Epilogue
Chloe - Eight Months Later…
My pregnancy both seemed to last forever and to be impossibly short. In the last few weeks, as the babies grew and my body ran out of room, making me more uncomfortable and exhausted, I felt like it was taking forever and they would never come.
But then suddenly, there I was, sitting in a wheelchair getting wheeled out of the hospital. My little ones were cradled safely in my arms, my daughter in one, my son in the other. As we rolled through the door and the very first drops of sunlight touched their tiny faces, I couldn’t believe they were already here. That I was already here.
I was a mother. Not just to one little baby, but two. In what sometimes felt like an instant, I went from not knowing if I would ever have children to being a mother of two.
Matt pulled the brand-new minivan he had just bought for us up to the curb and opened the sliding door on the side. He took one baby from my arms, and a nurse took the other so I could get up. I got in first, and then Matt settled the babies into the car seats on either side of me.
Matt closed the door and got in behind the wheel. He turned and grinned over his shoulder at me.
“See? We’ve got this,” he said.
“Now we just have to figure out how to do it without a third adult there to help us.”
He shrugged and turned back around. “We’ve got time.”
I laughed. As he headed toward home, I took the itty-bitty hands beside me and stroked them gently throughout the drive. Three months before, Matt and I had left behind the home where we started and bought our first house. We wanted to make sure we had plenty of space for our babies, and both felt a sudden strong need for a fenced backyard we’d never felt before. I had a feeling there was a puppy in our near future.
But we needed to get the babies settled in first.
I noticed Matt’s expression change in the rearview mirror as we approached the house.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Look.”
I looked over at the house and saw several cars already in the parking lot.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I recognize some of those license plates.”
He came around to get one of the babies, and I got the other, then carefully climbed out of the van. I could hear voices as I climbed the steps and walked into the house. Inside, a crowd exploded in cheers as soon as they saw me. The baby boy in my arms burst into tears, and a guilty look traveled across the faces bunched up in front of me.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. As I comforted Finn and Matt stepped up beside me with Sophia securely cradled in the middle of his chest, I looked at everybody there. That included all of Matt’s brothers, their wives, and their children, his mother, and my parents.
“Welcome home,” Matt’s mother said, rushing forward to hug me.
“We wanted to be here to welcome the babies,” Jordan explained.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
Matt was eyeing Hannah suspiciously. “Your cousin told me she needed a key to the house because she needed to put something for the baby inside.”
Hannah threw her arms open to encompass all the people there.
“Ta-da,” she said.
I laughed and shook my head.
Everyone took turns holding the babies and presenting us with frozen meals they made so we would have plenty of good food and not have to worry about cooking. I had never felt so loved before.
A few hours later, everyone left. Matt and I dropped down into the matching rocking chairs we’d gotten for spending moments like this with the babies. Each of us held one of our children as we laughed and talked about just how crazy life was. Just a year ago, we didn’t even know each other. Then we decided to fake a life together to make a point.
But now it seemed that point was that we had finally found the love we were supposed to have all along.
Boss Daddy (Sample)
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1 Jordan
“That’s perfect. It’s much better with the cheese like that.”
I scooped up the last bit of the tasting Tyler brought me and put it in my mouth, nodding as I ate it like I was reaffirming the comment I just made. My brother was trying out several new items for that night’s menu and was nervous about them.
That was one thing about my brother that never ceased to amaze me. Cooking wasn’t ever something he’d seen as a potential career for himself. It wasn’t like he ever dreamed of being a great chef or even just being a line cook. He’d tumbled into it when our oldest brother, Tom, bought this bar for us as a way to make money and support our parents as they both battled cancer.
All of us kind of fell into different roles and jobs we didn’t see as part of our path when we looked into our futures. We picked them up and did the best we could do because it was what we needed to do. The bar was our saving grace, and especially when we were first starting out, we couldn’t afford to hire anybody from the outside to help.
That had changed since The Hollow had gone from just a little neighborhood corner bar to a local destination. We got far too busy to be able to handle it all by ourselves, and we more than made up the money to compensate for payroll. But even as we added extra
