“Yeah,” He says, smirking at me, “Always.”
Epilogue
Reagan
We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet, but we’ve got either William or Christine picked out for names after my Dad and his Mom. I know Hudson’s pretty excited at the idea of having a little girl, but I’ve told him that there are plenty of Archer girls already without adding one more little probable spit-fire to the mix.
It was a small wedding with basically just the immediate families. My two sisters and my Aunt Kelly on one side, and the two guys who are for all intents and purposes his brothers on the other. We asked Major Lawson to walk me down the aisle, and Bryce ended up taking one of those online ordination classes and married us right there in the gardens of my father’s house.
We were barely pregnant at the wedding, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of jokes about the ‘shotgun’ nature of it, especially after Logan told me the story of my Dad literally breaking up an arranged wedding in Angola between some local warlord and this poor child of a girl with an actual shotgun.
Turns out my Dad was kind of a badass, which kind of makes the tattooed, scarred up, ex-mercenary, ex-drinker, ex-playboy of a Marine who’s now my husband make a whole lot of sense, if you subscribe to that weird Freudian stuff.
I can’t say the aftermath of the blowout with Donald and my telling everyone about Hudson and I was all a fairy-tale ending, because that’s just not real life.
Donald did end up suing Hudson, who ended up having to settle for some not-that-crazy-amount - well, for him - out of court to avoid criminal charges. Of course, after that he used every considerable connection he had to make sure Donald didn’t work in politics ever again, so I hope the $40,000 or so that he walked away with was worth it.
And I did take a hit in the polls after the announcement about the two of us. I guess some people have a problem with other people’s happiness.
I still won though, by some almost record-breaking numbers, and on the next term, I was sworn in as the youngest State Senator in New York history.
The victory was only made sweeter when we got wind of a massive lawsuit being leveled at Chet by three of his staffers for sexual misconduct.
I’m due in two months, so I’m of course as big a fucking whale these days. But for some insane reason I still can’t believe, my hunk of a husband still seems to find me irresistible, and he’s still trying to start things with me in public that we should not be doing in public. I know even as excited as he is, he’s worried about having kids just because of his own upbringing and the stuff he’s witnessed in the world. But I know he’s going to be an amazing father. I think the fund we’ve recently started up to rebuild schools in Afghanistan is helping too. Helping him work through some of things he saw over there.
After the baby, I’ll be taking some maternity leave before I finish up my term with New York, and then I’m putting my career into Major Lawson’s hands; both of us are actually. We’re excited for whatever comes next, and since we’ve got each other, I know what does come is going to be something amazing that we face together.
The things you care about are the things worth fighting for. We’ve both fought for what we care about, and somehow against all the odds, we’ve found our happy ending.
The End