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“All set,” I answered with a smile as Liz took Arielle’s bag from me.
All the guys had left the night before, but I didn’t blame them. Someone had to keep the company running while I was out on maternity leave, and they’d already stayed all night waiting for Arielle to be born. Ellie and Liz refused to go though—they wanted to ride home with me and Arielle.
As I climbed in the back of my Toyota, clicking Arielle’s car seat into the base that someone had already tightened into the middle seat, I couldn’t stop the giddy laugh that left me, startling the baby before she drifted back off to sleep.
I was a mom. I had a daughter.
Those might have been the most beautiful words in the English language.
* * *
“This is where we live,” I cooed, pulling Arielle out of her car seat. “It’s not much, but by the time you’re old enough to notice, it’ll be much nicer.”
Liz came in behind me, laughing at my speech.
“Well, it’s true,” I said ruefully, walking farther into the house.
“Your house is fine,” Liz assured me. “When we had Katie, we were living in a crappy old single-wide trailer while we waited for the house to be built. Babies don’t care where you live as long as they’re warm and clean and fed.”
“You care, don’t you?” I asked Arielle as she slept through our conversation. “Let’s go see your room.”
I walked down the hall while Liz and Ellie groaned about sore muscles from sitting in the car for so long. What should have been a four-hour trip turned into close to six hours thanks to traffic and my little princess. I wouldn’t be driving back to Seattle anytime in the near future. I didn’t know how Kate and Shane had driven all the way to San Diego when Iris was a newborn.
“This is your—Mom!” I yelled, my eyes almost popping out of my head. “Come here!”
“What’s up?” she asked, running down the hallway. When she got a good look at the room, she gasped.
The walls were still light green and the wood floors were still gleaming in the sun coming through the window, but the room looked nothing like I’d left it.
Underneath the crib was a large pink and purple woven rug. The white sheet that I’d left on the mattress was gone, replaced by a pink one with little hearts all over it. There was a large pink wooden A hanging on one wall and a princess crown on another. In the corner, a short curtain rod had been hung about waist high, and hanging from it were a bunch of pink and purple and yellow frilly dresses that I couldn’t imagine Arielle ever wearing comfortably.
The entire room clashed horribly.
I loved it.
“What in the world?” Ellie asked, pushing past Liz and me so she could walk into the room.
“Little girls should have girl rooms,” Liz read, picking up a note on the top of Arielle’s dresser—the dresser that now had pink crystal knobs on it instead of the white ones it had come with. “Welcome, Arielle. Love Papa, Uncle Mike, Uncle Trevor, and Uncle Bram.”
I smiled as my eyes filled with tears.
“Well, calling him Uncle Bram probably isn’t the best idea,” Ellie said, snickering. “That’ll make things awkward when she gets to grade school.”
Liz laughed, and just like that, my tears dried up.
“You do realize, this is why we kept it a secret?” I bitched, walking toward the changing table and laying Arielle on the top. “We knew you’d never let it go.”
“What’s there to let go?” Liz asked, reaching down to pick up a package of diapers and tearing it open.
“We’re not together.”
“For now,” Ellie said, flitting around the bedroom.
“Forever,” I argued, unbuttoning Arielle’s little pajamas.
“He won’t be able to hold out that long,” Liz murmured, handing me a diaper.
“Well who says I want him back?” I asked stubbornly, changing Arielle. “He made his choice.”
“Bullshit,” Ellie mumbled.
“Language,” Liz scolded her sister.
“Arielle doesn’t mind, do you, sweet girl?” Ellie cooed, making me laugh as Arielle made a weird grunting noise.
“I can’t believe she’s really here,” I murmured as I picked her up, cuddling her against my chest.
* * *
“You’ve gotta sleep at some point,” I told Arielle a week later, walking around my living room for the forty-fifth time that morning. “I mean, people can’t live without sleep. At some point you won’t be able to fight it any longer.”
I’d been up since two in the morning, rocking and feeding and changing Arielle, but nothing seemed to be working. I’d even laid her down in her bassinet thinking that she could just be awake for a while on her own while I fell asleep, but the minute I’d set her down, she started squawking like a chicken, and I’d had to pick her back up.
