It should be illegal to be this happy. I don't think my body can actually contain it.
"Callahan?"
"Yeah, baby?"
"I'm so happy. And loved."
He smiles down at me, and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
"I'm going to marry you one day," he says so easily, like he is daydreaming.
My heart is full, full, full and I'm smiling so hard my face hurts.
"Yeah," I whisper. "You are."
He kisses me again, full of so much promise, that I close my eyes and let it reach every cell of my being. In his arms, I am not alone. With him, I found what I always longed for.
I found home.
EPILOGUE
TEN YEARS LATER
Lily
The thing about happiness is that it sneaks up on you. You spend so long chasing it, planning for it, sacrificing and compromising and hoping that one day you'll arrive somewhere that feels like enough.
And then one random Friday you're standing in your kitchen watching your father-in-law hang streamers while your six-year-old argues about balloon placement, and you realize you stopped chasing a long time ago.
Happiness caught you instead, somewhere between the sleepless nights and the chaos and the ordinary magic of building a life with people who love you.
Ten years have given me so much, I sometimes have to call Rome and ask if this is our life now.
I am in my final year of OB/GYN residency at Harbor Hill General, with a job offer to stay on after I finish. Callahan isthe chief of the fire department, a title he inherited when Chief Morales retired last year and Zuri had no wish to do it. It's a title he wears with the same easy competence he brings to everything. And looking so hot while he does it.
The craziest part of our life is the fact that we have a six-year-old son named William Barack Holt. Everything else is so perfectly mundane that Callahan's decision to honor his first love is the most exciting thing about our life. My baby goes by Wick because that's how he said his own name when he was a baby and it stuck.
We also have a one-year-old daughter named Nova, who is turning one today, which is why our living room looks like a party supply store exploded inside it thanks to my husband and his father.
We never moved to Chicago. I think about that sometimes, how different everything could have been. We were so close to leaving. Callahan and Will had already started the process, researching fire departments, pricing out workshops with southern exposure. And then the acceptance letter from Brown arrived, and suddenly there was another path, one that let me keep everything instead of choosing between pieces of my life.
It was the right decision. Even Rome thought so, and Rome never thinks anything I do is the right decision on the first try.
I got to keep my career. I got to keep Callahan and Will, who had been ready to give it all up for me, but didn't have to. I got to keep Rome and his growing family, Poppy and Ramsey and the chaos of children that followed. I got to keep Harbor Hill, this town that had taken me in andrefused to let me go. I got to keep it all. I didn't have to sacrifice a single thing.
The past ten years haven't been simple. A grueling medical career and being a family with a first responder and a resident meant shift work and exhaustion and months where we passed each other like ships in the night.
During my third year at Brown, I started aching for a baby with a ferocity that surprised us both. Callahan wanted to wait until I finished school, wanted to make things easier for me, but I had gone half-mad with wanting and he has never been able to deny me anything.
Wick was born two weeks before I would have started my residency, setting me back another six months. I took six months of maternity leave with Wick, and then Callahan took the next six, and we traded off in a rhythm that became the blueprint for everything that followed.
We did the same thing with Nova when she came along. I have a six-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter and a husband who still looks at me like I'm the answer to every question he ever asked.
I am bursting with happiness in a way that should be illegal, but somehow is just right.
The old Holt house has seen changes over the years. Thanks to Rome, we used the big garden to add an annex for Will on the other side of the workshop, giving him privacy and independence while keeping him close.
The main house has been remodeled twice, walls knocked down and rooms added, the bones of the place expanding to fit our growing family.
