Epilogue

SEB

Seven Years Later

Of all the different looks I’ve seen my husband pull off over the years—tuxedos on the red carpet, a spacesuit for the movie Unexplored , an Elizabethan doublet and hose for his Shakespeare-inspired drama The Bard’s Secret —this might be my favorite.

Besides when he’s naked, of course.

“That hat really suits you,” I say.

Marcus gives me a look that lets me know if it weren’t for the little ears currently present, he’d be saying something decidedly unflattering right now.

Instead, he adjusts the Santa hat on his head and reaches for the next present in his sack.

“And this one is for Marley.” He gives the present to our niece, who is sitting in the lap of Saskia’s husband Joe. Marley is only two, so she looks up at Marcus with an adorable mix of confusion and excitement, unsure whether to focus on the gift or the man in the red suit.

“Papa, you forgot to say ho, ho, ho,” George says seriously. We can always count on George to correct any of our transgressions.

“You’re right. Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas, Marley.” Marcus inserts so much joviality into his voice for a second that it’s easy to believe he’s actually a rotund, rosy-cheeked man who just stepped out of a North Pole toy shop rather than a thirty-eight-year-old New Zealander currently sweating up a storm in a synthetic Santa suit.

Summer Christmas and Santa suits are definitely not a match made in heaven.

But I guess it’s not surprising Marcus can pull off a great Santa. He is the winner of an Academy Award, after all.

It’s such a beautiful morning that we decided to open Christmas presents on my parents’ back deck. The Pohutukawa’s crimson canopy showers the deck with delicate petals, like nature wanted to provide its own confetti to mark our Christmas celebrations.

Our daughter Mia is snuggled next to my mother, showing her the stuffed penguin she received in her Santa stocking this morning.

“Nana, you hold him,” Mia orders, attempting to arrange the penguin and my mother’s arms to her exact specifications. My mother complies, letting Mia position and reposition the stuffed animal until it meets some mysterious criteria only a five-year-old understands.

My parents are extremely doting grandparents to our twins, stepping up to help when Marcus is away on location. He tries to only film overseas once a year so he’s not away from the kids for too long. When he’s home, he does a few local acting projects but mainly focuses on doing all the day-to-day stuff with the kids so I can continue to chase tenure.

It hasn’t always been easy.

Initially, there was the relentless prying into our relationship. I guess it’s understandable that after Marcus’s speech at the Academy Awards, there was lots of attention focused on whether he got his happy ever after. For a while, photographers stalked our every move. Having my face plastered across the news and social media was a new experience and not one I ever want to repeat.

Although, it was quite amusing to see the reaction from my university colleagues and my Rainbow Rascals teammates. I guess I wasn’t the most obvious candidate for “movie star’s boyfriend.”

The only silver lining was fairy terns received far more attention than ever before, especially after a photo of Marcus hand-feeding a chick went viral.

Luckily, the interest in our lives has faded over time. Living in the backwater of New Zealand, where people tend to be more laid-back about celebrities in their midst, has definitely made it easier.

Marcus is still in therapy. He still has days when he struggles, when the ghosts of his past are loud in his head, when he worries about whether he can be enough for me, George, and Mia.

Marcus hands Mia her next present, then crouches beside her to help her unwrap it. When she reveals the child-sized lab coat with Dr. Mia embroidered on the pocket, her face lights up.

“Now I can be just like Daddy!” she says as she immediately tries to put it on.

“Here, let me help,” Marcus says, holding the coat while she slips her arms in.

He straightens when he finishes, grinning down at her. “Daddy saves endangered birds. What are you going to save?”

“Everything!” Mia declares with the absolute certainty only a five-year-old can muster. “Birds and tigers and whales and…” She continues listing animals while Marcus and my mother exchange smiles.

Seeing Marcus now, it’s strange to remember how terrified he was about being a parent. When Saskia was pregnant with the twins, he would wake up in the night with nightmares, his subconscious playing out every parental fear in vivid detail.

I was so worried he’d only pushed for us to have kids together because he knew it was what I wanted and that becoming a father would derail his recovery.

But his therapist worked hard to help Marcus confront his deepest fears about parenthood, unpack the complex emotions tied to his own childhood, and develop coping strategies for the inevitable challenges of raising children.

And from the moment Marcus was handed George as a newborn, and I saw the look on his face as he gazed down at him, I knew we would be okay.

And I feel like every cuddle, every bedtime story, every scraped knee kissed better, every spontaneous “I love you, Papa” has been another stitch mending the torn fabric of Marcus’s past.

We all take risks when we choose to love someone. That fact can never be changed.

But the rewards are always worth the risks.

I unwrap my present from my parents, which contains a ridiculously expensive set of waterproof binoculars. As I carefully fold the wrapping paper so it can be reused, the tattoo on my wrist catches my eye.

I never thought I’d be part of a couple with matching tattoos, but getting a fairy tern on my wrist to surprise Marcus on our wedding day seemed right. Even more than our wedding bands, our tattoos symbolize what we mean to each other.

After Marcus finishes distributing all the gifts, he comes and sits beside me on the couch.

“They really don’t make these suits very breathable. I’m so sweaty,” he says.

“Not the fun type of sweaty either,” I say in an undertone.

Marcus gives me a heated look. “Are you on my naughty or nice list this year?”

“Can I be on both?” I ask, and my husband chuckles before lacing his fingers through mine.

“Papa, Daddy, look what I got!” George says, holding up a circle with strings woven across it in a spiral pattern. Three long feathers are tied to the bottom, with tiny green beads threaded throughout the design.

“Oh wow, that’s so cool,” I say.

George examines it. “What is it?”

“It’s a dreamcatcher,” Saskia explains. “You put it in your window, and it catches all the bad dreams, letting only the good ones through. It’s supposed to help you sleep peacefully and have sweet dreams all night long.”

“I like that concept,” Marcus says, and I squeeze his hand.

After we’ve unwrapped the presents, it’s time for Christmas lunch.

We move into the dining room, where the blessed relief of the air conditioning awaits us. It feels slightly ridiculous to serve warm ham and turkey when it’s scorching outside, but Christmas in New Zealand is always a weird result of trying to shoehorn ancient Northern Hemisphere traditions into a December where the temperatures are more suited to seafood and salad than stuffed turkeys and plum pudding.

One Christmas tradition my mother loves is Christmas crackers, so silver and gold crackers line the table, gleaming with the promise of terrible jokes and tiny trinkets that will inevitably get lost before dessert is served.

“These cost five dollars each,” my mother announces as she hands one to my father to pull. “So please try to appreciate the jokes, no matter how awful they are.”

“No pressure,” Marcus says before offering me his cracker. “Care to do the honors, Dr. Kleggs?”

“I’ll never turn down the opportunity to pull your cracker,” I say in a low voice.

He laughs at me, and the pop of the cracker punctuates his laughter like an exclamation mark. Tiny silver stars cascade onto the tablecloth between us.

Marcus unwinds the rolled-up joke and reads it in the same voice he recently used for his role as Max in Prehistoric Pals , the animated movie that made him the hero of every child under the age of ten.

“What do you call a dinosaur that’s sleeping?”

“A dino-snore!” George says enthusiastically before I have a chance to reply.

We both turn to stare at him.

“Are we raising a bad joke genius?” I ask.

“It appears we are,” Marcus says.

George just shrugs. “It’s in my joke book Nana gave me for my birthday.”

Meanwhile, Joe and Saskia have pulled Saskia’s cracker.

Saskia puts on the purple hat while Joe reads the joke aloud. “What did the grape say when it got stepped on?”

“What?” Saskia asks.

“Nothing, it just let out a little wine,” Joe says with a grin, and Saskia laughs loudly.

Joe is so good for Saskia, balancing her intensity with his steady calm and meeting her sharp edges with soft understanding.

They didn’t have the smoothest start to their relationship, given they met when Joe was the social worker assigned to help Saskia, Marcus, and I navigate the surrogacy process.

Because New Zealand law bans commercial surrogacy and the child legally belongs to the surrogate mother until the adoption is finalized after birth, the surrogacy process is a complex legal and emotional journey.

When Saskia first offered to be an egg donor and surrogate for us, I’d been overwhelmed with emotion, stammering my thanks.

Saskia had responded by rolling her eyes. “Don’t be an idiot, Seb. I always thought it was something I’d like to do for you and for Marcus if either of you wanted to have kids. The fact you’re together just makes it easier for me, right?”

“I guess you could think of it as one of the perks,” I’d said, and she laughed.

We all liked Joe the moment we met him, but none of us had foreseen how close he and Saskia would become as he counseled her through the surrogacy process.

Of course, when Joe realized he had some nonprofessional feelings toward her, he immediately transferred our case to another social worker and distanced himself, which caused a lot of drama at the time.

Luckily, Saskia knew a good thing when she saw it and showed incredible patience to wait until enough time had passed before pursuing him.

“Well, it’s only fair that given I did something nice for you, I should get something nice in return, right?” she’d said on her wedding day as I was helping her adjust the veil.

I’d snorted a laugh. That logic was so Saskia. “Yes, I guess it’s only fair.”

After dessert, we head back outside so the kids can play in the paddling pool. Marley and Mia both look so cute running around with the water wings my parents gave them for Christmas, but George is more interested in trying to catch a cicada buzzing in the Pohutukawa tree, his tongue poking out in concentration as he maps out his capture strategy like a military operation.

When he finally catches it, he cups his hands together like he’s holding treasure and carries it carefully to where Marcus and I are sitting together on the deck.

“Daddy, Papa, look!” He opens his fingers just enough to give us a glimpse of iridescent wings. “Do you know that cicadas spend most of their lives underground?”

“Good god, now I’ve got scientific facts coming at me from all directions,” Marcus says, shooting me a smile.

“Don’t pretend you don’t love it,” I say, bending to examine the cicada more closely. George opens his hands so I can see it better.

“Do you see the patterns on its wings? Every species has its own unique design, like a fingerprint.”

George studies the cicada carefully, and he looks so much like Marcus when he’s reading a script for the first time that it almost stops my heart.

The sunny Christmas afternoon stretches on forever. We eat leftovers from Christmas lunch for dinner and don’t leave my parents’ house until eight p.m.

Mia falls asleep in the car. When we reach our house, Marcus gently lifts her out of her car seat, cradling her against his chest with the same gentle precision he used when she was a newborn. Her dark curls spill over his arm, and she burrows into his neck without waking, still clutching her new stuffed penguin she hasn’t let go of all day.

And I can’t help giving my husband a soft kiss, our daughter between us with her Christmas dress fanned out like fairy wings, before I’m on duty shepherding a sleepy George to change into his pajamas and brush his teeth.

George insists I put the dreamcatcher in his window, so I carefully hang it where the moonlight will catch its intricate web of threads and beads.

When I’ve finished, George regards the dreamcatcher with a rumpled forehead.

“Daddy, dreams can come true, right?” George asks.

Can dreams come true?

My mind flies back to fifteen-year-old me, standing in the kitchen, struck speechless by the appearance of my sister’s new friend, the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.

If I’d known then that one day he’d be my husband, best friend, and co-parent, I’m fairly sure I would have dropped more than a box of Froot Loops.

I don’t think I would have ever dared to dream about this future, where I spend nearly every day with my gorgeous husband, who is the bravest, most talented, kindest person I’ve ever met. Who has transformed his pain into purpose, his struggles into strength, and who shows our children every day what it means to be truly, authentically human.

“Dreams definitely can come true,” I tell George. “But sometimes life surprises you beyond anything you could ever imagine.”

Thank you for reading!