“I don’t want to.”
“You want what’s on the otherside, though. He’s going to have your lungs. Is it too late to call him Zero to Sixty? That would be a great name.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“I love to make you laugh.” He leans in and presses his forehead against mine. “I love everything about you. Your laughter. Your tears. Your absolutely incredible body that can do incredible things. Here we go, breathe, breathe, keep breathing, that’s it, growl at me…”
On and on it goes, like endless punishing waves that get bigger and bigger until I’m fully consumed in the storm of my body birthing a future baseball slugger.
When Gideon Rosehill finally slides into the world, he’s a beast of a baby, ten pounds, three ounces of pure, furious joy.
Jeff wraps himself around both of us as we stare at our baby on my chest.
“He’s here,” I whisper.
“You did it,” he whispers back.
And then at the same time, we both say I love you, and I immediately forget all the agony of the delivery.
“Babies born at the start of the year have a statistical advantage in sport,” Sinclaire says when she arrives mid-morning for a sister visit, bringing me and her dad two much needed lattes.
“I don’t care about any of that,” Jeff says as herocks Gideon, now swaddled in a baby blue flannel, and passed out from his second nursing of the morning. “He can be a mathematician like you if he wants. Or a lumberjack. Or a painter.”
I grin at her and take a sip of my coffee. “Thank you for this.”
She beams at me, so much like her father that it makes my chest hurt. “No, thank you forthis,” she whispers, pointing at her dad. “Thank you for bringing him here.”
Settling in Wildflower Hollow ended up being exactly the right decision for us. We came to visit right after Jeff announced his retirement, and it was a miserable weekend, the first icy storm of the season.
I was massively pregnant.
There weren’t a ton of houses to choose from.
But we only needed to find one, the right one, and we did. A charming, sprawling place on a quiet cul de sac, with a basketball net already installed over the garage door and a baseball diamond a short walk away.
It doesn’t have a white picket fence yet, but Jeff is going to put one in next summer—in between Little League practices.
EPILOGUE 2 (SUMMER AGAIN)
JEFF
Summer, again
The ball diamond is dusty. Not the well maintained red dirt of a pro field, but hard-packed, worn and cracked in places. Uneven running paths, but the chalk lines are fresh, and the sky…
I toss the ball I’m holding in the air and swing at it, the bat connecting with a satisfying thunk. It goes sailing into the near outfield.
Pulling another from the pouch on my belt, I do it again.
And again.
Thunk.
Thunk.
A truck pulls into the parking lot behind me, tires crunching on gravel.
Thunk.
