Chapter 25

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

It was official: Xavier’s ‘happy humming’ thing was contagious. Emily found she didn’t mind though, nor did it bother her that her little ditties were always just the tiniest bit off-key. She kept on humming as she tucked her hammer under her arm and took a few steps back to see how her new painting, done by none other than her next-door neighbor, was hanging.

Darla didn’t know that Emily had purchased one of her paintings—she hadn’t been working the day that Xavier and Emily had gone on a museum date. Emily felt a flicker of good natured, mischievous delight whenever she thought about how she could soon invite her friend in for some tea and then bam! Darla would see how her friends supported her art.

And then, of course, she would switch to laughing at herself. Who would have thought that Emily Harper would find herself eager to invite someone over? Heck, she might even do it while she was wearing sweatpants, as she was now. They were the slender cut, somewhat more fashionable kind, but still. The old Emily hadn’t even owned sweatpants.

Although…

She glanced at her watch. She actually shouldn’t be wearing sweatpants at this particular moment, as she was expecting Xavier shortly. Now that they had agreed that they were officially boyfriend and girlfriend, they’d gotten more relaxed with one another, but tonight they were going out for a date, which meant Emily would like to be dressed up a bit more nicely than she currently was. She hurried into her bedroom and put on a tapered pair of forest green pants and a gray cashmere sweater that was the perfect weight for New England springs, which played between warm and chilly, often flipping back and forth in rapid succession. She put her hair into a cute clip she’d gotten at Darla’s sister’s store, although Marty was not yet back from her maternity leave, and was finishing dabbing on just a little makeup when the doorbell rang.

“Coming, coming!” she called as she dug through her entry hall closet for her shoes and a light jacket.

When she opened the door, she greeted Xavier with a smile before bursting into laughter.

“We match,” she said, gesturing between them.

He looked down. It wasn’t exactly a match, as his pants were a more muted, olive color compared to her forest green. But he too was wearing a gray sweater and jacket—and looking very handsome in them, Emily noted with a flicker of pleasure. Her boyfriend really was just so handsome.

“Great minds think alike?” he suggested.

It was a little dorky, but Emily kind of liked that they were on the same wavelength like this. She did, however, swap her jacket for a down vest. A little difference was never a bad thing.

“Okay,” she said as she locked her house behind her. “Where are we going tonight?”

Xavier, as she’d learned, was a bit of a foodie. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the restaurants, it seemed, from here to Providence, and he delighted in introducing her to new cuisines and new places to try them. Emily, for her part, found that she had fun letting him plan out adventures. She never would have thought, in her past life, that she would have been willing to give someone else the reins and simply go along for the ride, but with Xavier…

Well, she trusted him.

Besides, he lit up like the sun when he got to introduce her to something she’d never tried before.

“Okay,” he said. “So you’ve maybe had Ethiopian food before.”

“I have,” she confirmed. There was a little restaurant on the Upper West Side that was one of the few things she missed from living in New York City.

“So this place, the people who own it are Ethiopian but they have Somalian influences. I don’t think it’s officially fusion, when the countries are just neighbors, but it’s supposed to be really good and probably a little bit different from other Ethiopian restaurants. The bread is smaller, I guess?—”

Xavier likely could have gone on for a while longer. Emily had discovered that she liked listening to him talk about food and flavors as much as he liked talking about them. He’d even confessed once that, as a child, he’d considered going to culinary school before deciding that medicine was his true passion.

Today, however, they were interrupted.

“Oh, hey, guys!”

Emily had been so lost in Xavier’s descriptions that she was a little startled to hear Darla’s voice. She blinked, then smiled at her neighbor, and at Scout, who was dancing merrily at the end of her leash.

She and Xavier crossed the lawn, finally dry after the last of the season’s snow had melted away and turned everything muddy.

“Hey, Darla,” she greeted. “Hey, Scout… okay, you’re not even going to say hi? That’s harsh, puppy,” she added as Scout bypassed her, heading directly for Xavier.

Xavier grinned up at the women, even as he knelt down to pet Scout. “I’m sure she smells Coco on me," he reassured Emily.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm sure," Emily groused, but she was only joking. She couldn’t blame the dog for flocking to Xavier. Clearly Scout had good taste.

“How are you feeling?” she asked Darla instead.

Darla pulled a face, although it was quickly replaced by a grin. “Oh, I feel sick all the time . It’s weird though, because I hardly even care. I’m just so excited about baby.” She grinned down at her stomach, which had, if Emily squinted, the teeniest tiniest bump to it. Not that she made a habit of looking at pregnant women’s middles, of course. But Darla had asked her a few days earlier if Emily thought she looked at least a little bit rounder. When Emily had said yes, Darla had been pleased as punch.

Emily raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what you said last week. Last week you said, and I quote, ‘If I get sick one more time, I’m going to dedicate my life to finding a way for men to get pregnant so that Rick can do this next time, that’s how miserable I am.’”

Darla shrugged. “Yeah, I’ll probably be saying the same thing in about twelve hours or so. But I just managed to eat a whole sandwich without a twinge, so right now I’m in a great mood!”

The adults all laughed, although Scout let out a little whine of disappointment as Xavier got back to his feet.

Darla looked the two of them over. “Hey, do you guys know that you match?”

Emily chuckled. “Yes, but it wasn’t planned.”

“Great minds,” said Darla.

“That’s what I said!” Xavier grinned. “But no, we’re not going to a themed event or anything. We’re just grabbing dinner.”

“Oh, yeah?” Darla said. “Where?”

Xavier got that sunshine look on his face again, but Emily clapped a hand over his mouth before he could start in on his spiel.

“Sorry,” she told them both. “But I want to eat and hear about the food, and if you let him get started, we’ll never get to the eating part.”

When she removed her hand, Xavier’s expression was sheepish. “Yeah, that’s probably right,” he said.

Darla, meanwhile, was looking at the pair of them like she’d never seen anything cuter in her life.

“Excuse the gushing,” she said. “I’ll blame it on the hormones. But you two are so adorable it kills me.”

Emily grinned. “Gush away,” she said. “You earned it. After all, without you, we never would have found each other.” She reached out and laced her fingers with Xavier’s. She was speaking to Darla, but her eyes were on her boyfriend as she said, “And I never would have learned that you were right about Whale Harbor. Except you missed one part.” She looked back at Darla. “It’s not just a great place for finding yourself… it’s the perfect place to find your other half.”

Darla’s eyes were getting shiny. “Okay, again, I blame hormones, but—that’s just so nice.” She lunged forward and gave the couple a quick hug, one arm around each of them. “Have a great time, okay? Scout, let’s head inside so these two crazy kids can go out on their date, huh?”

“’Crazy kids?’” whispered Xavier. “She’s ready to be a mom already… to a teenager.”

“In the nineteen-sixties,” Emily quipped.

“I heard that!” Darla called over her shoulder laughingly as she disappeared into her house.

The couple chuckled, looking up at one another. It was the perfect moment for a kiss, Emily decided. And since she had no reason not to kiss him, she did, pouring all the fullness of her heart into the gesture.

And then her stomach rumbled.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Let’s get going. On the way, you can tell me about every ingredient I might even possibly encounter in my meal tonight.”

In the flickering of the streetlights as they sped down the highway, Charity admired the sparkle of the rings she now wore on her left hand. If she glanced over at where Dominic was driving, she could just catch the glimpse of his matching gold ring on his left hand.

“It’s not going to disappear if you stop looking at it for a moment,” he teased, reaching out to hold her hand in his. It was late in the evening, so the long stretch of highway as they approached Whale Harbor was nearly empty, which made it easy enough for Dominic to drive with one hand.

“Shush, Mr. Turner-Reeves,” she chided. Because of the kids, they’d decided that the whole family would hyphenate their names. That way they could all share a name without erasing any part of the long, sometimes painful history that had brought them all together. After all, Charity wouldn’t trade where she’d ended up for the world, no matter the struggle it had taken to get here.

“I’m not afraid it’s going to disappear. I’m admiring . They’re totally different.”

“Is this what marriage is to you?” he quipped. “Lessons about vocabulary?”

“That and so much more,” she said, pulling up their joined hands so she could kiss his knuckles.

They kept their voices low. Both children were asleep in the back seat of the car, as was Milo, whose little doggy snores made for an adorable soundtrack to the last leg of their trip. They hadn’t driven for long hours like this during the rest of their journey, instead stopping along the way to see sights big and small. Lucas, for one, had been delighted by the World’s Largest Rubber Band Ball and had immediately begun calculating how much of his allowance would have to go to rubber bands, and for how long, if he wanted to make a ball that was bigger.

Today though, they’d been left with just enough of the journey that they were left with a choice: push through or stop for one more night. Charity had assumed the kids, at least, would have been clamoring for one more day of true vacation. She’d been surprised, therefore, to find the whole family in agreement.

They were ready to be home.

And soon they would be. Across the last hour or so, the road signs had started naming increasingly familiar locales. First there had been signs for Boston, then Providence. And now, she saw with a smile, Whale Harbor itself, her little town, her wonderful home.

“Thinking about how to explain to your friends that we eloped, and they don’t get to plan a whole wedding?” he teased when she fell silent for a few minutes.

She laughed. “Well, I’d say that the two babies that were just born should be enough to distract them… but you know they’re going to throw us a party, right?”

“Oh, I think Rick is already on to us,” he confided. “He sent me a text the other day oh-so-innocently noting that we’d been on vacation for a long time.”

“We were gone for a bit longer than we originally planned,” Charity said. “Maybe he just?—”

“And then he included a bunch of emojis, including one that I think was supposed to be a detective and another that was a wedding ring. How does he even know how to use emojis? He doesn’t have kids yet!”

“You know, for a tech guy, you’re not very up with the trends,” she teased, not mentioning that she only knew how to use them because Addie and Lucas had taught her.

“So Jordan taught him?” Dominic said, referencing Rick’s young coworker at the Marine Center.

“I think so, yes,” she confirmed with a laugh.

Dominic paused as he switched lanes so he could take the highway exit toward town. “You’re still not sorry we skipped the whole ‘big wedding’ thing, right?”

“Not at all,” she said firmly. “It was… honestly, it was just perfect. So us.”

They’d gotten married in a small section of the redwood forests in California, their officiant and older woman with waist-long gray hair who didn’t advertise except by word-of-mouth. When they’d woken up that day, they hadn’t known it was their wedding day, they’d only known that they were getting married sometime soon. When they’d encountered the woman’s hand-lettered sign that said she could officiate, it had just felt right.

After all, Charity thought, recalling the day with a smile, nothing about her relationship with Dominic had ever been expected. She hadn’t planned to fall in love again, hadn’t planned to find herself with a daughter whom she loved just as much as she adored her son.

And the kids had loved the redwoods. Addie had been so entranced that she’d cried exhausted, overwhelmed tears when they’d had to eventually leave. Plus, most wedding venues couldn’t accommodate an excitable dog. Outdoors, however, Milo had been free to frolic while Charity and Dominic shared the vows they made up on the spot, completely from the heart.

It had been, as she’d said, perfect. Absolutely perfectly perfect.

“Yeah,” Dominic agreed. Now that they were driving through town, the landmarks becoming increasingly familiar, and speeds were lower, he reached out and held her hand again. She felt an increasing sense of rightness settle on her, clicking more firmly in place with every mile closer to home. A smile flicked across her face when they passed Seastar Espresso, it’s lights off for the night.

Vacations were great. Wonderful, even.

But there was nothing like coming home.

As if feeling the same thing, the kids stirred almost the moment they pulled into the driveway, sleepy little murmurs getting closer and closer to words.

“Oh,” Lucas said happily. “Home. Yay.”

“I want to sleep in my bed,” Addie mumbled. “So does Gilly,” she added, squishing her face against her stuffed goose, her eyes still closed.

“Okay, kiddos,” Dominic said. He hefted Lucas into his arms, while Charity led Addie, who was awake enough to move on her own two feet, into the house with an arm around her back.

When the children were tucked snugly into their own beds, Charity and Dominic wearily returned outside. They didn’t need to unpack everything tonight, but Charity knew there were some essentials, like toiletries, that she’d be sorry to have to find early the next day if she didn’t remove them from the car now. A bag over each of their shoulders, the newly married couple snuck back into their house, careful not to wake either the kids or the dog, who would be sleeping on his puppy bed directly between Addie’s and Lucas’s bedrooms.

By unspoken agreement, they both plopped down on the couch, needing a breather before they headed upstairs to their own bed. Charity let out a happy sigh as she snuggled underneath Dominic’s arm.

“Happy to be home?” he asked quietly, pressing a kiss against her hair.

She hummed her agreement, and he chuckled.

“Ready to tackle the next adventure?” he asked.

She sat up, giving him an indignant look.

“Dominic Turner-Reeves, don’t you think we should unpack from this adventure before we go on another one?”

He laughed again and then tugged her back into his side… not that he had to tug very hard. She was more than willing to indulge in some more comforting cuddles with the man she was overjoyed to now call her husband.

He waved an arm that encompassed their living room and, by implication, their lives more generally.

“I meant this,” he said. “This whole thing. It’s our biggest adventure.”

She caught his meaning… and then reached up and caught his lips in a kiss.

“I can’t wait,” she told him, meaning it with every piece of her heart.