The only honest future is the one she chooses.
I tear my gaze from the paper and force myself to stand. Because every second I’m here, in this office, is a second I’m not beside the two people who actually make me human.
When I reach the bedroom doorway, she’s awake, baby curled against her chest, her fingers stroking her tiny back. She looks up at me with a sleepy smile that hits like an arrow straight to the heart. She has been crying.
And right then, everything in me breaks.
The fear. The hesitation. The idea that she could ever be temporary.
I cross the room and drop to my knees beside the bed because there is only one place I belong now.
“I can’t do it,” I say, voice raw. “I can’t bear the thought of you leaving. Of raising our baby without you. Of waking up and not seeing you every day. Of not practicing Russian with you every lunch time. Of not being inside you ever again.” The last one comes out on a whisper because I feel it in my bones even though I know it’s inappropriate to voice out loud at such a time.
Her breath freezes.
“I thought I could control this,” I admit. “Thought I could box up emotion and pretend this was a transaction. But the last nine months… you were the only reason I kept breathing. And now that she’s here—”
I reach out, my hand trembling as I touch my daughter’s tiny fist and watch her curl her fingers around mine.
“Now that she’s here, I know I’ll never survive losing either of you.”
Her eyes fill. A tear slides down her cheek.
I brush it away with my thumb, gentle and reverent.
“I want you,” I whisper. “Not because of an heir. Not because of duty. Because you are the life I want. The family I want. Forever.”
She exhales a sob that sounds like a release of months of fear.
Then she shifts, moving our baby between us so that she rests against my chest, her warmth sinking into my skin, her heartbeat syncing with mine.
Charlotte curls into my side, her hand on my heart.
“I don’t want to leave,” she says. “I don’t ever want this to be over.”
Relief punches through me so hard I close my eyes.
“What about your studies?” I ask.
She glances down at our baby, then back at me.
“This is my future. Right here. I’ve never felt more sure of anything in my life.”
I kiss her gently, slowly, taking my time to press everything I feel into the place where our lips meet.
“She needs a name,” Charlotte says when the kiss breaks and our foreheads touch.
“She already has one. She is strong and beautiful, just like her mom. Her name is Charlotte too, but we can call her Lottie for short, if that’s okay with you?”
She looks surprised, then taken aback, before she looks down at our snuggled baby and smiles. “Lottie,” she says, testing how the name feels. “It feels like it fits her.”
Epilogue
Charlotte
Lottie has carrot on her eyelashes.
Actual carrots. One orange streak stuck to the very tip of one, blinking like a tiny flag waving surrender.
