“You… You’re here,” I stammered out, barely able to articulate. “Does that mean you’re coming with me?”
“No,” she said, and my stomach, heart, lungs, and every other organ inside of me plummeted to my toes. “It means we’re coming with you.” She lowered her hands to her own stomach, clasping them together and moving them back and forth as if cradling something.
Cradling…
“Are you…”
“Uh huh.” She nodded, taking a tentative step forward. “Turns out the condoms were expired. So… oops.” But I was done being tentative.
I rushed over to her, bent down enough to band my arms around her middle, and swung her in circles as pure unadulterated euphoria raced through my veins. Everything that had been going sideways in my world suddenly righted itself. I put her down, feeling a bit dizzy. I’d never gone from despair to joy without any stops in between, and the sensation was disorienting in the best way possible.
“I thought you were telling me no,” I said in her ear.
“I’m sorry about the suspense,” she said, “but I came too late for them to put me on your flight.”
The marshals had all pulled back to a more discreet distance, present but no longer infringing on our privacy.
“I was so sure you weren’t going to forgive me, that I’d ruined things for good.”
“I did struggle with the decision,” she admitted, “that’s why I was delayed. But you’d already given up one entire family for my sake. It’d be unfair of me to take away the one you didn’t even know you had. Besides, there was one other extenuating circumstance.”
“Beyond this?” I touched her flat belly, staggered not only by her choice to be here but by how thrilled I felt over this unforeseeable surprise. “What’s that?”
“That I never want to be without you again.”
And I kissed her, letting her know we were on the same exact page.
Epilogue
Kelly
Ten Months Later
I looked out our bay window at the craggy iron-gray mountains in the vast distance. California was such a different environment compared to Pennsylvania. The winters were far milder, the summers drier, and the air a bit smoggier, but we learned to call it home.
Maybe because we were there with no one to talk to but each other, we figured out how to work through any difficulties we were experiencing early on. Being shut off from everyone we knew was hard on both of us, and sometimes we struggled with our decision to leave. One bright spot was when we went to Lake Tahoe to elope three months in.
Even if that meant we became Kevin and Rachel Peterson rather than Marco and Kelly Varasso.
It had been a beautiful day in May with the smog-free sky reflecting in the placid waters of the lake. The pine trees and smooth round boulders were a nice contrast to the dry heat of the San Joachim Valley. It felt good to be married, to have committed ourselves to one another, and it made the times ahead easier to face. Especially when I began to have issues carrying our baby.
During my third trimester, and after a nearly perfectly healthy pregnancy up till that point, I started to experience nausea on a regular basis. I reported it to my doctor and discovered I had gestational diabetes. We had difficulty getting my insulin to equal out, and the baby grew so large they scheduled my delivery as a cesarean section.
It probably would’ve been fine if I hadn’t had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia, but I did. I lost consciousness for a few moments, and they had a hard time resuscitating me. This reminded Marco of when his brother’s girlfriend had gone into labor with his niece, dying unexpectedly due to the complication of an unknown heart condition.
And when I woke, for the first and only time in our relationship, Marco burst into tears.
I knew the fact that we had a little girl, just like Luca, only served to reinforce the memory. If I had died, he would’ve had to raise our daughter all by himself, without even his brothers nearby. This close call served to cement our relationship together in a way it hadn’t been before.
We only had one another to depend on, so we didn’t have the luxury of taking each other for granted.
I watched my husband as he went out to collect the mail, our daughter Amanda on one shoulder. We chose that name for a few reasons. One, it meant “one who deserves love” which she definitely did. Two, it fit in well with the names Kevin and Rachel. And three, it had an Italian origin, which was probably the only callback we’d get to make to Marco’s real roots.
Tomorrow was Thanksgiving and many of our neighbors had harvest decorations up. It felt far warmer than November in Philly did, but we were doing our best to start our own unique tradition among the three of us.
“Mommy, you won’t believe what Amanda just did,” my husband said, his features bright and voice pitched high. We’d taken to calling ourselves mommy and daddy instead of stumbling around with Rachel/Kelly and Kevin/Marco all the time. He’d tried wearing a well-trimmed beard to further disguise himself, and it worked so well with his mild-mannered façade that he kept it.
“What’d she do?”