Stray (25 page)

It was almost time for my speech, and I looked around the table at my loved ones, remembering that the company had been both the same and much different at the last New Year
’s Eve party. In fact, except for Erin and Doc, whom I never did learn to call Dad, everything was different. Even they were different in some ways.

I stood to offer a toast to the old year and the new year, and thank the employees for adjusting wholeheartedly to the new regime. Already we were running the resort in more ecologically sustainable ways, thanks in large part to my mother, who sat across from me beaming with what I hoped was pride.

Erin was next to me, glowing with health and happiness after a tough time with morning sickness. She was six months along, now, and just beginning to enjoy the pregnancy. We were expecting a little boy. Max was anticipating that almost as much as I was, based on the fact that he nuzzled Erin’s belly every chance he got.

It had been an eventful year since the last party. First, finding my mother, and everything that came after. After the night I thought of as my breakdown, Erin made it clear that I was completely forgiven, as long as I stayed with her. Since that was my intention, I wasted no time in proposing and marrying her, to make sure she didn’t get away.

I found the courage to tell her I’d planned all along for us to be together, and that’s why I bought her favorite house. She claimed she knew it all along, too. Erin called Doc Simpson home to handle the clinic as soon as she discovered we were pregnant, since some of what she had to do as a vet wouldn’t be good for the baby. In an ironic twist, her due date was a year to the day from the day I met my mother.

Before I even proposed to Erin, though, I took her with me for moral support and questioned Doc about how his brother could have known I wasn’t his son without Doc’s cooperation on the paternity test. Doc was as puzzled as I was, but we decided to leave well enough alone and assume I was his, though for reasons of convenience I didn’t change my last name.

Doc hadn’t known that my mother’s trysts with his brother and his best friend, Theo Miles, weren’t voluntary. They bragged they’d nailed her, and he didn’t question how, just assumed she was lonely with him away at school. When the story came out, he called her, apologized for not looking harder, and they started dating. Erin and I expected to stand up for them after the beginning of the year. We had a bet going; I said they’d do it on Valentine’s Day, and she said they’d wait until June.

Egren and I tried to work together, but our philosophies about the ecology were just too different. When I brought my mother on board because she had a Master’s in Environmental Science, he offered to sell me his shares at a good price, and I accepted. Ashleigh married the son of the owner of the next company her dad invested in. I sent a nice gift, which was returned two weeks after the wedding.

When I thought of all that had happened, and that much of it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t taken Max into the clinic that night, it left me shaking my head in wonder. All this: my happiness, my relationship with my mother, marrying the love of my life and soon a son, all this amazing joy, because of a stray.

The End

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