a quick kiss to my forehead.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes. Perfect, actually.” I sucked in a deep breath. “We’re having a baby.”
The shocked look on his face dissolved into something soft and sweet.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He pulled me against him, his arms tight around me as Adelaide came running back into the room.
I stood there with the man I loved, the little girl who made me a mother, and the baby inside me who would grow our family, and I’d never felt more fulfilled in my life.
Then, crack!
The sound came from right behind me.
We both froze.
Not a second later, water began spraying. On the walls. On the floors. On us.
Owen’s eyes widened.
“No.”
I bit my lip.
“Owen…”
“I installed that sink myself. It’s been fine for years.”
“I know,” I said, laughing as he rushed forward to cut off the water.
He turned to me, water dripping from his hair.
“I swear to God, you somehow brought your bad home luck here with you.”
He wasn’t wrong.
After years of the house giving him not a single cause for alarm before me, since moving in, the powder room toilet stopped working, the electric had to be re-run in the living room, the water line going to the street burst, half the planks on the back porch rotted and needed to be replaced. And now, the sink.
“You knew what you were getting into with me.”
“That I did,” he said, giving me a smile. “I’ll get my toolbox.”
“I’ll get the mop.”
“No need,” Owen said, nodding to the floor.
Glancing down, I saw not only Tuna but our daughter rolling around in the water.
A little whimper escaped me.
I had two baths ahead of me.
Owen caught my eye and gave me a smile.
“Worth it,” he said.
I looked at my wet family, my ruined floor, and the broken sink behind us.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was.
THE END