Chapter Thirty-One
EMMALINE
Emmaline sketchedfor days after they removed her from the tube.
Cut the tube from around her, whatever. Same difference, right?
Ethan worked out the details of his new Nosh contract for his Cook with My Celebrity Dad show where he’d teach other celebrities how to cook along with him and Annie. The spark of the concept was her genius after all.
Em illustrated an entire story about an excited little girl who made drawings that no one thought were any good, except her and a handsome chef who only happened to look a touch like Ethan Greene. Those drawings came to life, and the little girl’s world became pretty spectacular.
Emmaline could relate to the story because, while life was still hard, it was also beautiful. Most of the time, it was fun.
There were moments, because she was a mom, where she wished she could crawl into the tube again and get stuck there for a while. Long enough for a solid time-out.
Those moments were not the usual. Not hernormal, for lack of a better word.
Annie was doing better. So was Fiona.
They’d all started spending more time together, and the girls adjusted to their respective parents’ official relationship status. No overnight sleepovers, yet. They wanted the girls to be more confident in their relationship before they introduced that kind of change.
They were going fast. And yet, they were also going slowly.
Time was a funny thing like that.
So, while they sorted their stuff, she drew, and she still designed billboards, too. Still created business cards. Still made up the direct mailers that would fill mailboxes for insurance agents all over the globe. Hey, sometimes a job was a job. And that was enough when everything else was so great.
Then she sent off her book and hoped it might catch the eye of an agent or an editor, or someone who believed in her project as much as she did.
She stared at her face in the mirror. “I can do this.”
Maybe if she said it enough, it might come true.
Today she sat at her desk, drawing a kitten that looked a lot like Pepper and a dog that looked a bunch like Sketch. The two of them were unlikely crime-fighting pets. The house was quiet since Fiona was at day camp, but soon enough it would fill up. Family and friends would all find reasons to pop in.
Drawing a final whisker on her kitten, she chewed at the end of her felt-tip pen. Perhaps a little more shading around the paws?
The dryer buzzed, announcing it’d finished the cycle and needed to be swapped.
And the microwave dinged, reminding her she’d put her mug of coffee in there before she logged in.
She’d realized a few things in the last weeks.
Life wasn’t about finding normal.
Life was about finding the extraordinary in normal.
There would be arguments, and there would be anger. But there would be happiness, and there would be laughter.
The entire array. They’d have it all.
She deserved it all. And so did they.
Epilogue
ETHAN
Three years later…
