Chapter 16
We had a little girl in the spring.
We named her Lily, after Clara’s mother. She was small, with dark hair like Clara and blue eyes like mine, and she was perfect. I held her for the first time in the delivery room, and I cried, big, ugly happy tears, because I’d never felt anything so right in my whole life.
Clara held her, too, crying and laughing, kissing her tiny forehead. My father was there, pacing the waiting room, and when the nurse brought him in to see her, he cried too, holding her like she was the most precious thing in the world. He’d never gotten to hold his own granddaughter before, he said. He was going to make up for every lost second.
Lily changed everything.
The house, which had once felt so big and empty, was suddenly full of noise and laughter and tiny socks and stuffed animals. We moved into the family wing, the rooms closer to the kitchen and the garden, turning the old master suite into a playroom. We spent our nights taking turns holding her when she cried, our mornings drinking coffee while she played on a blanket on the floor, our weekends walking her around the garden in her stroller, pointing out the flowers and the birds.
I worked less, taking time off to be with them. The company was in good hands—James, Daniel, my father, they could run it without me for a while. Nothing was more important than my girls.
Clara was an amazing mother. She was patient, and kind, and she sang to Lily every night, the same lullabies her mother had sung to her. She taught her to say “mama” first, which made me pretend to be jealous, but I was just happy. When Lily said “dada” a week later, I cried again.
Lily’s first birthday was a big party, with all our friends and family. We had a cake shaped like a rose, and a bounce house, and a clown who made balloon animals. Lily ate half her cake with her hands, getting frosting all over her face and hair and dress, and we took a hundred photos, all of them blurry and perfect.
That night, after she was asleep, Clara and I sat on the porch, drinking wine, watching the stars.
“Remember when we were hiding in the cottage, scared for our lives?” she said.
I nodded. “Feels like a lifetime ago.”
“Sometimes I wake up and think it was all a dream,” she said. “That I’m still a maid, still scared of Vanessa, still watching you from the corner. And then I hear Lily cry, and I know it’s real.”
I pulled her close, kissing her temple.
May you like
“It’s real,” I said. “All of it. The love, the happiness, our perfect little girl. It’s all real. And no one is ever going to take it away from us again.”
She leaned her head on my shoulder, and we sat there in silence, happy, at peace, knowing we’d earned every second of it.
