Page 194 of Clinically Bewitched
“For love. For family. For this beautiful, messy, perfect life.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I could feel him processing, the way he always did when I said something particularly spiritual. He didn’t dismiss it anymore, the way he used to. He didn’t roll his eyes or make sarcastic comments about cosmic forces.
He just listened.
And sometimes—more often than he’d probably admit—he believed.
“Do you ever worry?” he asked finally.
“About what?”
“About them. About us. About the future.”
I considered this. “No.”
“No?”
“No.” I sat up so I could look at him properly. “I used to worry about you, you know. In the beginning. I worried that you’d never let go of control. That you’d never trust the universe. That you’d spend your whole life fighting against the flow instead of moving with it.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t worry at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve watched you change. I’ve watched you learn to surrender—not give up, but surrender. To trust that even when things don’t go according to plan, they’re still going exactly as they should.”
He remained quiet, absorbing my words.
“And because,” I continued, “I know the universe has a plan. For you, for me, for them.” I nodded toward our children. “Andthat plan is always, always better than anything we could create ourselves.”
“Even better than my spreadsheets?”
“Especially better than your spreadsheets.”
He smiled, and it was that soft, genuine smile that he reserved for moments like this. Moments when it was just us, when the walls were down, when he was not Dr. Darcy the neurosurgeon but just Julien, my husband, my partner, my soulmate.
“I never thought I’d say this,” he said, “but I think you might be right.”
“About the universe?”
“About everything.”
I kissed him again, longer this time, pouring all my love and gratitude and cosmic certainty into it.
When we pulled apart, Luna was standing at the bottom of the porch steps, hands on her hips, looking exactly like her father when he was about to deliver a lecture.
“Mama, Daddy, you’re supposed to be playing with us, not kissing.”
“We can do both,” Julien said.
“That’s not in the schedule.”
“What schedule?”
Luna pulled a piece of paper from her pocket—because of course she had a schedule in her pocket; she was Julien’s daughter after all—and showed it to us. “The afternoon schedule. Three o’clock to three-thirty is playtime. Three-thirty to four is snack time. Four to four-thirty is story time. Kissing is not on the schedule.”
All I saw were colorful straight crayon lines, squiggly doodles and stars.
