Page 106 of Filthy Rich Daddies

I swallow. “Dean know?”

“Not yet.”

I nod, turning the ring in the light. “You want us to match.”

Tic’s voice is soft. “I want it to mean something.”

“It already does,” I say. “But yeah…this makes it real.”

He meets my eyes. “You in?”

I close the box gently. “Always.”

After Tic heads off to bed—with no small amount of lingering hesitation—I stay in the kitchen for a few more minutes, watching the steam rise off my tea and letting my pulse even out. The whole house is quiet again. Not just still, but deeply,hollowlyquiet. The kind that creeps in when every light has been turned off except one, and you’re the only soul still awake.

But I don’t mind. This is the only kind of silence that’s ever felt…earned.

Eventually, I slip upstairs. The nursery is dim, but I can hear the faint white noise loop, the occasional sleepy hiccup from Calla, and one of Aurelia’s signature squeaky yawns. I step inside like I’ve been trained in covert ops, moving with absurd stealth.

I check their swaddles. Their breathing. The monitor battery. I lean down and kiss each tiny forehead. They smell like milk and sleep and something warm and new.

Then I step into the master bedroom.

Thalassa’s curled on her side, one hand under her pillow, the other resting instinctively where her belly used to be. Her body hasn’t fully reshaped itself yet, and she hasn’t changed out of the baggy sleep shirt she pulled on earlier. But to me?

She’s never looked more beautiful. She looks like safety. Like home.

I lie beside her, careful not to wake her, and for a long time, I just watch her breathe. My hand inches across the space between us and finds hers in the dark. Her fingers curl automatically around mine.

I don’t know how to be anyone’s father. But I’m going to try.

And I’ll figure it out the way I’ve figured out everything else—on my feet, in real time, with a thousand tiny mistakes and one loud heart.

Sometime near dawn, I dream that the babies cry and I can’t get to them in time.

In the dream, I run barefoot through the house, all the doors too far apart, my feet slipping on the wood. When I reach them, the cribs are empty.

I wake with a gasp. But when I sit up, they’re fine. Both of them, just a room away, sleeping like nothing in the world could touch them.

Thalassa stirs next to me. “You okay?” she mumbles.

“Bad dream.”

She yawns and slides closer. “They’re okay?”

“They’re perfect.”

She presses her forehead to my shoulder. “I’m so tired.”

“Me too.”

“We did it.”

“You did.”

And in that moment—tangled up in her warmth, her voice, the weight of our daughters resting in the quiet—I feel it again. It’s real. All it.

I have never been happier in my life.

The End