"Well, look who it is. Miss Callie Morgan."
Karla. In a crisp black Harborline polo with a name tag so new it still had the shine on it and a lanyard that said TRAINEE, standing behind the hostess stand of the restaurant where I had just eaten the happiest dinner of my life, on what was clearly her very first shift.
"I see the rumors and my suspicions about you were very true." Her eyes went down me and back up, the way they used to over the front office counter. "Out to dinner with all three of those fathers at once now. Bold. You know, everything I ever said about you in that office, I said because somebody needed to say it. Where I come from, a woman who spreads herself across three men has a name, sweetheart, and it isn't 'Miss Morgan.'"
My men came up and stood behind me out of nowhere.
"Karla," Ben said pleasantly. "Careful with the customer service. It's tricky holding down a job when you spent ten years as Darren Beauford's flying monkey and the whole flying monkey division just got shut down."
Karla's mouth opened.
"Boys." I put one hand on Ben's arm and moved him aside. "I've got this one."
And I looked at Karla Chism, the woman who had spent years narrating my failures to anyone in the front office who would listen.
"You're right, Karla. I do have a name. A few of them, actually. Mama. Miss Morgan. Cupcake. And by summer, whatever these three decide to put on the paperwork." I smiled at her warm as sunrise, not letting her coldness get to me. "You know, I spent years being afraid of you. You perched behind that front office counter like a chain-smoking vulture, logging my copy machine minutes and narrating my outfits and telling anyone who couldn't escape fast enough that I was a shameless mess who'd come to no good, and then you dragged my eight-year-old down a hallway by the collar of his shirt like he was a bag of trash, and I smiled at you and apologized, because you had a desk and I had a mortgage. Well. I don't have to smile at you anymore, so hear this instead. You were right, Karla. I am a shameless mess, and the shameless mess has three men who worship her, a baby on the way, a son with an IQ higher than yours, and the happiest table in this restaurant. And you have nothing but a trainee lanyard." I leaned in. "One more thing. We plan on eating here every week. So every single week for the rest of your natural life, you are going to seat us, and smile at us, and bring the shameless mess her breadsticks, and you are going to be nice to me, Karla or else your ass might find yourself FIRED." I patted the hostess stand. "Welcome aboard. I'll see you next Friday."
Then I turned and walked, and I did not look back, because behind me I heard Cole smile and say, "Have a good night and go fuck yourself, ma'am."
I made it four steps out the door before Ben scooped me clean off the sidewalk.
"Ben careful I am carrying all the leftovers."
"And I'm carrying the mother of our baby, everybody has an important job." He hoisted me higher, grinning like a man at a parade, and Luke and Cole walked ahead of us doing absolutely nothing except radiating pride in every direction, and down the sidewalk the kids turned around at the commotion.
"Why is Miss Morgan being carried?" Noah hollered.
"Because she won," Ben hollered back.
Oliver looked at me, airborne, clutching leftovers in the golden hour light. "Won what?"
"Everything, buddy," Cole said. "She won everything."
52
EPILOGUE
Ben
"INCOMING," I hollered, too late, because the fountain had already arced up out of the changing table with the range and ambition of a lawn sprinkler and caught Luke directly in the chest of his good work shirt, and Luke stood there frozen with his arms out like a scarecrow, being rained on by a person who weighed eleven pounds.
"She got me," he said. "She waited until I leaned in, she’s very tactical."
"She learned it from her mother," Cole said, and reached past him for the wipes and knocked the open canister of baby powder off the shelf with his forearm. I have seen this man handle live ordnance, and none of that training helped him when the canister went off on the way down like a soft, lavender-scented grenade. The cloud got him full in the face. He straightened up slowly, six foot plus of tattoos and military training, powderedlike a beignet, blinking through it as though he would simply not acknowledge what had just happened.
Wren thought all of it was the funniest thing that she had ever seen. She was four months old and she had this big rolling belly cackle way too large for the rest of her, just like her mama's, and she let it loose from the changing table bare-butted and pleased with her work.
"Oh, you think that's funny," Cole told her, leaning back over the table with powder still in his eyebrows, and then Cole Ramirez, scariest man in three counties, started singing.
I had to pull my phone out and start recording cause Cole's singing voice sounds like an out of tune cement mixer. He was doing some lullaby his grandma used to sing him, half in Spanish, and the fountain artist stopped cackling and went still and stared up at him like he was the moon.
Luke stood there dripping. I leaned against the nursery doorframe, which used to be an exterior wall back when this was the little yellow house, before the additions and the second bathroom and my workshop out back made it the big yellow house, and I laughed until my stomach ached.
"You could help," Luke told me, peeling his shirt off.
"I am helping. Someone has to document this all on camera," I said holding up my phone. "Someday she's going to marry some poor unsuspecting soul and I'm going to stand up at the reception with this footage, and it's going to be the greatest day of my life. This is a long game, Luke. I've never once not wung the long game."
"Wung still isn't a word."
