Page 48 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

EPILOGUE

15 MONTHS LATER: KAI

Kai was on the floor staring at the ceiling, patiently counting the beams over and over again. He’d been stuck like that for half an hour now. There was no sign of him being able to get up anytime soon, considering his baby was fast asleep on his chest. It was kind of funny to watch Mikey’s little body rising and falling as Kai breathed, the kid absolutely dead to the world. Mikey hadn’t slept great the last few nights. Kai wasn’t going to interrupt the best nap he’d had in days, even if that meant Kai was the mattress.

This sort of thing was his new normal these days, and he loved every second of it. It was strange to love someone so much when eighteen months ago he couldn’t have even imagined living like this. But then he’d learned a whole bunch of lessons about letting go of controlling everything and just jumping in, hadn’t he? Steering away from anything that might possibly go wrong had failed him for decades. In such a short space of time, things had changed so much in a whirlwind of chaos. But learning to trust the process had made Kai happier than he’d ever been before, so he tried his best to pay attention to those lessons.

Amy had moved into the penthouse apartment with him pretty much immediately, and Kai was baffled that he’d ever lived there alone. It had been so big and so empty before. Now there was a kitchen dominated by Amy’s passion for her job, her confidence and experimentation growing wilder by the day, and a nursery down the hall that smelled of their son, where his toys lay scattered in chaos and where he woke gurgling every morning. No wonder Kai had been in a constant state of panicked depression living in this place alone. It had been nothing more than an empty box back then; now it was a home.

Kai had been dwelling on all these changes, and his thoughts had spiraled in and out of the same topics since he’d been trapped by a sleeping Mikey, but they were interrupted when he heard Amy arrive home along with the rustle of grocery bags.

“Kai?”

“Hi,” he called, not concerned about waking Mikey up. The kid could sleep through a jackhammer. It was wild. You just couldn’t move him; that was the thing. They’d had his hearing checked and he was completely fine, just impervious to noise once asleep. But there were worse quirks the kid could have had.

“Where are you?” Amy asked, sounding confused.

“On the floor.”

Suddenly, Amy was standing above him with a wry smile on her face and an opened bag of potato chips in her hand. “Are you guys having fun?”

“Mikey’s having the time of his life.”

“Still not bothered by noise, huh?” she asked. “Because I could definitely have been quieter coming in.”

“Nope,” Kai said. “I think he actually likes it when I talk. He can feel the rumble in my chest or something.”

Amy sat down on the floor beside them. “Do you want a potato chip?” she asked and held one out above his mouth. Kai opened up obediently, and she dropped the snack right onto his tongue.

“Thanks.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I think about half an hour, but honestly I’ve lost all concept of space and time. I am just a speck on this planet, my sole purpose to be a living mattress for a very small person.”

“I mean, we live to serve his every whim and need,” Amy said with a serious nod. “He deserves nothing less.”

“I serve my master humbly and dutifully.”

Amy chuckled and ate some more of her potato chips. Mikey was still not bothered by the noise in the slightest, just so long as he was left on Kai’s chest.

Amy had been working a lot this week. Well, she worked a lot most weeks, but the last few days in particular had been wild for her. Kai had taken on the main parent duties, hence laying on the floor as Mikey’s mattress. At the moment it was mostly just meeting with clients and designing menus months in advance, giving Amy enough time to source ingredients and schedule casual staff for the various dates.

Despite the shrimp debacle that Kai had heard so much about, the charity gala she’d catered for had propelled her business to new heights, and she’d been booked up ever since. She had to hire new staff immediately, people who would come on the day of the event to help prep and finish off all the food. But Andy was her right-hand man. Kai was surprised that when Amy had decided to officially take on employees, she’d immediately sought out some teenager who had been a waiter at the charity gala. Then he heard again about the fiasco with the “contaminated” shrimp because, whether she admitted it or not, Amy was kind of traumatized by the whole thing. She insisted that she owed this kid the equivalent of a blood debt.

Despite his doubts, Kai saw why soon enough. The kid was a hard worker and had a heart of gold. On the brief occasion that Andy had met Jason, Jason had jokingly tried to poach him for his own business, mostly to tease Amy. Andy had stood loyally by Amy’s side, the joke passing right over his head, proclaiming that it was the catering life for him, so an office job was not in his future. In reality, it was a mashup of both a job and an apprenticeship. At least twice a week, they would have cooking lessons, where Amy would teach Andy everything from how to debone a chicken to helping him study for food safety accreditation. Kai loved those sessions — even though he wasn’t directly a part of them — when Andy would appear in their penthouse kitchen and Amy would patiently teach him everything she knew, while Kai observed quietly in the background, pretending that he wasn’t observing at all. He loved it because he could see a glimpse into the future when Mikey would be a teenager and Amy would be teaching him the same things. A future where they could have full conversations with their kid and get to know who he was as a person.

But Kai tried not to dwell on the future too much; it would be here in the blink of an eye, and he knew he would just be pining for the past again. For now, he was content to have Mikey, tiny and pudgy and a blank slate of a human being, sleeping on his chest on the living room floor.

“We’re going to have to book you a chiropractor appointment or something,” Amy said dryly, watching her sleeping son with a smile on her face.

“I don’t know. I think forty-five minutes on the floor is doing wonders for my back.”

“We’ll see if you feel the same tomorrow morning.”

“You’re so pessimistic.”

“I’m realistic.”

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