Chapter 15

He watched his daughter toddle around the house, his heart heavy, he hadn't touched his wife since her birth.  He did everything she had asked, and even though Alison was now sleeping through the night and he had been able to move back into their bed, she still refused his advances.  He promised to use protection, suggested she could take the pill, but she held firm, no vasectomy, no sex.  He just couldn't bring himself to do it.  As much as he hated being a single father, he loved being a dad.  He still held out hope that one day she would want to be a mother and they could raise more children together.

Two years after Alison's birth everything changed, he came home late from a particularly nasty investigation, and found her laying on their bed, wearing one of those skimpy little numbers that are meant for coming off as quickly as they go on. Part of him really wanted to turn her down, to let her feel the knife of rejection she had thrown at him so many times, but alas hormones and need won over vengeance.

A week later he was watching her run to the toilet, for the fifth time that day, it had been going like that for the last couple of days.  He suggested she go see a doctor, an almost fatal mistake it seemed. "I don't need to go to the damn doctor, this is why I asked you to get the damn'e vasectomy, you think I don't know what's going on?  You knocked me up again, that's what!"

He didn't know what to say, but the tiny voice in his head did, that same voice that had been hounding him since he brought his daughter home from the hospital.  It was too soon for her to be sick he thought, how could she be showing up with symptoms only a week later?  It was too bitter of a pill for him to swallow, and in the end he didn't say a word to Holly about it, instead he scheduled his vasectomy for the following month.

Aging sucked in so many ways, Bailey found it harder and harder to get around these days, and some days she actually looked forward to going and being with her husband again.  Despite having her grandchildren around, she was lonely.

The twins had graduated school, Maddison had been married straight out of high school, and had settled in with her new husband.  Both the girls had went on to college.  Maddison had hopes of becoming a news anchor, and Molly had dreams of  becoming a doctor.

Madeline had given Bailey a beautiful granddaughter, and Megan wasn't to be outdone by her sister, gave her twin grand daughters.  She had finally married Cindy.  Both daughters were expecting again, and she expected that soon Maddison would be giving her grandchildren as well.  Her life was full of happiness, and yet without Trevor it felt so empty in so many ways.  "Perhaps," she thought, "this is the way it is, so that when our time comes we are happy to go.  I never thought I would be ok with leaving this world, and yet here I am, ready whenever it's finally time."

Bailey  watched her daughter-in-law stroll  past her,  somehow she had managed to get herself pregnant again. Bailey was shocked at her son's ignorance in the whole affair.  She chuckled at her not so funny joke.  Alison isn't anymore his then this one is, how he can be such a good private eye and miss the sins going on in his own home is a puzzle to me.

She laid down in her bed, determined to help her son face the bitter truth of his marriage, it was over.  "It's high time he cut his losses and find himself a woman who can be a good mama to his boy."  She closed her eyes and drifted off, into the arms of a waiting Trevor.