The baby nurse and Teresa were trying to get organized. Becky was helping wherever possible. And Salima picked the baby up as soon as Isabelle set him down. It was easy to tell that he was always going to be in someone’s hands. He had doting parents and a loving sister, and a grandmother who loved him despite the color of his hair. Isabelle held him in her arms again before she left the next day.
“At least his hair is not quite as red as yours,” she said to Blaise reassuringly, looking at her daughter-in-law affectionately. Isabelle was thrilled with her new grandson. And she reminded them again to get married, as though they might forget. Blaise and Simon didn’t share her concern. “L’amour n’a pas d’age,” she said, referring to Simon and Blaise. Love has no age. And she looked pensive for a moment as she said goodbye to Blaise.
“Do you realize that when Simon is fifty-five, you’ll be seventy years old?” Isabelle said to her. Blaise had just turned forty-eight and Simon thirty-three that summer. And the fact that they were together and had Edmond was miracle enough for Blaise. They didn’t care about the math.
“We can all count, Mother,” Simon said with a look of exasperation as he escorted his mother out. And Salima bent over the baby to stroke his cheek again. She loved holding him and feeling his face next to hers.
“And when you’re eighty-five, I’ll be a hundred,” Blaise whispered to Simon with a grin, when he came back into the room and she was nursing his son. Edmond looked drunk with delight and his father grinned.
“That sounds good to me,” he said, smiling at her. They had each found the person that they had always wanted and needed. It had just come in a different package than they’d expected. They had been wise enough to see it, and brave enough to grab it, and know it was a gift. The numbers were of no importance. Only the people and the love they shared.
Simon had given her everything she’d ever wanted and longed for in her life. And Blaise was the woman he’d been looking for and hadn’t known it till he saw her. They completed each other, and each was better and had a fuller life because of the other. And with all the humanity that made it special and unique, it wasn’t perfect, and they didn’t need it to be. But it was very, very close to perfect. It was exactly the life they wanted it to be.