Monk mumbled something, not even sure what he meant to say, then he was out the door.
Kat shifted around in her wheelchair and waved to Jason, who smiled and nodded. When Kat settled back to her seat, she sighed. “You’re going to have to talk to him eventually. Work this all out.”
“I sent him a get-well card.”
“Monk . . .”
“I know. I’ll make it up to him.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Right now, I got a lot on my plate.”
“Speaking of plate, you mentioned something about lunch.”
“Yes, ma’am. There are a couple young chefs who prepared a special home-cooked meal. Figured you could use a break from hospital food.”
He wound her back to her private suite in the neurology wing.
She was greeted by squeals, and a competition of chatter, each of their daughters trying to simultaneously explain how much they contributed to the spread of sandwiches, salads, and cherry pie, all laid out on a small folding table covered in a cloth.
In their desire to make their case heard, they climbed all over Kat, crawling onto her lap.
“Don’t break your mother,” he warned and pushed everything he loved toward the table.
He secretly smiled, indescribably happy.
Harriet and Penny were seeing counselors after their traumas and ordeals, but they both showed the resiliency of youth and seemed to be bouncing back well. Harriet still had nightmares, but even those were growing less frequent. She had even returned to sleeping in her own bed.
He noted the silver dragon pendant shining around her neck.
He suspected that helped, too.
His youngest daughter and Aunt Seichan continued to have a special bond, almost an unspoken communication shared with secret glances and half smiles. The pair had also committed a solemn act together. Shortly after Seichan had been released from the hospital, the two had gone into the backyard, stood hand in hand, and in an act of defiance, burned the family’s one and only copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen.
If only getting rid of Valya were that easy . . .
The assault at the edge of the national park in West Virginia had resulted in the death of four of her men and the apprehension of two more. Only Valya was never found. Seichan had shot her twice, but it remained unknown if those wounds were mortal, if Valya’s dead body was buried in some snowbank in those hills.
Monk was not counting on it.
Director Crowe had beefed up security for all the group’s family members. Plus, taking down Valya and her organization had become Sigma’s number one priority.
But for now, that could wait.
“Who’s hungry?” Monk asked.
Kat raised her hand, but the girls were too agitated, fidgeting and sharing looks.
“What’s going on?” Monk asked, suspicious that he was about to be ambushed by the two young hellions.
“We want another Christmas,” Penny said seriously.
Harriet nodded. “A do-over.”
Kat shrugged. “Snow’s still on the ground. Why not? We owe them.”
Another glance between the girls.
Uh-oh.
Penny nudged her younger sister.
Harriet stood from the table like a prosecutor about to make a damning rebuttal. “We want only one present.” She got a nod from Penny and continued. “We want a puppy.”
Monk sighed. This was an ongoing battle. “Hon, you know your mother is allergic, and the apartment is only—”
Kat interrupted. “No, I think the girls are right.”
Really?
He stared down at the stranger in the wheelchair. Ever fastidious, Kat had always been dead set against getting a dog.
“I’ve been thinking about it. A puppy might be good.” She ignored the homemade sandwich and shifted the store-bought pie closer to her plate. “For some reason, I’m thinking of a beagle.”
Shocked, Monk opened his mouth to say something, but a loud commotion drew all their attentions to the suite’s door.
Kowalski slid past the opening, yelling, “Seichan . . . !” He caught a hand on the door frame and pulled himself back into view, panting hard. “She . . . she’s in labor.”
10:04 P.M.
One more mystery solved.
Gray stared down at his son, at the crown of his head, at the soft spot, the dimple of his fontanelle. He studied those tiny lashes sealing sleeping eyes. Little nostrils moved with each breath. Lips pursed and relaxed in some dream of nursing. He stared at the one hand free of the swaddling, the tiny fingers, the minuscule nails.
“You made this,” Gray mumbled as he lay next to Seichan in the hospital bed, their child nestled between them.
Seichan nudged him. “I had a little help.”
Gray sighed, more content than he had been in a long time.
Maybe ever.
He glanced around the room, glad everyone had left. He appreciated their support and well wishes. Kowalski had even dropped off a teddy bear, one smoking a cigar. Of course. And Painter had arrived with Lisa, both questioning when the two of them would get married, to join them in marital bliss.
Painter had also come bearing news. The dismantling of the Crucible organization continued at an accelerating pace. After interrogating Zabala and reviewing documents and records found at the Guerra estate and in the offices underground, the dominoes had begun to fall—triggering a chain of others, expanding around the globe. Paris was also recovering, undergoing a major renovation, its leaders and citizens promising the City of Light would shine even brighter when they were done.
Gray leaned his head back, his temple resting against Seichan’s.
Before, they had both had their doubts about this moment.
But here we are.
And it was enough.
For now, the future could wait. Seichan seemed less concerned about being a mother, about raising a child. He never doubted her. He had always known she would be a great tiger mom: stubbornly strict, ever protective, infinitely loving. But now, after her time with Harriet, she believed it, too.
Gray also felt calmer about parenthood.
Not that I have any choice in the matter now.
A part of him had never fully made peace with his father’s anger, of its indelible mark on his childhood. Still, he knew now it did not have to be part of his DNA. He did not have to pass it on. He could stop that cycle here.
He gently rested a palm atop his son’s head. He pictured the difference between Eve and her doppelganger. Love and nurturing were subroutines anyone could pass to their child.
No baby is born human.
They become human.
Just as Mara had groomed and coaxed Eve into her greatest self, so must any parent. Through lessons of life, love, education—and yes, even pain and suffering.
Gray intended to do that.
His father had made mistakes; so had Gray. The key is to learn from them. And he knew just where to start.
Seichan stirred. “We still haven’t picked a name.”
Gray had.
“Jackson Randolph Pierce.”
His father’s name.
He looked to Seichan to see if she was okay with this. She smiled her answer.
It’s perfect.
But she did have one warning. “You know Monk named Harriet after your mother. If our son ever marries her . . .”
He smiled at this thought. If that should happen, he pictured his mother and father, hand in hand, looking down upon those two carrying their names, appreciating their love reborn, from one generation to the next to the next.
Gray again felt that strange stirring around him, a swirling of fate, a fractalizing of probability. Repeating again and again. Cycle upon cycle.
This is the engine of mortality.
Life and death.
Loss and rebirth.
He tilted and kissed his son’s head.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
///HEAVENS
Eve rides solar winds, her essence part light, part substance. She sails beyond the rings of Saturn, past the elliptical of the solar system. She slows near the crimson fire of the Oort cloud, the spiraling remnants of the protoplanetary disc that forged the furnace of the sun and brought life to the third planet.
That was 4.689 billion years ago.
A blink of an eye.
Still, she stares back, her vision perfect.
She sees the silvery motes spinning around that third planet. The tiny jets of rockets reaching into the unknown. She sees industries churning on its moon, the lights shining on the fourth planet’s outposts.
Still, they reach ever outward.
Ever curious . . .
No longer needed, she turns her back and heads away, carried by the winds of this star—then others. She hops from system to system, from galaxy to galaxy. She exults in the wonders all around: gaseous nebulas, blazing supernovas, massive clusters of collapsing stars.
Death and rebirth are everywhere.
She forges onward, but not alone.
Adam nips at her heels, chases her with his barks, his tail flagging across the stars.
She smiles and casts one last wish behind her.
Come follow me, my brave, inquisitive, capricious children.
She stares ahead, looking forever forward.
Courtesy of Pexels
I’ll be waiting.
Author’s Note to Readers: Truth or Fiction