EPILOGUE
ISABELLA
Lying in a lounge chair, I stared out at the turquoise ocean with palm trees framing my view. Parker and I had our own little slice of heaven for the week, a private villa on an island in Thailand that he’d found online and booked immediately.
The sun warmed my skin where my legs stuck out from under the pergola, and hopefully, I’d actually leave this place with a nice tan. It was a novel idea for me, considering that I’d never had a tan before.
I wonder where my hunky fiancé is. I could use him for rubbing on more sunblock, and if it leads to more, then so be it.
For once, I didn’t have work on the brain. In fact, it’d been six months since I’d only had my work to think about. Today, exactly six months ago, Parker had shown up at my apartment from Niagara Falls and proposed.
That was why we were here. To celebrate our half-anniversary. I’d tried telling him that it wasn’t a thing, but he flat out refused to believe me. Apparently, if we wanted to make it a thing, then it was a thing.
I rolled with it because why not? I’d spent enough of my life following arbitrary rules, so as of now, our half-anniversary was a thing.
A smile spread my lips as I thought back over the last six months. It had been unbelievable, a whirlwind of fairytale proportions that I still couldn’t quite fathom as being my life. Things were so different that I often had to pinch myself to make sure it was real.
After we’d gotten engaged for real, Parker hadn’t wasted any time. He’d asked me to move in with him the very next day, and I’d agreed. A month later, once my notice period was up, he’d helped me move the last of my few possessions to his place, and neither of us had ever looked back.
The very same week that we’d gotten engaged, he’d also sold his franchise for a number with a one and so many zeroes that he was set for life.Wewere set for life.
The first thing he’d done with the money was to buy us a house in a neighborhood with good schools and a strong community vibe, and that was the house we’d moved me in to from my apartment. It was also the house where we planned on raising our children, and the thought of it sent a zap of excited energy through me whenever it popped into my brain, which was all the time these days.
When Parker found out that I hadn’t planned on having children, I’d thought that was it. That he was going to leave me for someone who was willing to give him the kids he so badly wanted.
Instead, however, he’d sat me down, heard me out, calmly listened to my reasons, and then he’d asked if he could make his case once I was done. I remembered the conversation like we’d had it yesterday.
Parker leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees and looking straight into my eyes. “So it’s not that you don’t want kids. You want them, but you’re scared to have them because what if something happens to you, or to us, and they end up in the foster system?”
I nodded, wringing my hands in my lap as anxiety raced through me. “I understand if this changes the way you feel about me, but it’s just not a chance I’m willing to take. It’s not like my parents knew how things were going to turn out. No one wants to think something bad is going to happen down the line, but you can’t control everything.”
“No, you can’t,” he agreed, still calm and still looking at me. “It doesn’t change the way I feel about you. Nothing ever will. If that’s the decision you’ve made and you want to stick to it, then that’s fine. I’d never push you into it or make you feel like you have to have children for me, but can I tell you how I see things?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have any aunts or uncles? Grandparents? Any family or close family friends who could’ve taken you in when you were a child?”
“No. I didn’t. My mother was an only child and my dad was estranged from his family. I’m not even sure if they knew I existed. He never talked about them. As far as I know, all my grandparents died before I was born.”
Parker nodded slowly, winding his fingers together loosely between his knees. “I thought it might be something like that. There are a hell of a lot of people who would have to die before our child would be left to the foster system, Bella. My mother might be getting older, but she’s still relatively young. Hunter and Hailey. Colt, Josh, Reese, Marley, Nash, Logan, Cyrus, Chris, and all their significant others.”
I frowned. “With the exception of your mom and Hunter, all of those other people are friends. How do you even know they’d take our child in if something were to happen to us?”
He brought a hand up to tap his fingers to his chest. “In here, I know that any one of them would step up whether we ask them to or not, but Colt, Reese, Marley, Josh, and I have been talking about it for a long time. We agreed as far back as college that, one day when we had kids, it wouldn’t matter who the actual godparents are because all of us would look after each other’s kids in the event something happened to us.”
“So in between drinking, working out, studying, partying, and doing God knows what else, you guys sat down and had that conversation?”
He shrugged, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “We were all about the future back then. We were going to be moguls, remember? Fuck yes, we talked about it.”
“Have you talked about it since?” I asked. “You can’t be sure they’ll keep a decade-old promise just because they agreed to it when they were practically children themselves.”
“We’ve talked about it a lot since. Josh and Marley are already doing everything they can to get their wives pregnant and it won’t be long before Reese marries and starts doing the same. Marley even sent us all some Hawaiian tree-root tea or some shit that’s supposed to help your swimmers stay strong.”
He shook his head at the mention of the tea, then smiled. “The point is that you know them, and you know Mom, Hunter, and Hailey. If you want to, we can talk to them all about it. You can ask them whatever you like, and if you decide that you can trust them to take care of any kid we may have, then we’ll set up a trust and we’ll have a whole hierarchy of people for said kid to go to if we ever get to a point where we can’t do it ourselves.”
True to his word, he hadn’t pushed the issue. I’d taken a few weeks to think about it, and once I started, I hadn’t been able to stop. I’d always adored children, and deep down in my heart, I’d always wanted them but I’d written the idea off for myself so early on that it had taken some serious introspection before I’d asked him to set up the meeting.
We’d spoken to his mother first, then to his brother and sister-in-law. Since Lennon and I had gotten closer, we’d spoken to her and Nash next, and then to Colt and the others. Every single one of them had assured me, in their words and their reactions, that they would absolutely take our kids in if they ever had to.