“And for him…”
She looks at me.
I swallow hard.
“There was this kid I used to play ball with,” I say. “Quiet. Scrappy. Good heart. Never stopped showing up, no matter how hard things got. His name was Beau.”
Josie smiles, soft and full of love. “Beau,” she echoes. “That’s perfect.”
So that’s how it happens.
Sage Dawson Knightly.
Beau Knox Knightly.
Our daughter and our son. A little bit of her, a little bit of me, and a whole future we never saw coming, but can’t wait to live.
I pull Josie close, careful of the babies now tucked against her chest.
“We’re parents,” I whisper.
Her laugh is watery, incredulous. “We’re so underqualified.”
“Absolutely.”
But I kiss her anyway. Because I’ve never been more sure of anything than this, this messy, beautiful, chaotic family we’ve built.
And the best part?
We’re only getting started.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Josie
The secondwe step through the front door, I drop the diaper bag and freeze.
“Did we leave the stove on?” I ask, sniffing the air.
Knox, who’s got Sage in one arm and Beau’s car seat hooked through the other, sniffs too. “No. That’s just stale coffee. Maybe socks.”
“Definitely socks,” I say, kicking off my shoes and narrowly missing a dust bunny the size of a grapefruit. “I forgot we used to live here.”
“Right?” he murmurs, gaze sweeping the living room like it’s a foreign country. “Wasn’t this place clean once?”
“Before we had people literally removed from my uterus? Yeah.”
Beau starts squawking.
I dart over and unclip him, panic already rising in my throat. “Okay, okay, okay. We’re home now, little guy. Everything’s fine.”
Sage opens her mouth, sees her brother crying, and apparently decides that’s the vibe, because she joins in. Now we’ve got stereo baby meltdown.
Knox raises his voice over the siren song. “Where do we put them? Do we have... like... a baby zone?”
“The nursery?”
“Yeah, let me just?—”
