Joy. Such unrestrained joy.
I’ll never tire of seeing the two of them together.
My tormentor-turned-lover and our son.
If happiness could be defined in an image, this would be it for me.
“Mom! Charlie threw a snowball at me and Bella,” Maya yells, running into the room with snow and ice falling from her jacket. Her little face is outraged, her tiny hands balled into fists. “And Lizzie called him a bad word!”
Laughing, I set aside my laptop and catch my tattletale three-year-old in a hug. “It’s okay, my darling,” I soothe, stroking her tangled chestnut curls as Toby, our golden retriever, runs over to lick the snow from her coat. “Your brother was just playing. He’s got a little crush on Bella, that is all.”
“I do not!” Charlie’s outraged tone matches his sister’s. “She’s way too blond and weird, and she barely speaks Russian.”
“Hey now,” Peter reprimands, setting him down. “That’s not nice.”
“Bella Kent speaks as much Russian as you do, you doofus,” Maya says pompously, her little chin going up as she steps out of my hug. Pushing Toby away, she adds, “And in any case, she’s only four. Her vocabulary will grow like yours did. Not everyone is born smart like me.”
Peter and I exchange a look. Then, unable to help ourselves, we burst out laughing.
Our birthday girl is on a roll today.
Charlie was two and a half when Maya was born, but this past year, she’s started teaching him math and reading—the latter in English, Russian, French, and Japanese. Her mind is like a sponge, and her brilliance is matched only by her ego.
For all her off-the-charts IQ, modesty is a concept her three-year-old brain can’t quite grasp.
“I thought you told me you weren’t a child genius?” Peter said to me in amazement when our daughter took up music composition at age two. “That you became a doctor so young because of your parents, not because you were insanely smart?”
“And that’s all true. I don’t know where this is coming from,” I told him, equally puzzled. “Maybe there’s some genius DNA in you.”
Not that Charlie, our first child, isn’t smart. He’s bright and curious and energetic—everything we’ve ever wanted in a son. He’s thriving in his private school here in Switzerland; according to his teachers, he’s as clever as they come.
Maya, though, is on an entirely different level.
It would be intimidating if she weren’t so stinking cute.
“Go tell the others to come in,” I say, catching her by her jacket hood. “It’s time for cake.”
Her tiny face—a miniature replica of mine—lights up, and she bounces out of the room, with Charlie on her heels. Toby jumps onto the couch to curl up next to me, and I use the quiet minute to review the new song I’m composing before closing my laptop.
With everybody here for Maya’s birthday, I won’t have time to finish it today.
After Bonnie Henderson helped clear Peter’s name, we had the option of returning to the Chicago area and resuming our life there. However, we decided against it. Not only would we be subjected to suspicious looks everywhere we went, thanks to our faces being all over the news after the bombing, but without my parents, there was nothing really tying me to Homer Glen. So instead, we decided to make a new home in the Swiss Alps, near the private clinic where I’d been offered a job while we were on the run.
I started working there full-time, but within a month, Peter and I realized that with the pregnancy tiring me out—and us not wanting to be apart for more than a few hours at a time—it wasn’t the best solution. So I opened my own practice on the first floor of our home, where I could set my own hours and see Peter throughout the day. Before long, the clinic began referring their pregnant patients to me, and I became the go-to OB-GYN for women with various ties to the underworld.
It’s worked out well—particularly since Peter has decided to put his skills and contacts to a new use: recruiting and training former soldiers to work as mercenaries for organizations like Esguerra’s.
It’s not exactly the peaceful civilian life we were envisioning, but it’s way less dangerous than high-profile assassinations—and much more interesting for Peter than teaching regular citizens basic self-defense. As for me, with my flexible work schedule, I not only have time for Peter and our two children, but also my music.
I no longer perform live or have a YouTube channel—after everything that’s happened, Peter’s become too paranoid about my safety—but I have the satisfaction of having my songs performed by some of the most popular new stars, who pay me well for ghost-writing them. My darker lyrics are especially popular, with two of my songs topping the charts for weeks.
“Cake! Cake! Cake!” The kids burst in like snow-filled tornadoes, with five-year-old Mateo Esguerra in the lead and Bella, Lizzie, Charlie, and Maya chasing him. Squealing, the children surround Peter, who’s ceremoniously setting up three candles, and Toby jumps off the couch and runs over to them, barking his head off in excitement.