I didn’t speak, didn’t spout crap about the bad luck of seeing me in my dress. He’d already seen me in one wedding dress. We’d had the bad luck.
So instead of all that, I ran to him, into his arms.
He caught me.
Of course.
I didn’t hesitate to press my lips to his.
He didn’t hesitate to kiss me back.
“I just wanted to see what it was like to kiss you,” I murmured against his mouth.
“And now you’ll never have to know what it feels like to stop,” he growled.
And then he kissed me again.
I was late for my own wedding.
But I was Polly.
So they expected it.
Two Months Later
We were sitting on the sofa, me with a glass of wine, Heath with a beer. He was reading, and I was doing some research for new versions of meditation at the studio.
It was a normal night.
Whatever passed for normal for us at least.
“What do you think about Luna?” I said, snapping my head up.
Heath glanced up. “For a girl or a boy?”
I scowled at him. “For a girl, of course.”
“You suggested Malin for a boy yesterday,” he shot back.
“It’s a unisex name!” I protested.
“Any unisex name is a girl’s name,” he muttered.
“That’s such an alpha male thing to say,” I snapped.
He grinned, yanking me in for a kiss without spilling our drinks. “I remember you seem to like all of the alpha things I do to you.”
I blinked once he was done kissing me.
“What were we talking about again?” I whispered.
“The name for our daughter,” he reminded gently.
“Right,” I breathed.
We had been talking about names since I’d broached the subject a month ago. I’d expected him to be tense, tentative, to mention it being too soon.
Instead, he’d made slow, beautiful love to me, then he’d made an appointment at an adoption agency. We’d gotten on a list quickly and without hassle, which was strange considering it was notoriously hard to get on such lists.
But Heath was Heath, so we got on.
Judy, our caseworker, warned us it could be a long wait.
“It’s okay, we’ve got time,” Heath had murmured, yanking me to his side.
And he was right. We did have time.
The ringing of my phone jerked me out of the past. And then of course I had to dig around in the sofa to find it.
“Hello,” I answered on the last ring, about to sip my wine.
“Polly? We’ve got a baby for you.”
I froze, the glass halfway to my mouth.
Heath was instantly alert.
“I’m going to warn you,” Judy continued. “She is currently suffering from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. She’s in an incubator since she’s premature and will be for the next three weeks at least. She will be hard,” Judy said, her voice hard as if she were trying to prepare me. “And not in terms of her health, but that will be a struggle too. But because we’ve seen various behavioral and mental health issues. This is a big commitment. This is harder and uglier than the reality of a normal baby. There will be no judgment if you say no.”
I had put the phone on speaker the second she spoke her first sentence, so Heath had heard everything too.
“We’ll take her,” Heath said immediately, snatching the words from my mouth, and my heart.
If there was ever a moment when I thought my love for him might kill me, might literally explode my heart, it was then. It was his lack of hesitation, the look on his face, the love he had for a child that we hadn’t seen, that was full of all the ugly realities of the world and that would be the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen.
Our child.
“I will never get right with the fact that I lost my baby for a reason,” I said, looking at the little baby in the incubator. She was so small. So small but somehow she took up all the space in the room. “But I think if there ever was one, it’s lying right there.”
I nodded at the tiny, helpless, damaged human being.
Heath’s arms tightened around me.
“It’s because the universe knew that there were little beautiful people like this that needed us. And that we’d need them,” he murmured the profound words with enough force to bowl me over, if he wasn’t holding me, that was.
We continued to watch the little being in the incubator.
Our daughter.
Epilogue
We found our son only three months after we brought our daughter, Skye, home. Everyone said it was too soon. Especially with the extra care Skye needed. A lot of people thought it was because we were sleep deprived and delirious.
“I bought kitten heels in the first three months of Amelia’s life,” Lucy said. “It’s like when Mercury’s in retrograde, no big decisions. And the kitten heels, thankfully I could return when I was lucid...ish. But a child, you cannot—well, not without people judging you, at least. Not me. There have been times where I would’ve returned Amelia for a houseplant or something that didn’t cry for six hours straight if I could. Of course, I love her more than life, but they don’t tell you about how fucking insane lack of sleep can make you.”
Lucy was right, we were sleep deprived. But I operated off little to no sleep as it was, and Skye seemed to like being awake in the night, just like her mom, so it worked out.
And I was her mom.
It didn’t matter that she wasn’t mine biologically.
“Blood doesn’t determine who your parents are,” Dad said, cradling the peaceful baby in his arms—Skye was always peaceful when she was given love and tenderness. “Love does.”
And Heath and I loved our little girl with all the pieces of ourselves.
She was ours. In more than blood.
But she was a lot. She did have problems. But we seemed uniquely qualified to handle them.
She cried a lot. Screamed, in fact. But her father was cool, calm under pressure, and he cradled her restless and fragile little body, laid it upon his bare chest, and somehow, it soothed her.
Like it had soothed me when I was broken.
I walked with her strapped to my chest, up and down the beach at three in the morning. She liked the witching hour.
Now I knew that everything happened for a reason. Everything ugly, horrible and unthinkable Heath and I had been through in our lives gave us the tools to give our daughter beautiful peace.
But she was still a newborn baby.
And they didn’t like sleep.
So we were tired when we pushed the stroller into the shelter. It was now one of three in the city, with Jay expanding. I helped manage when I could, but I was also building my second yoga studio inside the next shelter he was converting.
It was safe to say that the people of L.A. liked my particular brand of peace.
And people liked Greenstone dealing with their chaos, so Heath was busy. Not busy enough to miss feedings. To give me time to do things like shower, brush my hair and remember to put on deodorant.
He was a hands-on dad.
Skye was his princess.
So we were busier than ever, yet we made sure to volunteer once a week. Heath came every single time, not just for security. But to contribute. Because he wanted to be involved. Because of his past. Because he found that a lot of people had parents like his, and those people didn’t react the same way as him. Didn’t have the opportunity to react in the same way as him and they ended up on the streets.