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“Yeah,” I reply, checking the time. Though our first family meal will be ordering out, we still need to set up the kitchen and where we and the twins will be sleeping for the night.
“I probably should, too,” Isa says. “See you at dinner.”
She heads back to the cottage. I take a final lingering look at the memory box, my heart full of bittersweet joy. “We made it, Mom,” I whisper and let Drex lead me by the hand back to the house.
The rest of the afternoon is spent assembling furniture and putting away essentials. It’s sunset when we hear a knock at the door.
Kex and Axia stand in the doorway with the twins in their dual baby carriage. Axia pulls me into a tight hug. “This place is beautiful,” she says and then moves to hug Drex.
The babies coo and chatter as I take them from Kex. “Thank you,” I say to him and then to the twins. “Hello there! Did you miss Mommy?”
While Drex gives them a tour of the house, I feed the babies and check their diapers. Finding them all clean, I lay them down in their cradles and let them rock the twins to sleep.
Seeing them rest peacefully in our new home fills me with so much joy that I could cry again. They’re going to have a safe place to grow up. They’ll go to school and have friends and not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or if their home will be destroyed by bombs. They’ll have futures here that they’d never have on Armstrong.
Drex knocks on the nursery door. “Everything okay in here?” he whispers.
I nod, and he hugs me from behind. I’m too short for him to rest his chin comfortably on the top of my head, but that doesn’t stop him from trying. “I’m just thinking.”
“Always dangerous,” he teases, and I elbow him playfully.
“They’re going to grow up happy here. Back when I was pregnant with them, all I could picture was them starving to death or getting blown up or never having a moment where they could just be kids. But here… here they have a future.”
“And we’re going to give them the best one possible,” he replies. “They’re going to grow up strong, happy, and safe.” He takes my hand. “Now, come on. Dinner’s here, and we should join them before Isa starts wheedling my mom for embarrassing childhood stories.”
“Ooh, I have to get in on that,” I say. We each press a kiss to our kids’ foreheads and then join Isa and his parents in the living room.
As predicted, Isa got them talking about embarrassing Drax stories. As she sets the table, his dad regales them with his disastrous first hunting expedition.
“And then,” Kex says, chortling. “I found him covered in mud and wrestling a valtyi. He kept swearing that he had it, but then the pig kicked him right in the family jewels and he let go.”
Everyone but Drex laughs. He shoots a glare at his dad with no real heat in it, and I nudge him. “Apparently, no matter the species, embarrassing your kids is the one universal constant of parenthood,” I say.
“Bianca and Azel are going to be in so much trouble,” Isa quips as we sit down and begin serving ourselves. “They’ve got their parents, their Auntie Isa, and their grandparents. They will never know peace.”
We both laugh a bit harder than the joke calls for, but it is out of relief more than anything else. These kids will have no idea how lucky they are that the worst they’ll ever have to fear is embarrassment from their parents, and I will do everything in my power to keep it that way.
The conversation turns to our plans to get jobs – Drex and Isa as soon as possible, me when the kids are old enough – and how we plan to decorate the house when we can.
But before that, Isa and I are both eager to explore Kalei. What little we’ve seen is so beautiful, and we want to know what the rest of the planet is like.
“I’d love to show you around,” Axia says between bites of granthen noodles. “We could have a girls’ trip sometime.”
“I’d love that,” I say.
Isa nods her agreement. “I’ve always wanted to see the capital.”
“I could take the kids and give Drex a break,” Kex says.
Drex raises his brow at that. “You would?”
Kex snorts. “Of course. It’s actually pretty nice having those little critters around. It makes me nostalgic for when you were that small.”
“Are you getting soft, old man?” Drex teases.
“Soft? Hardly. Ask your mother,” Kex retorts, earning a collective groan from everyone and a swat on the arm from Axia.
“Now I know where you got your sense of humor,” I remark to my husband.
