First Epilogue
Six months later
“I did good, didn’t I?” Paige asked softly. She was physically exhausted, but there was a giant smile on her face.
“You did,” David agreed, smiling back. The experience of watching his son being born had been both mind-bending and mind-blowing. David was still sort of high on adrenaline as he walked around the small hospital room, holding his almost ten-pound baby boy. With a blue hat on his head and wrapped up in a matching blanket like a burrito, his little face turned David’s smile into a smirk.
“What are you smirking at?” Paige demanded.
“I was just thinking that he looks exactly like Jacob did when he was born. Which means … this little guy is probably going to look like me.”
Paige narrowed her eyes at David. She felt like she’d just delivered a Mack truck, and even though it had only taken two hours of active labor, it was still two hours of the worst pain she’d ever experienced in her life. “Take that back,” she demanded, not caring if she sounded like a petulant child. “I did not go through what I just went through, so you could have another clone. Ugh. You and your nuclear sperm.”
Right then, Valerie walked into the room with Jacob, who immediately asked, “What’s sperm?”
David gave Paige a look that said Thanks a hell of a lot. “We’ll talk about sperm later. Like in ten years,” he told Jacob.
“You’ll be talking about it before then,” Valerie said under her breath, as she and Jacob stopped by Paige’s bed to give her half-hugs and smacking kisses on her cheeks. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good. Tired, but good,” Paige replied.
“Is that the baby?” Jacob asked, pointing over to the tiny bundle in David’s arms.
Paige nodded. “Why don’t you go over and see him?”
With obvious excitement, he immediately dashed away, and with a soft laugh, Valerie followed him to where David was standing with the baby.
“Who wants to hold him first?” David asked.
“Me!” answered Jacob.
After getting Jacob situated in a chair, David gave instructions on how to hold the baby, before laying him in Jacob’s arms. David then took a couple of pictures and kneeled down next to the chair. “So, what do you think about your little brother?” he asked.
Looking down at the little face, Jacob seemed unsure of how to answer. “He’s all wrinkled,” he finally pointed out with childish bluntness.
“Most babies are when they’re first born,” David told him. “You were, too.”
Jacob carefully peeked under the little blue hat, causing the baby to twitch a little in response. “He hardly has any hair.”
“You didn’t have much, either.”
“You know who else didn’t have much?” Valerie asked. “Your dad.”
Jacob found that interesting for about two seconds. “Can we wake him up?”
“No, he needs his rest,” David said.
“Is he going to be asleep all the time?”
“Not all the time, but he will sleep a lot at first. He’ll also eat and cry. Oh, and poop, of course. He’ll do a lot of that—just like you did.”
Jacob made a face. “When can I play with him?”
“Not for a while, unfortunately. For now, all you really get to do is look at him.”
“That’s boring.”
Taking the baby from Jacob, David turned to Valerie. “Grandma’s turn.”
“Hand him over.”
As Paige watched her mother-in-law holding her newest grandson, Paige couldn’t help but think how truly blessed she was in this moment, how utterly content—
“I hate to say it, but I think he is going to look a lot like his older brother and dad,” Valerie said to David.
The words had been delivered quietly, but not so quietly that Paige wasn’t able to hear them. “Please let me pretend for at least one day that my baby’s going to look like me,” she grumbled. “Just one day.”
“You can pretend for as long as you want,” David told her.
His overly solicitous manner earned him a stinky look. “You know, you might want to take into consideration my fluctuating hormones when speaking to me,” she suggested.
“I was,” he chuckled. “That’s why I said you could pretend about the baby as long as you wanted. Otherwise, I would’ve told you to join the rest of us in the land of reality.”
Before she could give him another stinky look, Jacob asked, “What are hormones?”
“Something we’ll talk about in ten years,” David answered.
“When we talk about sperm?”
“Yep.”
When the baby woke and started to get hungry, Valerie reluctantly handed him off to Paige, before leaving with Jacob for the night. After David changed another diaper, Paige began breastfeeding, which to her relief had been relatively easy to get the hang of after a little help from one of the nurses earlier. The first few times had been slightly awkward, but now, as the baby latched onto a nipple, Paige found it to be extremely relaxing, even as David sat in a nearby chair, watching.
Shortly after the baby had been fed and burped, Jules arrived. “Oh, my God,” she said, at the sight of Paige shuffling around the room in a hospital gown. “What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be in bed after just having a baby?”
“Actually, the nurses want you up and walking around as soon as possible,” Paige explained, as she made her way to the bed and gingerly climbed back in it. “They’re pretty militant about it.”
“Jesus, that sounds barbaric,” Jules muttered, taking the baby from David. “I mean, give a new mom a second to rest, since you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep for the next eighteen years.” To the swaddled baby, she cooed, “Isn’t that right?”
Jules walked over to Paige’s bed and sat down in the chair next to it. “I can’t believe you made this entirely new human. He’s adorable.”
“I made half of him, by the way,” David pointed out.
Jules ignored him.
“Thanks,” Paige said.
“Did it hurt?”
“What? Pushing a new human out of my body? No, not at all.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much did it hurt?”
“Um, a thousand. He was apparently in a hurry to get out, so there wasn’t time for an epidural, which means I had him the old-fashioned, painful way.”
Jules flinched. “That sounds really awful,” she said, throwing David a frosty look over her shoulder.
“What? I drove here as fast as I could,” he said.
“He was also almost ten pounds,” Paige added. “So—”
“Oh, my God, really?” Jules gave David another frosty look.
“Why are you blaming me for everything?” he wanted to know.
“Because even though you ‘made half of him’, you had the easy part, with zero suffering, and that’s just wrong.”
“I’ve changed every diaper today, and plan on changing many more in the future. Does that count as ‘suffering’?”
“A little. Are you planning on helping with night feedings, too?”
“I’m breast feeding,” Paige told her. “So, those will mostly be me. Unless I decide to … pump … which seems weird to me.”
“I’ll be getting up with her at every feeding, though, to keep her company,” David said.
“I think he likes to watch,” Paige whispered to Jules.
“What a pervert,” Jules whispered back.
“Jesus, I heard that,” David said. “And watching my beautiful wife breastfeed my son doesn’t make me a pervert. It makes me … a loving husband.”
“That’s what a pervert would say.”
Just then, the unmistakable smell of the baby having filled his diaper had Jules wrinkling her nose and quickly handing him off to David. “Time to change another diaper. And you’ll probably suffer through this one.”
Paige and Jules watched as David expertly changed the diaper and then re-swaddled the infant in his baby blanket in record time.
When he was done, Jules gave him a nod of approval. “You’re pretty good at that.”
“Thank you,” David said dryly. “It’s probably from changing a few of Jacob’s diapers.”
“And by a few, he really means all of them,” Paige told Jules in an aside.
“Knock, knock,” said Evan from the doorway. He’d obviously come from the bar, as he was wearing one of the work shirts he hated, with himself, his brother, and sister on it, and a pair of jeans. His reddish-brown hair was slightly messy, as usual, curling around his ears and hanging over his forehead. In one hand was a bottle of champagne, which he set down on Paige’s bedside table.
After kissing the new mom on the cheek and telling her she looked amazing, then greeting Jules with a tilt of his head and a quick, flirtatious, “Hi, Jules,” he made his way to David. “So, this is the new Little Man,” Evan said, checking out the baby. “Nice work,” he told David. “He looks just like you … except … I think he might have Cat Lady’s eyes.”
“You don’t have to say that,” Paige said with a sigh. “I’ve already resigned myself to the fact I gave birth to another one of David’s clones. Apparently the Lowe genes are very strong.”
“No, I really think the baby has your eyes,” Evan insisted, before picking up the bottle of champagne and opening it like a pro. “I heard through the grapevine that you’re breastfeeding, but unfortunately, I didn’t hear that until after I was on my way here with this, so my apologies for not having something non-alcoholic you could drink for a toast. Or glasses, for that matter.” He held the bottle up. “So, here’s to …” he trailed off, glancing between David and Paige. “What’s the rugrat’s name?”
It was David who answered. “Julian Douglas. In honor of Jules,” he said with a nod in her direction, “and Paige’s father, Douglas.”
At hearing that, Jules’s eyes widened, then got suspiciously bright while sharing a long, emotion-filled look with Paige as they both remembered that night at Brews Brothers so long ago … and a deal that had been made in jest.
“I expect you to name your first child after me.”
“What if it’s a boy? Jules isn’t unisex.”
“Okay, your first daughter, then. You can name the rest of your kids whatever you want.”
“A daughter isn’t in the cards,” Paige said softly. “And Julian was as close as we could get to ‘Jules’.”
Jules sniffled several times and wiped at her watering eyes, which were becoming a little red. “Just so you know, I’m not crying,” she told everyone, before grabbing the bottle out of Evan’s hand and raising it high in the air to finish the toast. “To Julian fucking Douglas!” she said, then put the bottle to her lips and drank.