Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 59265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 237(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 237(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
But this was a whole new kind of empty. There wasn’t so much as a cup in any of the cabinets. The only thing being transferred to the next owners were the window treatments. And the bottle of wine on the counter.
“I know. I never thought I would leave this house. But it hasn’t felt like home in so long. Adelaide barely even remembers this place.”
That was true.
She’d been at my house for the largest chunk of her life. And, now, for the rest of her time home with us.
“Yeah,” I agreed, feeling the heaviness of the box in my pocket.
I’d had it for weeks.
But I knew that it was a question I had to ask in this house, before we left it in our past.
“Want to take one last tour of the place?” I asked.
“Sure,” she agreed, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in the place anymore. It was in my house. With me. And I wanted to make it clear I wanted her and Adelaide there with me forever.
It was in the primary bathroom that I reached to pull the box out of my pocket.
“You know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what my future might look like. A home. A family. Kids running around. A dog underfoot. Christmas lights. Sunday dinners. All of it.
“And somewhere along the way, I stopped viewing those things as some vague future I might have.” I reached out to take her hand, my fingers brushing over her knuckles. “I started imagining you. You and Adelaide. You in my kitchen. Her running around the backyard with Tuna.”
“Owen…”
“I know it wasn’t supposed to happen. You were a client. I was just supposed to fix your bathroom and move on. Not fall in love with you.”
Willa’s eyes went watery. Her hand was shaky in mine.
“I love you. And Adelaide. I love the life we’ve started creating, even if neither of us meant to build it.”
Finally, I lowered down to one knee.
“I want the ordinary stuff. I want the hard stuff. I want mornings when nobody slept and dinners where the kids are screaming and the dog eats their vegetables passed under the table. I want your good days and your bad ones. I want to be the person you call when something goes wrong, and the person you come to when everything is right.”
I opened the ring box.
“I want to be your husband. And I want to be Adelaide’s father. I want to spend the rest of my life proving to her that she has someone who will always show up for her. And I want to spend the rest of my life showing up for you too. Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” she said, already crying. “A million times, yes.”
I slid the ring on her finger and got to my feet to wrap my arms around my girls.
Willa - 3 years
“I saw that,” I said as Adelaide slipped a piece of carrot to Tuna, who was smart enough to always sit at her feet, a habit he’d picked up when she’d still been in a highchair and hadn’t gotten a hang of how her hands worked yet, so she sent more food flying than she shoved into her mouth.
“He’s hungry,” Adelaide insisted.
“And you don’t love carrots,” I shot back.
Adelaide was too smart to give her an inch, she would always take a mile.
“Ranch?” I asked.
She agreed, then spent the next five minutes driving her carrot sticks through the white dressing, getting more on her face and fingers than she got in her mouth, I swear.
“Where’s Daddy?” she asked, making my heart clutch each time it did when she called him that.
Because he was.
Her father.
In every single metric that counted.
As for Chase, the last I heard, he and his wife were adopting a baby.
Did some part of me ache for Adelaide, that she had a biological father who couldn’t be bothered to help raise her, but was on board with doing so for another baby? Of course. But Owen went out of his way to make sure that Adelaide never felt unloved or unwanted for a single second.
As guided by a therapist, we’d introduced age-appropriate concepts about birth parents and the parents that raise children, about how sometimes birth parents aren’t in a kid’s life, and that was okay because they were loved by the parents that were in their lives.
Adelaide just kind of shrugged it off and moved on.
All that mattered was that she did have a father in her life. And he loved her just as much as I did.
Just as much as he was going to love the baby I just learned was growing in my belly.
I hadn’t planned on having a kid again so quickly. When we talked about more children, we did so in an abstract, “someday” way. But fate had its own timing, I guess.