Epilogue

Elias

"Three minutes." That Dally thought he could claim five said he had a screw loose. "Three. And if another relative tries to give me a baby and tells me to smile, I'm coming to find you."

I didn't care what they had to do in the bathroom.

"Deal." Milo kissed my cheek and dragged Dally off by the neck when Dally tried to do the same thing. "Thank you, Daddy."

Fuck.

The house was too small to hide for long. But I stepped back into a small corner next to an oversized wardrobe that looked like something that would lead us to Narnia and did my best to blend in with the strange pink color on the wall.

It wasn't going to work for long and definitely not three minutes, but I was hoping with everyone going in and out of the backyard, it would give me a tiny break. Dally's family was excitable, interesting, and stubborn as fuck.

And they'd decided that the way to help me feel welcomed into the family was to keep shoving babies at me.

Because they were supposed to make me smile?

I still wasn't sure what the logic was, but asking seemed rude, so I was just trying to outlast the crazy until we could leave. Which had to be any time now, but no one was sure about that either. Dally's father—a man whose actual name was James—hadn't confessed to anything stupid yet, but there was a general buzz that said something was up.

The whole situation would've been easier to manage if I could've caught my breath but it was controlled chaos.

There were people everywhere ranging from toddlers who could've belonged to several of Dally's older siblings to his parents, who were startlingly young for how old Dally was. Every inch of the small house was filled with people and while they were clearly a close family, just imagining all of them growing up there made my skin feel too tight.

How had they all fit in a four-bedroom house growing up?

I still wasn't sure how they fit now when I realized several of the older kids and their families were living at the house.

Chaos.

But it explained a lot about Dally.

Who was actually still called Dally by nearly everyone except an older brother, who seemed to have settled on butthead.

And butthead had just disappeared with my troublemaker.

"That's a good spot." James somehow snuck up on me, which probably made him a magician considering how many people were running around. "There's a storage closet between the kitchen and the garage that everyone forgets about. If you push the boxes in front of the door a bit to the side, you can hide for a surprisingly long time before anyone finds you."

Since I hadn't been subtle, I decided to just polite it out. "Thank you. I'll remember that."

He barely smiled, shifting in front of me like he was trying to hide me better. "Just inch back a little more."

He was a surprisingly good host.

"Milo and Dally will be back shortly." Hopefully. "I'm enjoying meeting everyone."

And I did mean everyone .

I'd been interrogated by every member of the family and I had to say I'd been a very good distraction.

James gave another faint smile and nodded. "I've heard nothing but good things about you, but…I have a confession or maybe an explanation?"

Oh, that didn't sound good.

He sounded like a more laid-back version of Dally.

"Yes?" I was doing my best to look polite and not worried without looking like a dick. I wasn't sure it was working, though.

"The baby thing." He didn't start where I thought he would and I couldn't help looking confused. He chuckled but sighed after a few seconds. "Um, one of Dally's older sisters overheard Dally and Milo talking about you and they used Daddy in the sentence."

Wonderful.

I wasn't sure what to say or where the conversation was going, so I just raised one eyebrow.

James seemed to approve but kept going without much of a smile. "It got a bit mixed up like a game of Telephone and they think you're looking to be a daddy. That's why the babies."

Oh.

Well, that was…

Whatever he saw on my face had him chuckling again. "It's not my place to explain that one and I only know because Dally and Milo were not nearly as discreet as they thought they'd been over the last few years."

"No, I can't imagine they would be." Those two were not subtle in any way. "But Milo and I are not rushing into anything…like that."

I was rushing him in other ways.

Ones that were a lot less stressful than a baby.

And I wasn't even going to ask where they thought we'd get one.

"Not rushing, huh?" James finally seemed to be getting to the point of his roundabout interrogation. "You haven't known each other very long, and he…he's been searching for a family."

I wasn't terribly good at talking around the subject, so I chose the straightforward path. "I'm wondering why he doesn't have one here. He's very careful to always say Dally's family when he talks about you."

James winced. "We wanted to foster him. We'd have loved to have adopted him, but Social Services said we couldn't. Too many kids of our own and not enough room. He…he was very careful about not getting too close after they turned us down."

I could imagine.

"Well, he doesn't have to worry about that now because I've already explained that I'm keeping him." No point in beating around the bush. "I've stated that very clearly."

Ridiculously so.

And I had every intention of listing it out when Dally came running through the house with…with a pregnancy test?

"Who's pregnant?"

Not it.

But it seemed like it was time for the distraction to come out of hiding. Being part of a functional family was harder than I'd expected, but at least no one had called me a sex worker and asked how much I charged per hour.

"I think that's my cue to start mingling again." Giving James a dry smile, I nodded as he sighed. "Good luck."

Because judging by the chaos that was coming from the backyard, the answer was unexpected. So I headed that way slowly and was quickly met by a very wide-eyed Milo. "I think we've found the reason we were bribed to be here."

Nodding slowly, he peeked around me to look out the back door. "Daddy…that's…oops."

It seemed like it was entirely possible that Dally's parents did not know where babies came from.

Oops indeed.