Wyatt places a five-dollar bill on the counter at the clown toss, and I stand back to watch him win a prize for his niece.
Some days I pinch myself, wondering how we got so lucky after everything.
Other days, I remind myself that luck had nothing to do with it.
We fought for each other.
And love always wins.
Epilogue
Three Years Later
* * *
Renata
* * *
I wipe a slew of happy tears from my eyes as baby Jack shoves a handful of his first birthday cake into his mouth, his big hazel eyes wider than saucers at that first taste of pure sugar. Wyatt laughs as his beautiful wife kneels down next to the baby’s high chair and ends up with a fist full of frosting in her hair.
These are the moments I live for—the priceless slivers of time that make up the complicated, multi-colored tapestry that is life. It isn’t always rainbows and roses, but it isn’t always heartache and gray skies either.
McCoy and Daisy run through the kitchen, weaving through aunts and uncles and friends and family. A few years back, I gifted Wyatt and Blaire some land so they could start their own life together. They’d been apart for so long, I figured they’d be anxious to pick up where they left off.
I wasn’t wrong. A mother rarely is …
They were engaged in an instant, married a little over a year later, broke ground on their beautiful farmhouse a year after that, and now we’re celebrating the first birthday of their first child.
I head to the island to grab a stack of paper party plates and a cake knife.
“You doing okay?” I ask Oliver when I find him in the corner, isolated, and away from the crowd. He’s watched everything from afar today, and I’m not sure if he’s said more than a handful of words.
The man hasn’t been the same since everything came to light four years back. Almost overnight, he lost his wife, his daughter’s blind trust, and rumor has it he parted with most of his wealth as well. It turns out he was involved in some unsavory underground loan scheme that got him blacklisted from the agriculture banking circles. I don’t pretend to know all the facts or details. I only know what people talk about in town, and I take it all with a grain of salt because everyone likes to talk like they know something. Shortly after Odette left him, he placed that big old Victorian house for sale and moved to a two-bedroom on the outskirts of a town fifteen miles east of here. Odette remarried to some businessman in Cheyenne. I doubt she’s ever looked back, but of course that’s pure speculation.
“Jack looks like his father, doesn’t he,” Oliver muses, ignoring my question and fixating on his grandchild.
“He’s got his mama’s eyes, but yes, sir. I’d have to agree that he’s the spitting image of Wyatt.”
Oliver smiles, though there’s an undercurrent of regret about him today.
I learned a long time ago that holding onto anger only hurts the one holding it, and that sooner or later, all things work themselves out. While it pains me to know he’s the reason Blaire and Wyatt were kept apart for so long, I’m not the one he has to make it up to.
“They sure are a happy little trio, aren’t they?” I ask.
He nods. “Can’t argue with that.”
“See that light in my son’s eyes? Your daughter put that there,” I say. “I thank the good Lord every day that she’s back in our lives.”
With that, I head to the cake table to start divvying out portions to the hungry masses, but not before putting Cash on ice cream scooping duty.
Crouching, Wyatt places his face up to baby Jack’s, earning a handful of cake sludge in the process. Out of everything that’s come to light these last several years, Wyatt’s confession was the most shocking. I had no idea he’d found his father that day in the field—or that he left him to die … to save me.
So I did what I had to do.
I saved him back.
I told him I’d been replacing his daddy’s medication with sugar pills for months—even if it wasn’t true. I saw the pain in my son’s eyes, I realized he’d been punishing himself by keeping such a heavy secret all those years, and I did what any loving mother would do when their child is hurting.
I unburdened him.
He’ll never know, and he doesn’t need to.
And I’d do it all over again if I had to.
No regrets. Not in this lifetime. Not ever.