Marcus and Delphine both came, curious to finally meet the family that had briefly upended our entire holiday calendar. Delphine spent nearly an hour talking with Yolanda, who’d been invited too, at my insistence, the two of them bonding over something neither Marcus nor I fully understood until Delphine explained later that Yolanda had once considered nursing school, same as Delphine had years earlier.
Theo grilled burgers he insisted on seasoning himself, refusing all offers of help with the particular stubbornness of a man determined to contribute something concrete to a day built entirely out of abstractions.
Bridget and Paige spoke for the first time that day, standing near the cake table, both of them glancing occasionally toward me like I was some kind of anchor holding the whole strange gathering together.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Bridget told Paige at one point, Iris balanced on her hip. “For your embryo becoming the daughter I never expected to get to raise.”
“I don’t know how to thank you either,” Paige said. “For raising her exactly the way I would have wanted, even though I never got the chance to.”
They hugged, awkwardly at first, then less so.
Yolanda watched from a few feet away, arms crossed loosely, an expression on her face I couldn’t quite name until she caught me looking and offered a small, tired smile that eased something in my own chest too.
“It’s strange,” she said, joining me a moment later. “Watching two women thank each other for something my body actually did.”
“Does that bother you?” I asked.
“Less than I thought it would,” she said. “I think I expected to feel erased. Instead I mostly just feel like I got to witness something most people never get to see up close. Two families figuring out how to be grateful instead of resentful.”
I watched from a nearby bench, Ember asleep against my shoulder for the moment, Iris toddling unsteadily nearby, chasing a balloon that kept escaping her grasp, giggling every single time it slipped free.
Desmond sat down beside me, watching the same scene.
“Never thought I’d see those two hugging,” he said.
I followed his gaze toward the cake table, Bridget and Paige now laughing about something, an image that would have seemed impossible exactly one year earlier.
“Never thought I’d see any of this,” I said. “A year ago I was holding a baby in a hospital room, certain my whole world had just come apart.”
“Did it?” he asked. “Come apart, I mean.”
I considered the question honestly.
“Parts of it did,” I said. “Other parts got put back together in a shape I never would have chosen, but somehow works better than the original.”
Desmond was quiet for a moment, watching Paige across the pavilion, laughing at something Bridget had said, both women more relaxed than I’d seen either of them look in over a year.
“She’s different now,” he said. “Paige, I mean. Since all this. Softer somehow, even though the whole thing was so hard.”
“Grief does that sometimes,” I said. “Cracks you open in a way that lets more in, once you’re through the worst of it.”
“Is that what this was? Grief?”
“Some version of it,” I said. “Grief for the version of this story we all thought we were living, before the truth caught up with us.”
He nodded slowly, watching Iris finally catch her balloon, delighted with herself in the specific way only a one-year-old can manage.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m sorry. For that day. For how I acted.”
“I know,” I said. “You said it already, back then. I heard you.”
“I don’t think I said it well enough,” he said. “I think I was so scared I said everything wrong.”
“You were scared,” I said. “So was Paige. So was I, honestly, once the shock caught up to me a few hours later.”
“How’d you get through it?” he asked. “The shock, I mean.”
