Beautiful Mistakes

Plus she felt really comfortable snuggled up against Aaron's chest, his arm fastened securely around her…

Safe wasn't even the right word for it, but she couldn't think of a word to adequately describe how she felt in his arms.

Instead of wasting any more time trying to think of a word to describe the indescribable, Julie closed her eyes and let herself drift off to sleep.

That night while she slept, her dreams were filled with imaginings of her future family, Julie with the baby—only the baby was a toddler in the dream—in their yard, playing in a big mountain of golden leaves.

"Here comes Daddy," she told the toddler in her dreams, grinning as she and the baby stood by the pile of leaves.

Then Daddy came swooping in, picking the toddler up and causing him or her—the baby didn't seem to have a specific gender, she just knew it was her baby—to shriek with glee as he playfully "tossed" the baby into the pile of leaves.

The sound of the baby's giggling filled her ears, and in the dream Julie gave the baby a sneaky little look, then she came up behind the daddy and shoved him into the pile of leaves.

She jumped in after him, and he wrapped his arms around her, the baby climbing in between them and giggling as its parents shared a moment.

A feeling of complete peace came over her, and as they all stayed snuggled up in the leaves, Mom, Dad and baby, Julie felt like her life was completely perfect.

Her family was completely perfect.

Then when the baby finally made its way between them, Daddy leaned in and gave Mommy a soft kiss.

Only in her dreams, the daddy wasn't Matt.

"Daddy," the baby said, trying to climb over him and giving in to a fit of giggles as it slid down into the leaves between them again.

"I love you," Aaron told Julie in her dream as he lifted their baby and caused it to giggle some more, then he gave the baby noisy kisses and Julie laughed.

She woke up then, the dream startled her so much, and she looked up at Aaron in the dark of the night, the warm feelings from her dream still very dominant.

"Oh my," she murmured, giving in to the urge to lightly run her fingers through his hair as she gazed up at him.

For a moment, she felt a pang of something—regret? sadness? longing?—and she placed her free hand on her abdomen, the doctor's visit floating back to the front of her mind.

Daddy.

Then, closing her eyes, Julie tried to fall back asleep and not think about the beautiful impossibility of ever being able to apply that word to the man from her dream.

She tried not to think about the sheer impossibility of her perfect little family.

But somehow she entered back into the dream with the perfect family and the pile of golden leaves, and her waking self seemed to get confused with her dream self, because as Aaron and the brown-haired toddler played, she called out to him:

"I have to put this in the box!"

Chapter Nineteen-

Over the next couple of days Aaron watched Julie carefully, scolding her when she would try to do anything and forcing her to spend a good two hours over the course of the night just sitting in the chair when he finally let her come back to work.

There was a slight buzz around work—Julie kept noticing she was getting strange looks, and Leigh seemed to be keeping a little bit of distance from her, which Julie found disappointing since she really liked Leigh. Debbie never said anything in front of Julie, naturally, but Julie was sure that she was probably saying plenty when she wasn't around.

When she had called Aaron at work to take her to the hospital, it never even crossed her mind that the co-workers would want to know why he was leaving in such a hurry when he was supposed to be working.

The bleeding had become minor spotting, and Julie called the doctor daily to make sure there was no cause for concern, even though they asked the same questions each day and the answers never changed—she wanted to be safe.

She had made a copy of the ultrasound picture to put on the fridge, but since she had a bunch of free time and she had to "rest," she had played around a little on Photoshop and printed out the ultrasound picture with a little text box below it that said, "Mommy's Little Poppy Seed." When Aaron first saw it he cracked a smile and called her a dork, but it didn't seem to bother him, so Julie was glad.

She didn't hear from Matt at first, but later in the week he called her and left her a voice mail telling her to call when she got a chance.

Julie had plenty of chances, but she didn't call.