Shattered Dreams (Dream #1)

Epilogue Two

Charlie

Five years Later

The soft bells ring and my eyes flutter open, taking in the almost dark room. The sunlight tries to come through the side of the shades. I turn to my side to stop the alarm from ringing, shutting it down before I turn the other way, reaching for Autumn. “Morning,”

I mumble as my hand touches the empty space where she is supposed to be sleeping. I get up on one elbow, looking over at the baby monitor by her side of the bed, and see Landon, our three-year-old son, still in his bed, “Baby,”

I say softly, looking back at the door to the bathroom and seeing it open but no noise coming from there. I flip the covers off of me, getting out of the bed, and looking down at the phone that is right next to the picture of the three of us, taken last summer when we went to my parents’ house. Autumn is tucked to my side, her arms around my waist, while I hold her shoulder with one arm and Landon with the other. The three of us posing for the camera. It is such a beautiful picture I also had one made for my office.

Grabbing a pair of shorts before I walk out to the kitchen and see it’s empty also, I look around. “Autumn,”

I say her name louder, looking around the room and spotting pictures of us all over the place.

The table in the corner of the living room still has Jennifer in the middle, with pictures of us all around it. I’m about to take out my phone when I look out to the back patio and see her sitting in the swing. I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding, as I make my way to her. Pushing open the back door and then the screened storm door, her head turns to look at me. “What the fuck.”

My voice is tight, and her eyebrows shoot up.

She has one leg tucked under her as she pushes the swing with her other foot. It’s the same swing she had at her house; we just moved it over to ours. " Good morning to you, grumpy pants.”

She is wearing a loose, long-sleeved gray, off-the-shoulder shirt with matching shorts. That is exactly what she wore to bed last night before I peeled it off of her. She holds the white coffee mug in her hands. " Did someone get up on the wrong side of the bed?”

“No.”

I sit down next to her, wrapping my arm around her waist and pulling her to me. She holds the coffee cup above her head, laughing as I tug her over my lap and she straddles me. I bury my face in her neck as I wrap both arms around her waist. I close my eyes and my heart starts beating normally now that she is in my arms. “How am I supposed to make you breakfast in bed for our anniversary if you leave the bed?”

She leans the side of her face on my head. “Happy anniversary,”

she responds softly. “I think you gave me my gift this morning, at like three, when I got up to use the bathroom and came back to bed, and you mauled me.”

“I didn’t maul you.”

I smile. “You were just wearing too many clothes.”

She laughs. “What time did you wake up?”

I finally let her go. She sits back on my lap, brings the cup to her lips, takes a sip, and then offers it to me. “This is cold,”

I retort when I take my own sip. “How long were you out here?”

“A little while,”

she replies softly and avoids looking at me, instead she turns her face to the side. “Was just sitting here thinking.”

“Yeah,”

I ask, knowing something is up with her, “and what were you thinking about?”

She shakes her head and puts her hands on my chest, right where my heart is beating. “I was just…”

she trails off. When she looks up at me, I see tears in her eyes, and everything inside me freezes. “I was thanking Jennifer.”

I lean over to the side, putting the coffee mug on the table before giving her all my attention.

“Autumn.”

My voice comes out in a whisper.

“I know, I know,”

she starts, wiping her tears off of her face, “but I was just, I don’t know, thanking her without trying not to feel guilty about having you.”

I hold her face in my hands. “I believe in my heart this is where we would always be.”

My thumbs catch her two tears. “That regardless, this right here with you and our son is where I would have been.”

“You can’t say that.”

Her bottom lip quivers. “You don’t know.”

“You’re right. I don’t, but what I do know is that my life with you, with Landon, it’s not something I would trade, for anyone, ever.”

I kiss her lips, our foreheads connected

“I’m pregnant,”

she reveals softly. My eyes fly to hers, and my heartbeat speeds up, listening to the words, blinking a couple of times, wondering if I’m hearing things or not. But the smile on her face, the way her eyes light up, I know. “I’m three days late. I woke up this morning and took the test.”

I bring her face to mine, sliding my tongue out and into her mouth, her hands roam up my chest to around my neck. Pressing her into me, I’m about to carry her to bed when the door opens, and Landon comes out with tears running down his face. “Mama,”

he cries out, coming to us, wearing his tractor pj’s, “I thought you left me.”

He uses his palm to wipe the tears from his face as Autumn turns and holds out her hands for him.

“I would never leave you.”

She moves back on my lap, turning him and sitting him down between us. “Never, never.”

She kisses his head, my arm holding them to me.

“We would never leave you.”

I look at my wife. “Do you know what today is?”

I ask him and he rests his head on Autumn’s chest. “It’s the day Mommy and Daddy got married.”

He looks up at me. He looks exactly like me, minus his eyes, which are just like his mother’s. The mirror to his heart, like hers.

“Do you love her?”

Landon looks at me and then his mother, then back at me with a smile, and I give him the same smile back. “He loves you,”

he tells Autumn, who just laughs at him.

‘Yeah.”

She nods her head. It’s something that started when he was two-years-old and I walked into the house one day and said, “Landon, you know what? I love her.”

Then I kissed her lips, making him laugh. So ever since then he asks me every single time I get home, “Daddy, do you love her?”

She kisses the top of his head before looking at me. “I love him too. How about we go and get breakfast going?”

she asks him and he jumps off of me and runs toward the door, and we watch him run into the house.

“Thank you, baby,”

I tell her, and she turns to look back at me, tilting her head to the side. One hand goes to wrap around the side of her neck, and the other goes to her stomach. “Thank you for taking my shattered dreams and making them real, mending them so they are so bright they’re hard to look at.”

“No,”

she refutes, getting off of my lap and holding out her hand for me, “thank you for mending all of my broken pieces and putting me back, not like I was, but better than I’ve ever been.”

She turns. “Now come and feed your wife and children.”

I get up, slipping my hand in hers.

I watch her walk into the house before turning and taking a look at the blue sky and silently saying, Thank you, Jennifer, for giving her to me.