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That sounded nice of them, and I was grateful for the help. I’d be even more grateful if I even knew how a hospital worked – which I didn’t – but I assumed this wasn’t standard practice.
“Hey, can you update us on a couple of patients?” Archer asked before she left.
Looking nervously around us, she made sure we were alone. “I’m not really meant to…”
“The guy who was brought in an hour ago by the sheriff, did he get fully discharged?”
With a nod of her head, she answered it without breaking too many rules. This also told us that Rob was in the only place he deserved to be, snuggled up and hopefully on his way to becoming Bruce’s bitch. The only other place suitable for him was if he was rotting in hell, but prison was a close second to that.
“How is Mr. James doing?” I asked, but it wasn’t nurse Charlotte who answered.
“He’s doing well,” Lily’s mom said behind me. “Still sleeping it all off, but they did what they needed to, his heart’s beating, his vitals are looking good, and now I want to see my grandbaby.”
Spinning around, I swept her up in a hug, relieved at the news about Petey, relieved over the fact Rob was in prison, thanking my lucky stars that my girls were healthy, and thrilled that Rachel was here. I couldn’t wait to see Lily’s face when she saw her mom too. I wasn’t a woman, obviously, but a new mom had to need her own after she went through what Lily had.
“It’s a girl,” I mumbled into her hair, not releasing her.
“That’s awesome,” she whispered, her head still pressed against my chest.
“Yeah,” I gave her a second to take in the news, and then dropped the bombshell. “Lily named her.”
There was a long silence as this sank in. “Shit.” The three watching the exchange behind us burst out laughing at her response, but I thought it was valid. “What did she call her?”
“Rebel.”
Groaning, she pulled away and rubbed her hands over her face. She looked exhausted and there were stress lines around her eyes that I didn’t think I’d seen before. “Can we call her by her middle name?”
Shaking my head, I bit down on my lip while I tried to figure out how to break that one to her too. She’d had a lot to contend with today, what with her family’s bar being burned down while her husband and pregnant daughter were inside it, and what followed after it.
Would this be the final piece that pushed her over the edge?
I didn’t want to be that guy, the one who told her something that resulted in her needing to be sedated or something.
Seeing the emotions flashing across my face, she growled, “Tell me.”
Taking a deep breath, I focused on the spot on the wall above her head. “Rowser.”
I could hear the laughter coming out of my brothers getting louder, but ignored them. They hadn’t been privy to the conversation where Lily had told me our daughter’s full name, so this was news to them too.
“Rebel Rowser Townsend?” Archer choked.
Glancing at Rachel quickly, I saw shock on her face and her mouth opening and closing as she tried to get her head around her grandbaby being called Rebel Rowser.
Fortunately, my worries about driving her to insanity didn’t come true. Instead, she wiped under her eyes and spluttered, “That poor baby!”
Taking her by the arm, I guided her into the room slowly, hoping if I showed her how perfect her granddaughter was, it would help her get over it.
A man could always dream.EpilogueTateIt’s amazing how fast time flies by. One second, you’re living your life, it’s just you and that’s all you have to look out for. Now, five years later, I was a dad, a husband, and about to welcome baby number three into the world.
Rob, Carly, and her mom were all in prison serving their sentences. It was unlikely they’d be getting out early for good behavior too because they were such dickheads, but once they were, they’d be moving out of the area, far away from us. This was the agreement put to them by our lawyer in exchange for us not pressing for longer sentences, which likely would have been granted given the nature of their various crimes. Oh, not the ones they’d done just to us, but the other crimes that had been discovered after their arrests.
How Archer slept at night when Carly and her mother had both been so obsessed that they’d turned their basement into a room for him to live in, with charming chain and shackle jewelry attached to the wall, I’ll never know.
Rob also had women coming forward who were sadly victims of attempted rapes, stalking and crimes along those lines. They’d been tried and convicted in front of a jury, but we’d allowed the women to take front and center to get justice for what he’d done to them. The arson case had been the cherry on his prison sentence, oops I dropped the soap, cake.
