Everything About You

As we approached the double front doors, one side opened and my mother rushed out with Alec and Mazie right on her heels.

“I want to see her!” my mother and Mazie said in stereo.

“Can we get inside first? And, Alec, don’t let the dog escape,” I said.

Alec grabbed Harry the Hound’s collar just as he was about to bound down the steps and across the yard. Today was not a day for us all to be searching for our beagle as he ran around the neighborhood playing hide and seek. Us seeking, him hiding.

Worse, if he spotted a rabbit, we might never see him again for hours.

With her face lit up and tears in her eyes, my mother immediately held out her hands to take Jae from Tate.

I wasn’t sure if he’d let Jae go, but after a second he did and my mother carefully scooped her up and immediately began cooing, crying even harder and smothering our daughter with noisy kisses.

As Tate pulled his hands away, albeit reluctantly, my gaze landed on the tattoo on his inner left wrist. A semicolon. I had a matching one on my inner right wrist since the symbol had meaning for us, both individually and as a couple.

As my mother and the kids filed back into the house, I remained standing on the walkway watching them.

Tate paused while climbing the stone steps and glanced over his shoulder. His dark eyebrows pulled together in concern. “What’s wrong?”

With a shake of my head, I told him, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing is wrong. Everything is right.”

He smiled the smile I hoped to see for the rest of my life. “It’s perfect.”

I joined him on the steps, hooked my arm over his shoulders and escorted him inside.

For a moment, while I’d been staring at the house we’d turned into a home and also our family, I worried that I might have died.

Because if there was a Heaven, I had found it.

The semicolon is by far one of the most powerful and inspiring tattoos. In the English language, the semicolon indicates that the writer could have ended the story simply by using a period but decided the story wasn’t finished yet.

Tate and Ronan’s life together could have ended twelve years prior on that day in their apartment, but it didn’t. Their story had only paused until it could be picked back up again.