I could relate because it pleased the shit out of me having Remi at home with our babies.
Still, I’d hated to see Emily go, but she’d managed to run Oscar off before she’d left, so I owed her a far bigger severance package than I had given her.
Tyson stood up from the poolside recliner and hitched up his swim trunks. “I’ll grill, ya bunch of babies.”
“No!” Cassidy snapped. “Jared, come get your husband before he lights the house on fire.”
I rolled my eyes. “He won’t light the house on fire.”
“Thank you,” Tyson drawled, leveling Cassidy with a snotty glare. “Good to know someone has faith in me.”
Swaying from side to side, gently bouncing my three-month-old daughter, I elaborated. “No. I meant that literally. I moved the grill to the other side of the pool. It would be virtually impossible for you to light the house on fire. But I don’t trust you with almost two hundred dollars’ worth of steaks though, either. Dad, you’re up.”
My dad kicked his feet up and shook his head. “No can do. I’ve got a game to watch.”
“Welp, looks like we’re eating sandwiches then.” I shrugged. “I can make those one-handed.”
Remi walked outside holding a casserole dish of her world-famous tortellini salad and set it on the table. “Why are we eating sandwiches? I spent two days marinating steaks.”
“Because out of all the men we have here, suddenly nobody can grill.”
“I told you—” Tyson began to interject.
“I told you no.” He was practically known for cremating a good piece of beef. Or chicken. Or pork. Or any edible substance he attempted to cook over the flames.
“Sandwiches it is,” Aaron stated absently.
For two years, Remi and I lived the most incredibly quiet, uneventful life together. She hadn’t completely gotten her memories back, but every so often, something would float to the surface and we’d delicately deal with whatever it was. It took a long while for me to share her curious excitement when she came to me with questions of real or not real. Especially when her flashes of the past led us to conversations about things I would’ve rather forgotten.
Her memories didn’t stay good forever. She eventually regained pieces from her first suicide attempt and clues she’d missed about Mark. But the darkness was no match for the bright light that was Remi Michaels. After I was finally able to internalize and accept that, the memories didn’t scare me so much.
And who needed the past anyway? Remi and I made new memories together. Thousands of them. She’d chosen not to reopen Grey Realty so we’d have the time to grow as a couple. And together, we’d flourished.
We had taken a cruise and gone on road trips together. We’d learned that, regardless of our preference to not fly, driving for days at a time didn’t really do it for us, either. Trains were where we’d found our traveling sweet spot. Slow. Unrushed. Hours of laughing and pretending to be new people from the towns that passed by our windows or stories we made up about the odd strangers we saw in the cars as we rolled down the track became some of the best parts of our vacations.
But just like our lives together, it was never about the destination. We’d learned it was the journey that made us strong. Made us love harder. Made us unstoppable.
We’d built a house together, something that was both of us all wrapped in one. The porch was bigger—for me. The sunroom was bigger—for her and her rainforest of plants. We got a pool—for both of us. Or so I let her think. Her spending almost every waking minute of the summer in a bikini—that was all for me.
And to top it off, we’d adopted a cat.
Well, we didn’t so much as adopt him as he adopted us. Eggs Benedict Arnold as my lovely nutjob wife had named him was a solid black cat Remi had spotted in the bushes while we’d been eating breakfast on the patio one lazy weekend. He was feral and batshit crazy, and he popped every pool float I bought the second we walked inside to grab a drink. But Remi loved him, so he was ours. He refused to let either of us pet him, but I had faith he’d come around.
The good ones always do.
For those years as newlyweds, we had taken things slow. There was no gardener or flower. We watered each other. And when I couldn’t take care of her or she couldn’t take care of me, we trusted in fate to care for us both. It had never let us down before.
“Babe,” Remi said, smirking as she peered up at me. “I know you love her, and she only likes you when she’s sleeping right now because you don’t have boobs. But Dad gave up a whole life in Miami in order to move back and spend time with his grandkids. Let him hold her.”
