MASON AND SAGE

Epilogue ~ Mason

Two years after we were married, Sage announced she was pregnant with our first child, and we were awestruck as we watched her body change and then began feeling our child kick and squirm inside of her. It was a magical time for us, so we had to share.

Hi! No real letter this time. Just wanted you to see our gender reveal invitation! We are SO EXCITED!!! All of our friends will be there, and we know you wish you could join in our beautiful day, too. If only!! We'll be sure to send you lots and lots of pictures -- so you can feel as if you had been celebrating right along there with us!

Enclosed with the letter was the exact same invitation Eva had sent to Sage, except this time, there was a very real picture of me standing beside Sage, looking down at her adoringly, my hand next to Sage's on her baby bump. Sage, my perfect, petty kitten, had even tracked down the exact same outfits Eva and her stand-in had been wearing in her faked gender reveal invitation, and we were wearing them in our picture.

"Twinsies, bitch, but mine is real," Sage was muttering when she'd showed me the outfits. She was still salty about that faked invitation, and I couldn't blame her.

We'd even used the exact same wording:

We're so excited to find out whether our little blessing is going to need a pink or blue nursery! Please join us at our home for our baby gender reveal!

Eva's meltdown from the gender reveal invitation had gotten her into so much trouble, she'd had six months added onto her sentence. That was the single greatest addition to date. Twenty years was getting closer and closer with each month. Once we eventually reached the twenty-year mark, we eased off on the letters and limited them to once a month. The infrequent letters seemed to inflame her even more and now she was creeping up on a sentence of twenty-five years.

Of course, that wasn't our real gender reveal invitation, simply because we didn't actually have a gender reveal. Sage didn't want to find out the baby's gender, so we didn't. Although I wanted to know, since Sage was doing all the heavy lifting, I left it to her to decide. So it was a sweet surprise when our little girl was born. We named her Sura -- new life -- and began our new life as a family of three.

As a man, you love your wife. But seeing your wife pregnant and giving birth? Becoming a mother to your child? That takes your love and respect for her to entirely new levels. Although we both worshipped Sura, I found my eyes on Sage just as much as on our baby. Our baby girl might have looked like me, but her sweetness was pure Sage. My girls could get away with murder and I'd be happy to hide the body for them. Sage was everything a mother should be, everything a man could want for his children, and she often told me I was the dad she'd always imagined her children would have. There's something to be said for mutual admiration societies, and our love gave me the desire to be everything everyone in my family needed me to be.

We added a little boy, Macklin, two years after Sura, and then about a year later, we received Skyla as a huge -- but very welcome -- surprise. Then Sage sent me to be neutered, as she called it, and our family was complete. Cashew, when he could be bothered to stop sleeping, enjoyed playing with the munchkins as they got older.

Sage once asked me if I would have told her about kissing Eva in the alley that awful night. I told her I would have and that was the truth. I asked her if she recalled seeing me right when I got home that night I'd just as soon forget. She and I both remembered me walking into the house, locking the door and pressing my head against it, with my fists on either side of my head. For once, I let my body slouch down, even if it was just for a minute. I'd realized during my three hours of walking that I had no choice but to tell Sage and let her decide where we would go from there. My respect for her demanded it, my honor demanded it and our future demanded it, regardless of the outcome. I couldn't let her marry me in two weeks without her knowing the full truth. When I had slouched against that door, I'd known my future with Sage might not survive my confession. Had she been asleep, I would have allowed myself one last night with her and told her when she woke up in the morning. Seeing her awake, I asked her to go upstairs with me so I could confess. But since she already knew what had happened, I hadn't had the opportunity to come clean. 

She listened to my story of coming home that night, her eyes on mine, and then she simply said she believed I would have.

"You never once lied to me, Mason," she'd said. "And moving ahead without telling me would have been a lie, so I believe that."

"I don't deserve you," I used to tell her in the early days of our marriage until she begged me to stop saying that.

"You do," my kitten would purr into my ear as she straddled my lap. "Yes, you did something awful, and you broke my trust, but, Mason, you worked hard to rebuild that. You did everything possible to show me that would never happen again, that you regretted your actions...and you still haven't forgiven yourself, have you?"

"No, not really" I told her. "Not sure I'll ever forgive myself for hurting you, hurting us like that. I almost lost you forever, Sage; that's not something I can rest easy about."

She put her little hands on my chest and looked right at me. "I've forgiven you, Mason. And if I can forgive you, then I want you to forgive yourself."

That required a kiss, so I gave her a good one. When she pulled back, she looked a bit sassy. "So, here's a hypothetical for you: in the extremely unlikely event that sometime in the future I should make a mistake, would you forgive me?"

"Of course," I told her immediately. And that was the absolute truth.

"And what if I couldn't forgive myself?"

I grinned at her, knowing exactly where she was going with this. "I'd want you to forgive yourself."

"Well, there you have it!"

"I'll work on it," I assured her. But deep down, I sort of liked that I hadn't really forgiven myself, because that uneasiness kept me on my toes, kept me working hard every day to be the man Sage deserved. I'd heard once that marriage was hard work, every single day, so you never fell into complacency. I'd been stupidly complacent once, and I had vowed to never let that happen again.

When I'd been in the jungle, sure I was going to die there, Sage was all that kept me alive. My love for her urged me on, kept me fighting and working hard to make it back to her.

Now I enjoyed working hard every day for Sage, for us, for our family. I surprised her often with little gifts that didn't necessarily seem like much, but just showed her I was thinking about her, that she was on my mind, that I wanted to bring a smile to her face, give her a little bit of happy.

And Sage worked just as hard on our marriage as I did. She was forever doing little kindnesses for me, always working to bring a smile to my face -- although that didn't take much from her. Her very existence made me smile and filled my heart with happiness.

I think of all the things we did for each other, it was the simplest one that meant the most to each of us. Words we began and ended each day with, and said them liberally in between.

I love you, Sage.

And I love you, Mason.

I know what I lost when Sage left me, so to me, there was no better, more meaningful gift than those three words. 

It's the gift of forever.