“And in the meantime,” he says, “we do what we’ve been doing. Breakfast and bedtime. Braiding hair badly. Hanging sight words on the fridge. Taco Tuesdays. Prayers that just sound like talking. Loving her loudly and proudly the way she deserves. Letting your parents and mine spoil her like they already knew she was a permanent part of this family too.”
My parents.It still shocks me that I can say those words, even after all these years. I couldn’t be more grateful for Sarah and Mark—my mom and dad.
I’mabout to be a mom…Iama mom. Wow. This is insane.
I look at my husband’s face, the one I once begged God to let me keep, and I think I might burst from the gratitude. I’m not the same girl I was ten years ago. I still sometimes don’t understand how I’ve been able to come this far, but I’m thankful that I have.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay.”
He stands and helps me up with him, pulling me into his chest. He smells like coffee and that cologne I pretend not to like because he’ll drown himself in it if I say the words. His hand drifts back to my stomach.
“Hey, Peanut,” he says into my hair. “Your sister is…a comet. I hope you like sparkles.”
I snort into his shirt. “You can’t say that. You’ll make me cry again.”
He kisses the top of my head. “That’s allowed.”
We stay like that. The house is quiet, the kind of quiet I used to beg for when I was eighteen and everything inside me sounded like sirens…but it’s a different kind of quiet now, one that feels peaceful.
Footsteps shuffle down the hall, the small, heavy, sleepy kind. We break apart just as Paisley appears in the doorway, hair a storm of bedhead curls, a big T-shirt with a cartoon astronaut eating ice cream on it, and cheeks creased from her pillow. She blinks, then smiles.
“I’m awake,” she says, voice still raspy from sleeping. “I had a good nap.”
“You did?” Bash asks. It’s all sweet and genuine and full of that toddler talk that’s so cute on him.
She walks across the room, and I kneel so we’re eye level. She comes straight into my arms like a magnet. That was pretty new; she wasn’t like that when she first got here. Now she barrels into me.
I love this little girl. I love this life.
Bash wraps around both of us, one big arm across Paisley’s back, the other circling me, fingers landing instinctively where the baby is. We are ridiculous, a three-person huddle near the dining room chairs, but I don’t care. If someone broke in right now and told us to freeze, I’d say sure and happily stay like this forever.
Paisley tips her head back to look at us. “Can we have breakfast for dinner?” she asks. “Pancakes shaped like stars?”
“Obviously,” Bash says, scandalized that this would even be a question. “We are a star-pancake household.”
I look at her. Really look. At the little scar on her eyebrow, at the fear that no longer lives in her eyes. I think about the girl I used to be, staring at the ceiling and wondering if God had fallen asleep and forgotten to check on me. I think about how far I’ve come since being that girl. I think about how it’s not this little girl’s fault that anything bad in her life has happened, and that thought always slaps me in the face, knowing the same thing applies to me, applies to the little girl inside me who’s still trying to heal from a world that wasn’t gentle with her.
I stand slowly, and Bash doesn’t let go of my hand. We watch her pull a step stool to the counter, watch her pull out the mixing bowl like we’ve done a hundred times together. He tugs me into him again, chin on the top of my head, and whispers, “We’re really doing this.”
I look down at our joined hands, at my ring catching the light, his wedding band nicked from too many IKEA builds, the gold bracelet that has Isaiah 43:1 engraved into it, and I nod. “We are.”
He turns me to face him, and there’s that look, the one from the football field the night he told me he loved me, the one from our wedding when I thought my chest might actually split open from the love. “You know what I hear when I look at you?” he asks.
“What?”
“Kept,” he whispers. He kisses my forehead, then my mouth. “You are kept.”
I feel the baby flip, like he’s amen-ing.
In the kitchen, Paisley bangs a whisk against the bowl like a drum, then laughs loudly at the little show she’s putting on.
I just stand there, watching how crazy it is that this is my life now. It’s nothing I could have ever dreamed up, because it’s better than anything I ever thought I deserved.
“Okay, team,” Bash calls out, making his way over to our little girl. “Star pancakes, coming in hot.”
81
Extended Epilogue
