Page 90 of Omega’s Fold

Julian says, “I’m going to message everyone and give them the good news. They’ll all be waiting.”

“All right. Tell them she has hair. And she’s beautiful.”

Julian grins but he does not move yet. He stays a minute longer with his arm around the two of us, his forehead against my temple still, his cedar steady and round around us. Then he kisses the top of my head, and he kisses the top of Maggie’s head, very carefully, and he stands.

He crosses the room to get his cell, then he sits beside me and sends out the first news of our new arrival.

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Epilogue: Julian

The party is on the back porch. It is the first warm Saturday in March. The sky is the high clean blue it goes when there is no dust in the air, and the snow has gone from the ridge.

Matthew is ten today.

He is at the foot of the porch steps with my brother Eli on one side of him and my mother on the other.

He is opening a present from my father that is a remote-controlled drone and Matthew is grinning from ear to ear.

My father, who has driven six hours to see this look, is matching his grin.

“Eli,” I say. “Help him with the batteries.”

“On it.”

Eli takes the box. He sits on the step. He gets the batteries out of the small bag at the bottom and starts loading them into the controller, talking to Matthew the whole time, and Matthew is listening with the absolute concentration he gives to the things he is genuinely interested in, which now includes my brother.

It has been like this for a year.

Eli came up at Christmas, then again in February. He is here this weekend, and he is coming up again in April for what he is calling a long visit, which I think means he has finally decided to take the sabbatical he has been threatening to take from his job for two years.

He is good with Matthew. He is good with Caleb, who is now eighteen and who has a girl from Eastfield who came to dinner last Tuesday. She makes Caleb tongue-tied in a way that is hilarious to watch.

He is best with Maggie, who at fourteen months is at the stage where she has decided uncles are a separate species from parents and that this species is for being carried about and shown things.

She is on Caleb’s hip now.

Maggie is pointing at Biscuit and saying, “Dog. Dog. Dog.” Her hair has come in dark and long enough to curl at the ends.

I stand at the porch rail with a beer in my hand and I watch my family.

My mother is at the table.

She has Maggie’s lunch plate in front of her and she is cutting strawberries into the small thin slices Maggie will accept. She wears the cardigan Donna sent her at Christmas. My mother phoned her afterwards and that led to a conversation I was not in the room for. It has resulted in Donna and my mother phoning each other every Sunday.

I had not seen that coming.

Wyatt is at the grill turning over sausages.

He is in the dark green flannel I bought him in November and a pair of jeans that have at last started to fit him properly again, which they did not for the first six months after Maggie was born.

Wyatt feels me looking at him. He looks up. He does the small thing his mouth does, which is the corner of it lifting half an inch, and he goes back to the sausages.

My phone, on the rail beside my beer, lights up.

I pick it up. It is an email. I am working again.