Chapter 371: Our L.o.v.e
Amara honestly couldn’t have said how the five of them managed to fit on one bed it hadn’t happened like this since the kids were small enough to all pile onto her lap at once but somehow they did, arms and legs tangled together, everyone laughing about something none of them could later remember the cause of, and for one long, warm moment, Amara simply let herself feel it, she still had this.
All of it. Every messy, overlapping piece of it. That, she thought, was the whole beauty of it.
It was Julian who remembered first, in the middle of the laughter, that the nurse had told him downstairs it was time for Amara’s medication, which was, in fact, the entire reason the tray had been sent up in the first place, a detail that had gotten thoroughly lost somewhere in the pile-on.
"You need to eat something first, so you can take your medication," Julian said, nodding at the tray.
Amara made a face, and even at her age, apparently, she hated taking medicine as much as she had at sixteen.
"I’ll feed you," Justina offered immediately, already reaching for the tray.
"I want to feed Mummy too," JJ said, hand shooting up like she was answering a question in class.
"I want to do it as well," Josh added, not to be left out.
"I suppose that means me too, then," Julian said, getting up to retrieve the tray properly this time.
What followed was chaos four different spoons competing for the same mouth, four different opinions about how big each bite should be, all of them laughing every time Amara had to wave one hand off to make room for the next.
Amara could only manage a few small bites at a time before her stomach protested, though none of them would let the tray go back downstairs with food still on it. So she did what she’d always done best, in one form or another, for sixteen years and twelve years respectively.
"Alright," she said, taking the tray gently out of Julian’s hands. "Now it’s my turn to give you all my love."
And she fed them instead one small bite to Justina, one to JJ, one to Josh, one to Julian, passing the spoon around the circle again and again until every last bit of food was gone, until none of them could remember, or particularly cared, that the tray had ever been meant for her alone in the first place.
Night fell.
Getting the kids to leave that night was its own small battle. None of them wanted to go, each finding some fresh excuse to linger a little longer at the foot of the bed, until Julian finally shepherded all three of them out with the promise that their mother needed rest and would still be there in the morning.
It took nearly twenty minutes longer than it should have.
When the house had finally gone quiet, Julian climbed into bed beside her and pulled her close, holding on the way a man holds something he’s genuinely afraid of losing because he was.
He had come closer, these past few years, to losing her than he ever let himself dwell on in daylight, and the fear of it hit differently every single time it resurfaced, sharper rather than duller with practice.
He knew death was simply part of life. He’d understood that since he was young, had buried people he loved and found his way, eventually, back to something like peace with it.
But loving someone more than his own life, needing her the way lungs need air, made a different kind of arithmetic entirely because a life without her in it didn’t feel like grief so much as it felt like nothing at all.
He’d felt the edge of that particular nothing once before, briefly, years ago. These last ninety days had only confirmed it beyond any doubt he loved this woman, right here in his arms, the mother of his children, more than he had ever managed to say out loud even to himself.
He had lost people before. His father. His brother. Even his young nephews and his mother not long after.
Every one of those losses had broken something in him that never quite grew back the same shape. But none of them, not one, had wrecked him the way even the possibility of losing his wife had wrecked him these past three months.
He understood, lying there with her breathing steady against his chest, that he was simply a fortunate man.
Fortunate to have found someone he considered his other half in every sense of the word.
Every moment he was given with her, every ordinary minute of it, the arguing over medication, the pile of kids on the bed, the quiet nights like this one felt like something he’d been handed rather than something he was owed, and he never let himself forget that, not really, not even in the middle of the busiest years of his life.
Not everyone was lucky enough to find someone like her to walk through a life with. He knew that. He tried, every day, to hold onto the gratitude of it rather than let it fade into the background the way easy things sometimes did.
"Julian." Amara’s voice was soft in the dark. "I’m not going to disappear."
She felt his arms tighten around her, just slightly, and beneath her ear she could hear how fast his heart was beating, faster than it should have been for two people just lying quietly together.
"I’m sorry, did I hurt you?" he asked, pulling back just enough to look at her.
"No, baby." She reached up and touched his face gently.
"I was really scared," he admitted, voice rough. "I’m just glad the heavens didn’t take this angel away from me." He pressed his forehead lightly to hers.
He kissed her softly then, once, and she smiled against his mouth, feeling nothing less than blessed herself to be home, to be alive, to be surrounded, even now, by every messy, complicated, hard-won piece of the family she’d spent her whole life wanting.
Amara’s POV
I feel his heartbeat before I hear him say another word, steady now, slower than it was a minute ago, like just having me here against his chest is enough to talk it back down from wherever fear had sent it.
He reaches over and turns the lamp down lower, just enough that the room goes soft and gold instead of bright, and for a moment we just lie there like that, foreheads almost touching, neither of us in any hurry to fill the silence with anything at all. I trace the line of his jaw with one finger, feeling the day’s stubble under my fingertips, feeling, more than anything, how strange and wonderful it is to simply be allowed to do something this small again.
"Do you remember," I ask him, "our first dance? The one where you stepped on my foot twice and tried to blame the DJ for the tempo?"
He groans, dropping his head against the pillow. "That was one time."
"It was two times, Julian."
"The DJ did speed up."
"You are, and always have been, a terrible liar," I tell him, grinning now, and he pulls me in closer, laughing against the top of my head in a way that vibrates all the way down into my chest.
"I love you," he says, quieter now, no teasing left in it at all. "I love you in a way I don’t think I’ve ever properly told you, not really, not in a way big enough to actually hold what I mean by it."
"You just did," I whisper.
"Not enough." He tilts my chin up with two fingers, looking at me like he’s trying to fit ninety days of fear into a single expression and set it all down at once.
"I want a hundred more years of stepping on your feet at bad parties. I want to still be terrible at dancing when we’re both gray, and our grandchildren are laughing at us for it."
"That’s very specific," I say, though my eyes are stinging now, in the good way.
"I’ve had a lot of time to think about it lately."
He kisses me then, slow and unhurried, the kind of kiss that isn’t in any rush to be anything other than exactly what it is two people who nearly lost each other, choosing, deliberately, to stay found.
I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull him closer, and somewhere in the quiet after that, laughing softly between kisses at something neither of us could later repeat if we tried, the whole rest of the world Nolan, Sebastian, hospitals, headlines, twelve years and three children and every hard thing we’d survived together falls away completely, and there is nothing left in that room but the two of us, exactly where we’ve always managed, somehow, against every odd, to find our way back to each other.
The lamp stays low. The night stretches out, warm and unhurried, entirely ours.
And for the first time in three long months, I fall asleep smiling, wrapped up in my husband’s arms, home.
The End