Page 43 of Serenity

Epilogue

Dillon

7YearsLater

“Dillon!”I felt the jab of an elbow in my side before I heard Faith panting my name. “Wakeup!”

I’d had a long week at the office, trying to get caught up on all my work. I wanted to be ready to hand off any projects I wouldn’t be able to finish, so I wouldn’t have anything distracting me during my leave of absence. Then it’d been an even longer weekend since we’d been at a gymnastics meet from Friday afternoon through Sundaynight.

“What?” I askedgroggily.

She jabbed me in the side again. “I’m in labor. You need to call your parents, wake Cynthia up, and grab my overnight bag. We have to get to the hospital because they’re already coming closertogether.”

“You’re in labor?” I yelped, jumping out of bed to toss onclothes.

In the time it took me to finish everything she’d told me to do, Faith had gotten dressed and climbed into the passenger seat of herBeetle.

“Faith,” I growled. “We’re not taking your car. Get intotheSUV.”

“We are too taking my car.” She folder her arms and glared at me. “Or at least I am, so if you and Cynthia want to ride with me you’d better get inthecar.”

Cynthia was still sleeping, so I bundled her into the backseat and tossed Faith’s overnight bag on the floor behind the driver’s seat. “I can’t believe I’m driving this ridiculous car to the hospital while you’re inlabor.”

“Well, you’ll be happy to know we’ll be leaving it there,” she grumbled. “You’re finally getting what you want. One of my co-workers is buying it from me. I figured as long as we’re already going to be there, I might as well make it easy for her to pick it up. Now you won’t have to worry about me driving around with Cynthia and the babyanymore.”

“I’m always going to worry.” But I’d worry a fuck of a lot less now that I could get her a safer vehicle. I hadn’t known she was talking to someone at work about buying the car, probably because Faith knew I would’ve offered to pay them to take it off her hands. After she had completed her master’s degree in only eighteen months, she’d decided to take the job offer she’d received from SoutheastMemorial.

It hadn’t been an easy choice because the county’s office for the Department of Children and Families also wanted her to come work for them as a case worker for kids in the foster system. In the end, the hospital won out because they had a program which allowed their employees to use paid time to volunteer for up to twenty hours a year. Between that and the vacation time they gave her, she had enough free time to keep working with foster kids in high school to make sure they were aware of their college opportunities. The program had remained important to her, bringing her and my mom even closer as they continued to work on ittogether.

She’d been working at the hospital for almost two years when we decided we wanted to try for a baby and talked to Dr. Stewart about it. She’d remained mostly healthy during all that time, with some anti-rejection medication adjustments needed here and there to keep her that way. He gave us the go ahead, but it took almost three years before we got a plus sign on a pregnancy test. I figured the wait had been meant to be, just like Faith and me, because we met the first child we took in as a foster a year intotrying.

Holly was a nine-year-old girl with severe asthma whose mom had passed away from congestive heart failure. Her father was in the military and was stationed overseas when it happened. They’d been in the foster system when they met, so there wasn’t any family to take Holly in until he could make it back home. Placing her in a home was difficult because her asthma was exacerbated by her grief over the loss of her mom. When Faith, as her hospital social worker, and Sarah, as the case worker assigned to her by the state, put their heads together to come up with a solution to help her—Sarah got us certified on an emergency basis to takeHollyin.

After she was reunited with her father, Faith and I decided we wanted to get certified to take in more foster kids, and Cynthia was our first placement after the process was finished. And that’s how the delay in getting pregnant had resulted in us finding our six-year old daughter and adopting her the same week we found out we were pregnant with the baby we were apparently going to have tonight—two weeks earlier thanplanned.

When we arrived at the hospital, we were ushered up to the labor and delivery floor. Faith was pre-registered, and she knew most of the hospital staff, so we were set-up with a room right away. Her labor was quickly progressing, so one of the aides took Cynthia to play in the waiting room until my parents made it there. Less than four hours later, we were the proud parents of ababyboy.

“You were a fucking rock star,” I whispered inherear.

“Maybe on the outside, but on the inside I was more scared than I’d ever been in my life—counting all that time when I thought I was going to eventually die from kidney failure. I don’t think I want to go through thatagain.”

“We’ve got our two, that’s more than enoughforme.”

“Our two,” she repeated, her eyes filling with tears. “I never thought I could love you more than I did on our wedding day, but the way you are with Cynthia and how I know you’ll be with our son...I can’t possibly explain how incredible you are or how much Iloveyou.”

“You don’t need to, baby. Because I feel the exact same way about you.” I pressed a kiss to her forehead and stared down in awe when they brought our son back over to us. We spent the next thirty minutes examining his fingers and toes, getting to know our son. Then one of the nurses reminded us that we had impatient grandparents and a big sister in the waiting room hoping to meet the newest member of the Montgomeryfamily.

“You ready for visitors?” I askedFaith.

“Absolutely!” She beamed up at me. “I’m always ready for ourfamily.”

The nurse went and got them, and my mom made a beeline for the baby as my dad carried a sleepy Cynthia intotheroom.

“Meet Declan Lloyd Montgomery,” I said as I lifted my son off Faith’s chest and handed him tomymom.

“You named him after your brother and father?” she sobbed. My dad moved to her side and peered down at the baby. Cynthia rested her head against his chest, smiling around the thumb she shouldn’t have had in her mouth at herbrother.

Faith and I had agreed that we didn’t want to know the baby’s sex before he was born. Instead, we wanted to savor every moment of the pregnancy and wait to see what fate had in store for us since we hadn’t been sure if we would be able to get pregnant. We’d picked out boy and girl names, but we hadn’t shared them withanyoneelse.

“Faith insisted,” I explained, looking down at my wife while she smiled up at us from herhospitalbed.

“I wouldn’t have my Declan without yours,” Faithreplied.

My mom managed to pull herself together as she stared down at her first grandson. “And so we’ve come fullcircle.”

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