“I told you years ago that I couldn’t keep my hands off her,” Cole said and laughed. “This is what happens.” He motioned to the baby strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn.
“Plus, you should talk, bro.” He motioned to my youngest, who was strapped to mine.
“Yeah, but you’re pregnant with your fourth. That just seems exorbitant. Audrey and I have a respectable three.”
“For now,” Cole said. “I can still see that emotional boner on your face. If Audrey wants another one, she’ll get it.”
“That’s probably true,” I said and laughed.
We’d kept our promise and come back to the Bahamas every year. The only part of the promise that was not intact involved Todd and Evie’s children. They had three little boys, and they were indeed screaming and often filthy. They brought home bugs and worms for their mother and made her scream, too. But she loved them, and it let me see another side of Evie—a side that let me know she was sincere in her love for Todd and for their children.
And I loved her and Todd’s screaming, filthy little buggers for that.
Four years ago, Audrey and I had been married in a small ceremony at the Gardner Museum. Todd and Cole had been my attendants; Jenny and Evie had been Audrey’s. Cole and Jenny had married later that same year. In contrast to our intimate wedding, they rented an entire Caribbean island and had hosted a blowout, black-tie affair, complete with fireworks shot out over the water.
“This is huge,” I’d said to Cole at the time, looking around at the celebration.
“Jenny’s sort of used to huge,” Cole had said, deadpan.
At our wedding, Tommy had walked Audrey down the aisle. She’d looked exactly like an angel, in a long lace dress.
My eyes had filled with tears the moment I saw her. Audrey’s mother had tears in her eyes, too—most likely for a different reason. She was probably counting all the dollars Audrey was marrying into, relieved that she didn’t have to sweat the annual increases to the Massachusetts cigarette tax.
My mother was crying, too. Probably because she was worried about the dilution of her bloodline, as well as the fact that I was marrying the woman who’d brought her house of cards tumbling down.
I thought of it as poetic justice.
Things had changed irrevocably in my family after the allegations surrounding Danielle’s death were made public. No charges were ever brought against my father; there wasn’t enough evidence. My mother, however, had been arrested on a felony-murder charge. The prosecution’s theory was that she had hired someone to kill Danielle by running her off the road. But there wasn’t enough physical evidence for the grand jury as**signed to her case to charge her, and she was set free after a preliminary hearing.
Still, she’d been briefly incarcerated, and the tabloids had gone crazy over the story. Her face had been plastered over all the gossip columns online. Her arrest had even been featured as a companion piece to the spread of Todd and Evie’s wedding in New England Brides Magazine. The Andersons wrote a novel, a thinly-veiled fictional account about what they believed happened to their daughter, that made all the bestseller lists. Celia Preston had been thoroughly and publicly humiliated. Even though it wasn’t the justice she deserved, it was still something.
She would deny her involvement until the day she died. I had made my peace with that. But I also made her donate two million dollars to Danielle’s scholarship fund and include a healthy bequest to the foundation in her will.
I never wanted to speak to her again, but Audrey convinced me to invite her to the wedding and to at least send pictures of the children on a regular basis. Just like I’d convinced her to invite her mother to the wedding and to regularly send pictures of the children.
“They’re our family,” I’d said, shrugging. “For better or for worse.”
“I liked it better when you said that they were dogs. And that we were walking them,” she’d said, but she’d sent the invitations anyway.
Audrey now walked down the beach carrying Bella, our two-year-old daughter. Next to her was Jenny, who was pregnant and glowing, holding her daughter Reese’s hand. Our three-year-old son, Rhodes, was running around with Cole and Jenny’s son, Kyle, both of them splashing in the water and screeching in delight. I had the new baby, Mia, strapped to me. As did Cole. Except his wasn’t a Mia—she was an Audrey, named after her aunt.
There were a lot of us to keep track of.
“Weren’t we all just here a while ago, single, drinking beer, and snorkeling?” Cole asked, looking at our crew. “Jesus, there are a lot of us now.” He looked baffled.