Epilogue

PSA: Due to pregnancy hormones currently surging through my body, I could kiss you or geld you at any moment. Be prepared.

-Text from Krisney to Reed

Reed

Two years later

“Push.”

“I don’t want to push,” she snarled. “If I push, I’ll shit all over the fucking table, and then you’ll tease me relentlessly for the rest of my life. So no, I’m not pushing. You can go to fuckin’ hell.”

And that was that.

I rolled my eyes. “Kris, I’ve seen hundreds of women give birth. I know what the body goes through. I won’t judge…”

“You will not do. This. To. Me,” she snarled. “GO away.”

I ignored her and felt the fontanel of my daughter’s head—yes, we’d accidentally found this one out at the twenty-week exam—and said with more patience than I’d ever used with any other woman, “Push.”

“Fuck. You.”

Then she pushed.

And, for all those wondering, no, she did not shit on the table.

She did, however, scream my fuckin’ ear off as she dug one of her heels into my shoulder and tried to donkey kick me in the face.

“Oh, my fuckin’ God!” she screeched. “Why the fuck did we think it was a good idea to go on a fuckin’ babymoon three weeks before my due date?”

That, unfortunately, had been my idea.

But, as her doctor, I’d thought it would be okay.

We were only two hours away. What could go wrong?

Apparently, I didn’t factor in the hike that Kris wanted to take, or the goddamn flash flood that rolled over the entire goddamn bottom half of Texas.

No, because if I had, I might not have suggested going to a cabin in the woods with no one around for miles.

I also wouldn’t have suggested we go on a weekend where it was set to hurricane the shit out of Texas.

But I had suggested it. And we did go on a hike.

And now, we were stranded when the only two roads leading out of where we were located were washed out. I’d tried to leave earlier, for your information, but Krisney went into hard labor, which led us to now and her currently delivering our third child.

“Fuck you.”

I tried not to take her words to heart as she screamed in pain, but just as suddenly as that ‘fuck you’ had come out of her mouth, she bared down, and our daughter was born kicking and screaming, already acting exactly like her mother.

I caught her with smooth, practiced hands, and fucking smiled like a dolt as I did.

“Oh, God,” I breathed. “Baby, she’s perfect. Just like our boys.”

She had dark brown hair—a lot of it—and squinty eyes. A cute little button nose just like Dash, and a set of lungs like Bax.

Our sons, Dash and Bax, were now two years old. They acted, sounded, and played like other normal two-year-olds. Bax had a slight speech delay, but Dash more than made up for that with talking for both of them. Dash was a late walker, but now you couldn’t even tell that he hadn’t started to walk until he was well over a year and a half old.

Both boys were happy, healthy, and everything that I ever imagined.

Our new daughter, though, I knew was going to be a force to be reckoned with…just like her mother.

“Can you give her to me already, baby hog?”

Chuckling, I cleaned her off, sucked out her nose with a bulb, and handed her over.

“Aren’t you glad I brought my doctor bag now?” I teased.

She rolled her eyes.

Not only had I brought my doctor bag, but I’d packed the car with all the necessities a newborn baby would need…just in case.

And wasn’t I now glad I did?

“Yeah, baby.” Krisney started to sniffle. “I’m glad you did.”

I waited and attended to other matters—such as delivering her placenta and cleaning her up—while she bonded with the baby.

Once everything was as clean as I was going to get it—and no, I doubted we were going to get our deposit back for this one—I rounded the table and picked her up, carrying her to the clean bed.

Once she was settled, I crawled in beside her, pulled out my phone, and called my mother.

She answered on the second ring.

“You got time to Facetime, Mom?”

Facetime had become a thing for me and the boys.

Sometimes I worked late hours and didn’t get the chance to say goodnight to our kids. On those days, I’d Facetime Krisney and talk to the boys, tell them a bedtime story and give them air kisses.

So, they were not new to this game.

What was new was seeing another person on the receiving end of their phone call.

“Boys,” I turned the phone so it was pointing at Krisney and their new sister. “I want you to meet your sister, Amy.”

Life hadn’t gone as planned for Krisney and me.

No, we’d both suffered uselessly, and most of that was my own doing.

But I was making up for it now with every single breath I took. The day I died, I wanted Krisney to know that she had meant everything to me. Hopefully in fifty plus years from now, she would look back on our time together, and the happiness of our lives would outweigh the regret over losing those first twelve years together. Hopefully, when she looked back over our life, she only thought of the happy years we’d had after we reconnected, and never felt sad again.

I’d spend the rest of my life making sure that she was happy, and I would enjoy every single second of it as I did it.

“God, baby,” I breathed, looking down at my two girls. “She’s fuckin’ perfect.”

She glared at me. “Language.”

I managed not to point out to her that she’d said enough F words to last them a lifetime.

“Yes, ma’am.”