And then we're back in what must be Africa, and my dad's there as well and the two of them are holding shovels and standing next to what looks like a new water pump. We're in the desert somewhere, Hudson, Bryce, Logan and my father standing alongside others I don't know in front of a brand new building that I can tell is a school from the playground out front and the boxes of books being unloaded from a truck.
And it's when I realize that this is everything I never knew about my father that I start to cry.
"This is our past, Quinn," Logan says quietly from behind me. "It's the past that I need to remember."
He touches my arm and I turn as he takes my hands. "I need to know the past, because it's the path I took to get right here to you."
Epilogue
Quinn
What's funny about growing up is watching yourself and those around you change and grow in ways you'd never have imagined. For instance, who would've known that my tom-boy of a middle sister who would have just as soon gotten her teeth pulled than wear a "stupid dress' would've been the first one of us to have the romance novel of a happy ending. The one where everyone ends up barefoot and pregnant and getting married? And by the same stroke, if you'd have told a younger, nerdy, never-miss-a-curfew, never-step-outside-the-lines me that I'd end up with the swearing, tattooed, bareknuckle boxer of a bad-boy, I'd have thought you were nuts.
But hey, that's love; totally nuts.
Logan and I aren't getting married, not yet anyways. Reagan and Hudson, for all that passion and drama, had their history. Theirs is a story that they started writing five years before they found each other again. But Logan and I are just opening our book up. Ours is a story we're still learning to write, and one I might add that seems to get steamier by the page.
We're also not pregnant. Not yet anyways. For now, we're too busy helping the frankly staggering amount of kids out there in the world already that don't have anyone. There are the hospitals we're finishing up with the Archer humanitarian program in Cuba, Liberia, and Guatemala, but also the schools in Ghana and Afghanistan that Logan and I are just doing on our own on the side. I mean, just the traveling is enough to keep me busy enough that getting knocked up really isn't an option.
Of course, that's not to say we aren't "practicing", as Logan puts it. And let me tell you, practice makes perfect. Especially with that man.
The world is an imperfect place, and sometimes it's painful, and full of hurt, shadow, and sorrow. But, it can also be full of light and joy, of peace, of healing, and of love. Sometimes you just have to fight for it, because some of those things are worth fighting for.
There are words inked across Logan's chest that I love to trace my fingers across. I imagine a younger, more lost version of him may have gotten them there in another time, another life, and with a heart not yet whole.
"Never Back Down"
But I know they mean something new now. Something even fiercer than the fighter ceaselessly swinging at the darkness. And they've also never been more true.
Because you never back down from love.