“You did it sweetheart. It’s going to be okay.” After that, things move in a rushed blur. There are doctors stitching her up, doctors tending to the baby, and nurses that seem to be running in every direction. For one moment, however, the world goes still again, and we hear her first cry. It breaks the deafening silence that has been with us since we got into the ambulance, and heat pricks at my eyes. Renata is already crying, tears streaming down her cheeks. A doctor brings our daughter over and puts her on Renata’s chest as the doctors work to sew her up.
“She’s fine. Totally fine. You were very brave today. And so was she.” When our little girl’s skin touches her mother’s chest, she goes contentedly silent, breathing beautifully like she should. After a short time, the orderlies wheel Renata over to the mother and baby floor, and I follow behind them in a total daze, unable to keep my eyes off of my wife and daughter. Just a year ago, I was on the verge of drinking myself out of a job, on the verge of falling into a depression that would have been the end of me. And here we are, right at this moment, with everything we ever wanted.
I’m not alone anymore, I repeat to myself as we walk down the hall. There’s still the haunted feeling that I thought I might lose everything again, even more than I lost before. But somehow, we all pulled through together, and we’re far greater than we were before. Now, there’s a little girl with us. We’re not just a couple anymore—we’re more than that. We’re a family, better and more resilient than either of the families we came from. As we approach the room where we’ll be staying for the next few days, I realize there are tears streaming down my face too. It’s a strange feeling—I rarely let myself cry, but now the tears won’t stop coming. The emotion wells up from inside, taking me over, and I lean against the door, too incredibly overwhelmed to stand straight.
I take a deep breath and walk into the room, wiping tears away with the edge of my hospital gown. When I see Renata, bright eyed and smiling, holding our daughter, I breathe a deep sigh of relief. I step over to her and sit in the chair next to the hospital bed. After all the medications and monitors are set in place, we’re left with a different kind of quiet. This silence is beautiful and much deserved. It’s the very thing we’ve been waiting for for the all the years we were together and all the years we were apart. We spend time just staring at our little girl, whispering to each other in hushed tones as she closes her eyes and takes her first nap on her mother’s chest.
When she wakes again, Renata nods to me. “You should hold her.”
Hands shaking, I take the small weight of a tiny baby from my wife’s hands. Her expression is bright and alert, wisps of brown hair in little whorls on her head, small round face contemplating me with her timeless, beautiful eyes. I rock her gently, sitting back in the chair as she drifts off to sleep again. “What should we call her?” I whisper to Renata. “We never did settle on a name.”
Renata smiles at me, tears forming at the edges of her eyes again. “Maybe… Joy. It’s not one we discussed before, I know. But it’s what I’m feeling right now. I know that’s kind of corny.”
My throat tightens, and I hold our baby tight. “No, I like it. I really like it. Seems like it suits her pretty good. It’s a good, solid name for a little girl. A pretty name.”
Renata smiles and reaches out to put a hand on my knee. “We don’t have to search for each other anymore. We have each other for real. And now we have her too.”
“That we do. And she’s beautiful.” We pause like that for a long time, letting the idea sink in. We’re not waiting for anything, not running, not getting out of a bad situation that we both caused, and no one is leaving anyone for a very long time to come. If I have anything to do with it, we’ll live forever, just like this. The three of us, united against all the odds that we have faced. There might be bumps in the road ahead, flaws and shortcomings that we’ll all have to face, problems we’ll have to work out. It doesn’t matter, though. We have each other, our unit of three, and maybe more when the time is right.
I expect Renata might not want to go through this again for a while, and I reckon I’ll leave that up to her.
Right now, this is all I need.
And I don’t think that’s ever going to change.
ROWAN - BONUS BOOK
CHAPTER ONE
“I’m afraid it’s not viable, Cadence. The transfer didn’t work.”
The worlds swirl around in my mind as I walk up to the art studio where my friend Anna is waiting to hear the news. I should have accepted her offer to come with me to the fertility clinic, but I was stupid, and I thought everything would be just fine. There were two beautiful pink lines, lines I hadn’t seen in over a year. And stupidly, I thought it would stick this time. Like it didn’t before.