Between Hello and Goodbye(96)

After a while, Momi and her nurse went home, and Paula helped Kal get ready for bed. I put Alani down, and Asher and I were finally alone in our bedroom.

I changed into a short, satiny night gown that barely concealed anything. It drew Asher to me instantly—which was why I put it on in the first place. He came up behind me, kissing my neck and then rubbing away the knots of work stress.

“Yes, please.” I leaned into his touch. “I needed this desperately.”

His hand slipped down over my breasts. “How about here? You mentioned they get sore…”

I rolled my eyes with a laugh. “Actually yes, they’re sore as hell.”

“Already?” he asked, his mouth on my neck again. “You’re only twelve weeks. Seemed like with Alani, it took longer for the discomfort to set in.”

“The discomfort. Is that what we’re calling it? You’re too cute.”

His hand slipped down lower, over my belly. “Pretty soon we’ll be able to know if it’s a boy or a girl, right?”

“Not for another six or eight weeks, but I did have a scan while I was in Seattle.”

Asher froze, then pulled away and turned me around. “Why? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “It just seemed to me this pregnancy is happening in overdrive. I only have three speeds these days: exhausted, nauseated, or horny. There is no middle ground.”

“One out of three ain’t bad,” Asher teased though the concern was still bright in his eyes.

“And so,” I said, moving to my carry-on luggage that was still at the foot of the bed. “I wanted to make sure that it was all normal hormonal craziness. And it is, I promise. But…”

I held up a sonogram with my finger covering one half of the grainy black and white candid of my uterus.

“This is our baby,” I told Asher and watched his face melt with pure joy and love. Then I moved my finger. “And this is our other baby.”

His eyes widened and he stared at me, then to the sonogram, then back to me. “Twins?”

“Indeed, firefighter. You are too damn virile for your own good. I used to joke around that you only needed to look at me sideways and I’d get pregnant, but I’m beginning to think I was right.”

Asher grinned. The grin turned into a chuckle, and the chuckle turned into a laugh until he fully lost it. Tears of mirth streamed down his face, and he clutched his sides.

I gave him a little shove in the chest. “It’s not funny!” I cried, laughing also. “Do you know how big I’m going to get? Not to mention, we just doubled our child count in one fell swoop. I’m going to have to sell my condo in Seattle to pay for college for all these kids.”

Asher just laughed harder because that wasn’t exactly true. He still had all his investments chugging along, and I may have been prone to exaggeration.

He sat on the edge of the bed, his laughs slowing, and pulled me onto his lap. “I can’t believe it,” he said, his hand roaming over my belly again with a new curiosity. “Twins.”

“Believe it, pal.” I said and rested my palms on his cheeks, cherishing this man because sometimes I didn’t have the words for the love I had for him and the life he gave me.

“I can just hear it, can’t you?” he said softly. “Morgan. Laughing his ass off.”

“I can hear it,” I said. “And Nalani, elbowing him with teary eyes because she’s so happy for us.”

“They both are.” He gazed up at me. “I’m happy for us.”

“Me too,” I whispered, stroking his cheek. “Me too .”





THE END





Author’s Note

When I set out to write this book, I knew the major plot events, but it wasn’t until Asher got that phone call, that the impact of what I was writing hit me. I nearly deleted it and started over because it seemed almost unfair to do that, even to fictional characters. But I write about trauma. Specifically, I write about people surviving and eventually learning to thrive and heal after trauma, because that is what my life has become since losing my daughter in 2018. That process is fascinating to me, and vital. As if I’m trying to unlock the mystery to it with every book. And sometimes trauma isn’t a bad childhood or a past incident; sometimes it whacks us out of the blue in real time. A smack in the face that sends us reeling so that we feel like we’ll never find our feet again. I never want to be dishonest or sugarcoat anything, so I kept this plot the way it is because that’s what the story is about. It's not about that phone call, it’s about what to do with life after it. To survive and thrive and to know that our capacity to love doesn’t diminish with loss. The single candle can light a thousand more, and we find our way out of the dark again.

That’s what this book represents for me. Three years after my daughter Izzy died, the grief took a turn. Instead of sharp and stabbing and obvious, it settled like a malevolent cloud that never seemed to want to lift. For a long time, I contemplated whether I would write romance again, would write anything at all, again. And to be perfectly honest, most days I contemplated whether this whole experiment called life was worth it anymore. Thanks to therapy in which I stared my worst agony and guilt right in the eye without blinking, the clouds parted. I keep coming back to the imagery I put in this book—the gold light emanating through gray storm clouds and that pearly beauty that you can’t have unless there’s been a storm.