Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Baby,” Cesare said later that night while I worked on dinner in the middle of the construction zone that was our kitchen.
“Yeah?” I asked, half-distracted by the carrots I was glazing.
“What’s this?” he asked, making my head tilt up to find him holding the boxes of the pregnancy tests that I’d left in the hall bathroom.
“Oh,” I said, wincing a bit. “Yeah, that. They were negative.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, baby?”
“I wanted to wrap my head around it first. I was going to tell you over dinner.”
“Did you want them to be positive?” he asked.
“Maybe not yet,” I said. “But I was a little sad when they were all negative.”
“I get that,” he said, coming around the island to wrap his arms around my waist. “How about we see if we can get a positive one after our honeymoon?” he suggested.
We’d decided to go to Balm Harbour.
Nontraditional, sure, but I liked the familiarity of it. We’d only managed to get back to Maine twice since I’d first come to the city. Once, to pack all my things up. Another, for a meeting Cesare needed to have with his new imports staff.
I wanted a chance to really dig in and explore all the events that I enjoyed so much in Balm Harbour.
But this time, with Cesare at my side.
“I think that sounds perfect,” I decided.
I ended up getting pregnant on our wedding night.
Mere - 14 years
“It’s like looking into a rip in time,” Vega declared as we sat on the porch in Cesare and my Balm Harbour home, watching our daughters down by the water.
She wasn’t wrong.
See, Vega had gotten pregnant almost at the same time that I had.
So our little girls had grown up like sisters.
And like she said, they were like mini versions of us.
Vega’s daughter was tall and lean with a mop of red hair—though hers ran more mahogany than copper. She was wearing a pair of bright orange corduroy bell bottom pants and a flowing, colorful Stevie Nicks bell-sleeved duster.
Whereas my daughter was in a very simple navy blue sundress with her dark brown hair pulled back into a neat bun.
She wasn’t fully me. None of our children were. For example, she had my sense of style and a like of all things pretty and neat, but she was bold and charming like her father. One of our sons was the biggest slob in the world, but was reserved like me.
As it turned out, we carried on the Costa family tradition of reproducing “like rabbits.”
Four planned.
One a whoopsie baby when the rest of our kids were already ten and up.
Vega, always one to buck tradition, had only had her one daughter. Who she raised to be an even bigger badass who had been doing martial arts since she was practically a toddler, who’d always been at the top of her class, who had never—not one day in her life—bucked to convention, sacrificed her own style or interests for what was popular.
“I’m glad you guys could come this year,” I said, smiling over at Vega.
They usually used spring break to go jet-setting somewhere. While adult Vega liked having roots, and had no interest in raising her daughter as a nomad like she’d been raised, she did believe that travel was an important part of life. So they were always going off to explore somewhere whenever they could find a time away from school and work.
“Me too. There’s a big part of us in this town,” she said, looking around. “I like knowing the kids get to experience small town life too. Gives them some balance. Oh, there’s your man,” she said, nodding toward where the car was turning down the street. “I’m going to take those two out to go fuck up some shit,” she declared, walking down toward the girls.
“Where are they rushing off to?” Cesare asked as he walked around the side of the house.
“According to Vega, to ‘fuck up some shit,’ which I am pretty sure means order the biggest sundaes at the ice cream place,” I told him, smiling at the bouquet he’d brought me.
He was good at that.
Surprising me with flowers.
Especially after I did kind of fully “retire” after our children came into the world.
He knew I missed having flowers around. So he would drop into a florist on his way home and have something pretty made to keep on the kitchen counter.
On our first wedding anniversary, he’d filled the entire house with white flowers. Thousands and thousands of them.
Whenever he brought me one, I would pick one special flower to press between the pages of a book, drying it, saving it for a collage I was going to make one day. Thousands of little proofs of his love.
“You’re amazing,” I said, taking a deep breath of floral-scented air. “How was the shop?” I asked, knowing that was part of the reason we were in town.