Until Fools Find Gold (Providence Gold 1)

‘Millions of women have them, Luna!’ Well, good for them! Millions of fish want their balls and guts back, too. Is it happening? Un-bloody-likely.

Noah was rubbing my back and whispering to me when the doctor came back in.

“The operating theater is ready now, Luna. I think we need to call time on this one.”

I wanted to cry. I was a failure. I couldn’t even get my baby out of a straight tunnel. How was I going to get her in a diaper? What if I missed her mouth with my boob and blinded her?

I was well aware that I was a hormonal mess, I’d been like this throughout my pregnancy and they’d reassured us I would go back to normal once my hormones went back to normal. I couldn’t wait for that day, it was driving me insane!

Bawling into Noah’s chest, I nodded my sweaty face and tried to say okay. I was so caught up in the tears that I missed Madix walking in until Noah turned me to face the other side of the bed and I saw him standing there with his hand over his eyes.

“Mad… Ma… Madix,” I wailed. “She doesn’t like my vagina, and they’re gonna gut me like a f… f… fish!”

Without removing his hand from his eyes, he reached out with his other one and waved it around in the empty air looking for me. Moving forward, I stuck my sweaty face right in his palm.

“Luna, you can do this. All you have to do is think of how time sensitive it is.”

“What do you mean?” I asked my brother, wiping my nose on his palm and smiling when I saw the grimace on his face.

“Well, remember when you were little, and we’d pull a funny face at each other, and Nana would tell us our faces would get stuck like that if the wind changed?”

And I thought I was weird. What did this have to do with what I was going through?

“Uh, yeah?”

“Well, you’ve had her in the chute for two hours,” he reminded me. “What if what Nana was saying was true? Two hours with her head right there…”

Holy shit. Two hours with a baby’s head stretching me?

Spinning round to face the medical crew who were standing watching us in amusement, I growled and pushed.

“Get out, get out, get out!” I yelled, grabbing both Noah and Madix’s hands, and then pushed like I was shitting my ever-loving heart out. Not that I needed to, but the nurse had told me earlier that that’s what I was meant to do– so I did. “Whatever happens, forget it happened. Do you hear me?” I yelled at the room and pushed again.

Both men yelled as I crushed their hands, and then my little daughter screamed her head off at the same time as her mommy when her shoulders split me in half.

It was a group affair.

And there wasn’t a poop in sight, I swear it!

“What’s her name?” the nurses asked as they did whatever it was that they did down the business end before the cord was cut.

“Oh shit,” my husband gulped.

At first, I thought it was because of what he was looking at as he reached over with the scissors. Then I worried that he’d cut the wrong thing.

But then I realized that my husband, the one who had begged me for months to be allowed to choose our daughter’s name, had forgotten to do that one crucial thing.

I was going to kill him!Epilogue 2

NoahTonight was the night. Our eldest daughter, Jamie, had her first basketball game. Well, it was kind of basketball, about as much as it could be for five-year-olds.

I walked in with my three-year-old son on my hip. Not because he wanted to be, but because he was such a little shit that he had to be. If I let Leo run around, he’d steal the balls and tear down the nets.

Last time, I’d found him under the bleachers looking up one of the other mother’s skirts. Trying to explain that your little kid was curious and not a pervert was awkward as fuck!

He was such a pain in the ass!

I’d eventually had to admit to my wife that I’d forgotten to pick a name for our daughter when she was born. Actually, the excuse I’d gone with at the time had been that I was so overwhelmed with emotion over the birth of the baby, that I’d forgotten what I’d chosen.

I later came up with Jamie and it had been an immediate yes from her mother– thank shit!

Seeing Luna sitting down already, the baby in her belly about to burst out, I took a struggling Satan over to sit beside her.

“How kind of you to finally turn up,” she snorted, watching as Jamie dribbled the ball like a pro. She was only five, but she was as tall as a nine-year-old, so it wasn’t hard to track her progress down the court.