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I took up tutoring on the side, helping out the kids I worked with here and there, just about twenty hours a week all in. And it was a blissful thing, being able to make my own schedule like that, because it meant that I could focus on building this home for us the rest of the time. When he came home from working on the dock all day, I could have dinner on the table and be ready for him with a kiss by the door. I had never imagined that I would be the kind of woman who would find joy in something as simple as that, but when it came to taking care of him, I got such a great happiness and contentment from it that nothing else appealed to me any longer.
And yes, of course, we had started looking into raising a family of our own out here. We had promised each other that we would give it a year before we committed to anything to do with kids, just to make sure that we actually liked it as much as we thought we did, but now that we were six months in, I knew that he was thinking the same way I was about it.
Everything was so much easier out here. And not just because nobody knew about our background, the drama that had followed us when we had first started out together. There were fewer people in our lives now, and the ones that we chose to keep around had to make a specific effort to be there – Mallory, his family, our few friends that we had around the island. People couldn’t just stop by to come and poke around and try and pick up on whatever gossip they had come looking for about the two of us. It was a relief, actually, to know that; to know that whatever we did, it wasn’t going to be the center of some focus, but rather, the choices we made because we knew that they were the ones that worked best for us.
Adoption was a long process, but I had been prepared for that from the start. The fact that I had experience being around kids helped a lot, and the couple of meetings we’d had with social workers to get a scout out on our location, work, and general relationship had gone well; I knew that it was a tick in my favour, and I intended to make the most of it that I could. Sometimes, I felt impatient at the thought of having to wait any longer to welcome our first child into our lives, but then Joseph would remind me that everything good that had come to us, we’d had to wait for. This was just an extension of that. And our family was going to be the most perfect thing in my whole life; I wasn’t going to hurry it along.
Besides, I had Roe for now, and I was just happy getting used to having another creature to take care of. He was a young thing, full of that puppy energy, and I knew that he was going to be the perfect protector for our little one, however old they turned out to be. Sometimes, I had trouble keeping up with him, but he would always pause to come back and wait for me to catch up. This was what it was like being surrounded by younger men, I supposed, you were constantly hurrying to keep up. But that kept my head focused firmly forward, not looking back, and I wanted that. I needed that.
As I stood there, watching Roe bounce around in the freezing cold water like he had never seen it before, I couldn’t help but smile. A year ago, if you’d told me that this was where I was going to be then I would have been sure you were crazy. But now that I was here...well, it just felt obvious. As though this was where I had been heading all along. It was hard for me to believe that I hadn’t, in some ways; that the universe hadn’t been guiding me to this end. To him. To Joseph. To this. To the life that I wanted, but didn’t know I needed until I had it.
Back at the house, I knew that Joseph would just be getting up for work. I liked to take Roe out early so that I could go back and have breakfast with him before he went out for the day. He worked so much these days, but I knew that he loved it; it just meant that I had to come up with smarter ways to feed him in the evenings, because he would be so hungry by the time he got back that he could have eaten most of the cupboards if I hadn’t been careful. I called Roe to me again once I was satisfied that he had stretched his legs, and headed back to the house.
Sure enough, there was Joseph, boiling the kettle and yawning. He was wearing just a pair of jeans – the cold didn’t seem to get to him the same way it did to me.
"Morning," He greeted me, and he leaned over and planted a kiss on my cheek, before getting down on his knees to say hello to Roe. I was pretty sure that dog loved Joseph more than he loved me, though Joseph had claimed to be less of the animal person out of the two of us. I wasn’t sure I believed it.
"Morning," I murmured back. And, as I watched the two of them together, the beginnings of the family we were going to make with one another, I knew it.
I knew that this might not have been the chance that I had expected, or the change that I had wanted. But, above all of that, it had been the change that I’d needed. The change that had put everything in my life to rights.
I couldn’t think of anything else, in that moment, that mattered more than that.
