Page 82 of His Secretly Pregnant Cinderella

“And why do you care about doing what he said? Because you love him. But he was still wrong. My mother was wrong and she loved me. Love doesn’t make people perfect. It doesn’t make the world perfect. But we don’t have to wait for perfection to find happiness.”

And then Constantine fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her. “I love you,” he said, the words broken. “I love you.”

“I know,” she said, smoothing his dark hair off his face. “I really do.”

“But it opens you up to so much pain,” he said.

“The pain is there, whether we protect ourselves from it or not. The only thing we ever managed to really keep out is the joy.”

“No more,” he said.

She nodded her head. “No more.”

“I love you, Morgan,” he said.

“I love you too.”

“Let us go to bed.”

“Yes. I think that’s a good idea.”

The phone woke Constantine in the middle of the night. But he was too sated by his evening spent with Morgan to be angry. He answered, and it was his mother on the other end, her voice breathless and strained.

“What is it?”

“It’s Athena,” she said. “They’ve found Athena.”

And the last bit of any defense he had built up inside of him crumbled completely. And the emotion he had been holding back for all those years poured out.

Athena was rescued by a man called Castor Xenakis who had been searching for his own sister for years. It was an incredible story of persistence, and he had apparently found his own love with a woman named Glory along the way. But when his work had come to fruition they had discovered that more than one girl had been kept by the wife of this particular crime lord, a woman who had always wanted daughters.

Apparently there had been a tip from a man known only as Dante, which seemed a bit on the nose, if it was a reference to The Inferno. But the end result was simply that he’d helped save Athena, whether he was a devil or not.

Athena looked far younger than Constantine did, her glossy dark hair smooth and perfect, her skin golden like the rest of her family, but with a pale cast, as if she did not spend very much time in the sun.

“These are strange times,” she said.

“Do you remember me?” Constantine asked, his voice rough.

And Morgan’s heart felt bruised on behalf of her husband.

“Of course, Constantine.” And though it was tentative, Athena smiled. “Do you remember, we used to watch that cartoon about ponies.”

And Morgan wept. Her heart had never felt so full of joy.

And she was grateful. For the decision to open her heart in the first place. For her decision to love even when it was hard.

And she no longer worried about being a good mother. She knew she would be. She didn’t worry, because she was happy with herself. Happy with the wife she was. And she had a sister-in-law. One that she was very excited to get to know.

She and Constantine went to bed that night in his room. The room where they had first made love.

“It is a miracle,” he said.

“You see,” she said. “Sometimes the miraculous is hiding just around the corner. Not everything is dark.”

“And sometimes the miraculous is right in plain sight,” he said, looking directly at her. “As you were, from the beginning. From the first moment I saw you.”

“I love you.”

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