Christine swallowed hard, in surprise.

“But when you left, after I saw what you were willing to do, how far you were willing to go for that baby, our baby”—Marcus’s eyes began to glisten, but he blinked them clear—“it made me think. It made me understand. I married you for a reason, because I love you and because I want to go through this life with you. I didn’t want you to be alone ever, especially not during the tough times. We’re in this together, no matter what, but it took your going away for me to realize that.”

Christine couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Marcus had never spoken this way before, or with so much emotion. She felt herself soften, letting her guard down.

“And that’s when I realized that that’s what being a parent really is. Being a parent, being a father, is putting somebody else first, but I never was a father before, and truly, I never put anybody first before, not even you.” Marcus’s eyes brimmed with tears. “But that’s going to change, it already has, and that’s why I left this morning, even before Gary called. I was coming down here to bring my wife and my baby home, where they belong.”

Christine felt all of her love for him come rushing back, warming her from the inside and out, flowing through her veins like lifeblood, but she didn’t interrupt him because she could see he wasn’t finished.

“I want to be a better father than my father was, not let my pride and ego get in the way of everything in my life, ruin it all, and hurt the people I love most, like you. Honey, it took me awhile, and I’m slow on the uptake, but I finally figured out exactly who the father of that baby is. It’s me. I’m the father.”

“Oh, babe,” Christine said, reaching for him, and Marcus reached for her at the same moment, and they clung to each other, husband and wife, bruised and battered, alone in the darkness, in the middle of the countryside. But for the first time, their embrace made a shelter for their baby.

And it was time to go home.

Epilogue

It was a typical January in Connecticut, and the third winter storm of the season blew outside, hard enough to rattle the windows in the house. Snow buried main roads, covered rooftops and cars, and burdened tree branches and power lines, but Christine felt safe and warm, cocooned inside their bedroom. Marcus had insisted that they buy a generator, not wanting to take any chances with a power outage since the arrival of one Brian Paul Nilsson, currently nine pounds, two ounces, born two weeks ago with a smile on his face.

And everyone else’s, too.

Christine’s labor had gone as well as could be expected for the most excruciating pain any woman would ever have, but Marcus had cheered her on, telling her when to push and when not to and cutting the umbilical cord after baby Brian had made his entrance, so quietly that they both worried something had gone wrong. Brian had burst into lusty crying soon enough, and Christine got to be in the other scene she’d always dreamed about, the one with the new mom lying exhausted and sweaty after labor, holding an adorably weighty package of person, who had blue eyes, cute little lips, and enough brown hair on his head to qualify as a fright wig.

The memory lingered happily as she lay in bed, in the middle of the night, the bedroom dark except for the TV, where a bundled-up meteorologist stuck a yardstick into a massive snowdrift. She kept the TV tuned to the Weather Channel these days, sitting out the endless cycle of bad news on CNN and the like. She had seen enough violence for an entire lifetime, and she still couldn’t get the images out of her mind, popping into her consciousness when she least expected it, like a mental ambush. She took comfort in knowing that the authorities had more than ample proof that Dom Gagliardi had murdered Gail Robinbrecht, Susan Allen-Bogen, and Lynn McLeane; there had been horrifyingly incriminating photos in his computer, and they’d found so-called “trophies” he kept from all three nurses, which the police did not reveal to her, and she didn’t need to know more. Zachary had been set free, returning to his job at Brigham and saving for medical school with renewed determination.

Christine thought of him from time to time, even now, and though the entire episode had been awful, it had been a blessing in disguise. Marcus had been right that they weren’t back at square one, because without what happened with Zachary in Pennsylvania, she and Marcus never would have gotten their marriage back on track, and Marcus would never have embraced the baby the way he had, from the moment Brian was born. A new father was born that very day, too, and the truth came out in the open, never to be denied again, even to Brian himself, when the time came.

Christine counted her blessings, lying there in the darkness, knowing even as she was living it that this was another scene from a movie she’d always wanted to be in, where the father was taking a nighttime feeding with the baby, using her pumped breast milk. He was trying to give her a break to sleep, but she couldn’t and didn’t even want to, savoring the sweetness of the moment. Through the baby monitor, she could hear Marcus humming his little Swedish folksong as he rocked the baby in the nursery. The very sound brought tears to her eyes, and Christine didn’t know how she got so lucky, or so blessed.

She looked forward to the other scenes she’d always hoped she’d be in: the one with Brian’s first steps, then when he went to kindergarten, when he read his first Dr. Seuss book, when he met his first girlfriend, then went to prom and college, and on and on and on, in the series of scenes that are the expectations every parent has, in the movies we make of our own lives. Christine knew that some of her expectations would be met, some maybe even surpassed, and still others would go very differently from the way she’d expected, but she was ready for everything that came their way.

What she had wanted the most was a child, perfect in all its imperfections, and she had gotten what she wished for.

In fact, she had gotten something even better.

A family.