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Epilogue

Joy

Five Years Later

My feet hurt.

My back hurt.

Everything freaking hurt.

And there was a lollipop stuck to the bottom of my sock.

I shook my foot, but it didn’t budge. “Seriously?”

Holding on to the back of the couch, I lifted my foot, peeled it off, tossed it onto the mountain of candy on the coffee table, then surveyed the wreckage my boys left in their wake.

“Noooo,” I groaned.

There were wrappers everywhere, a pair of devil horns on the floor by the couch, and a tail dangling off the back of the barstool where Jax had unpinned it from David’s butt right before the kid face-planted in his dinner.

Devils. That’s what our twins had been for Halloween.

Go figure.

I’d wanted them to be pumpkins or super heros, or something cutesy, but my husband had taken one look at the little horns at Target and declared those boys were about to be little devils and live up to their name.

So two four-year-olds had gone up and down the block tonight with glitter horns on their heads and pointy tails safety-pinned to their asses, screaming “Trick or treat!” at the top of their lungs, while their daddy walked behind them with a look on his face like he’d won the lottery.

My annoyance at the mess quickly evaporated, and I smiled.

Leaving the wrappers for tomorrow, I padded down the hall toward our bedroom.

Five years ago, exactly one week after we found out we were having twins, Jax had come home with a sledgehammer.

I’d stood in my kitchen with my hands over my mouth while he knocked the wall between our apartments down himself, swinging that thing like a man possessed.

Now we had four bedrooms, four baths, and a living room big enough for two wild boys to wrestle in.

We still lived above the bakery, only now it was Jane down there at three a.m., not me.

Hiring her was the best decision I’d ever made, next to marrying the man whose shirt I was currently pulling over my head.

She took over the morning shift about a month after she started and never gave it back.

The second location opened on the North Side last spring, and Ian ran that one like the diva he was, and I hadn’t seen a two a.m. Shift in years.

Dropping my leggings on the bathroom floor, I kicked them toward the corner because I was a grown woman and I’d pick them up later. Maybe. Then I cranked the shower as hot as it would go and stepped inside.

“Oh, thank God,” I groaned.

Steam. Heat. Water pounding on my aching back.

I braced one hand on the tile and the other on my belly, and right on cue, my daughter kicked me.

“I know, baby girl,” I told her, rubbing the spot. “Mommy’s tired too.”

She kicked me again, and I sighed.