"It's hotter than hell in here," Emily said breathlessly.

"The air conditioner stopped running," I mumbled, trying to gain control of my heart rate and breathing. I gingerly stood from the bed and went to the small window unit in the cottage. I heard Emily laugh.

"What?" I asked.

"You have a hundred dollar bill stuck to your ass."

I laughed and reached back, pulling the paper from my sweaty skin. Emily's blackjack winnings were scattered all over the bed and floor.

I fiddled with the dials on the air conditioner. "Shit. I think this is broken."

Opening the window, I discovered the air outside gave no relief - it was August in the Bahamas and the warm humidity in the air at three o'clock in the morning was not all that different than it was at three o'clock in the afternoon.

"Here," Emily said.

I turned and caught the robe she tossed at me. She already had my t-shirt pulled over her body, the hem settling at the top of her thighs.

"What are we doing?" I asked

"Cooling off. Come on," she said with a grin, heading towards the door. "I found a place when I was out snorkeling."

I tied the belt on the robe and followed her outside the cottage. We weren't exactly on a private beach as six other rental cottages faced the water along with ours. But it was quiet in the middle of the night. My white t-shirt she was wearing glowed in the moonlight and I followed her to the water's edge and then to the right where there was a copse of palm trees.

"Where are we going?" I whispered into the night.

"Almost there," she said.

Fifty yards later, we came to a clearing. The cabins were hidden from view on the left, and to my right, I could make out the lights of hotels off in the distance, but there was nothing and nobody here that could see us - no cottages, no homes. It was a very small private beach, a scrap of sand, and then water.

I watched her as she pulled the t-shirt off her body. "There's barely any coral around here. We should be fine. Come on." She gave me an impish grin before turning to dive into the shallow, calm water.

I was no fool. My wife was naked in the warm waters of the Bahamas, and I wasn't about to not follow her. I shed my robe and dove in after her. She laughed and splashed me gently when I reached her. She leaned her back against my chest, our feet planted in the squishy sand, her head on my shoulder and turned so her lips pressed against my neck. "Thank you," she said. "For finding this place. For bringing me here. For loving me."

There was a half moon that night, but it was enough to see by. I watched over her shoulder as the rivulets of sea water ran over her breasts. Her ivory skin and my darker skin were a perfectly orchestrated dance against each other, out there in the water where it felt like we were the only two people left in the world. I kissed her neck and her cheek and her right arm looped up and back so my head was held to the warm skin between her ear and shoulder.

"Do you know the legend of the selkie?" she asked.

I shook my head. I had a vague recollection of the term, but nothing more. She used my arms to pull my body tightly to hers and I held on. "It's an old legend, Irish in its roots, though there are many countries who have similar fables and folklore. They say the male human seeks out the selkie, a seal-like creature who is always drifting and swimming. When the male finds her, he takes her seal skin away and she becomes a human with him, to marry him and love him."

I pressed the palm of one hand against her stomach and the other over her heart. "Is she happy, when she's taken from the water?"

"Sometimes not. There are many stories about selkie females who marry the man who took her seal skin away and she has children with him, but then later sought her skin so she could return to the sea. But I like to believe that when the right man finds her, she's happy. She doesn't want to go back to the water and drift, she just wants to stay with him."

I turned her in my arms at that point and kissed her. "I'm glad I found you."

Her wet hands trailed over the contours of face. "Me, too." She wrapped her arms and legs around me as the water lapped at our waists. "You know, there are male selkies, too. They shed their skin and take a human form. They're said to be masterful at the art of seduction."

With that, she ground her pelvis against me, and I felt myself getting hard. I smirked. "Who's seducing whom here?" I asked.

I held her to me as she laughed. The pictures of perfection in our life where plentiful. It was perfect when we all laughed around a dinner table together - Leon and Rory and my mother and her father with us. And it was perfect when the team was over. It was perfection when I watched her nurse and rock Rory to sleep each night, and when we read with Leon before bed. And this was perfect, too - just the two of us out here in what was only steps away from civilization, but felt like the middle of nowhere.

We kissed out there in the water for several minutes, our hands trailing over each other, our breath catching here and there. With her legs wrapped around me, I pushed inside her. I expected for her to stay upright in the water, with her legs around my waist and her arms wrapped around my neck, but she released me with a brief kiss and let herself fall back into the water, so her torso was floating before me and she was looking up at the stars in the sky.

I stilled the movement of my pelvis. "What if two selkies find each other? Two drifters who come together. Do they stay together in the water?"

I looked at her while she contemplated me, her body glowing in the moonlight and the water dancing on her skin.

"I've never heard of a story like that, but maybe it's out there." She tilted her head slightly to catch my eyes. "Or maybe we're writing that story right now. Two selkies who find each other and shed their skins to live as humans with their children and their family."

I pulled her upper body back up to me and turned us around, taking a few steps towards the beach. I got just far enough so I could lay her down with her head was above the gently lapping waves and I could sink my knees into the sand. "Is she happy?"

Her fingers were on my cheeks and her thumbs trailed over my lips. "Happier than any definition of the word, even though she's about to get sand in unmentionable places."

I chuckled and flipped our bodies over so she was on top.

What a sight she was that night above me, with the moonlight and water reflecting on her skin, with her body bent over me and her forehead pressed against mine while she moved above me and the warm, salty water covered me from the neck down.

I'll never know for sure, but I like to believe that was the night Emily lost her IUD. Sometime between winning big at the blackjack tables at Atlantis and our time in the water, it had dislodged itself, or I'd dislodged it, and it washed away in the waters on that beach there unbeknownst to us, when we were declaring our happiness in the quiet confines moonlit sand and sea.

Something let loose in Emily the moment she whispered, "I'm pregnant," in my ear. A deluge of tears and her clinging to me instead of pushing me away, and I welcomed it. To say I felt shocked would be an understatement. Shock paled in comparison to what I felt. We were both past the point of mid-forties, and I thought with everything in me that Leon and Rory were it.

Before questions could spill past my lips about how and when, I thought about all the times I told myself to to slow down and enjoy watching Emily with Rory, believing that every single moment of Rory's infancy would be the last that we experienced. I thought about all the nights where I was too tired to give Emily and our baby my full attention, and how I felt guilty about that. And now I felt the opportunity of a second chance to remember it all - every beautiful detail.

Though I'd intended to make love to Emily that night and not let her be distant, I pulled out of her instantly. I kissed her forehead and her lips and moved my body down the silky skin between her chin and abdomen.

The tears in my life have been large torrential bursts and abrupt stops when I've declared inside me that it was enough. But this was different. There wasn't a burst of tears, but a slow, steady drip that naturally flowed from my body over the skin of Emily's stomach. "What?" I asked. "What?" over and over while her hands clasped my head to her skin and I felt her body shake with her own tears.

"I don't know," she cried. "My IUD fell out. I didn't know. I took the fetal DNA test today. We should know in a week if everything's okay, but I'll have to retest in a couple of weeks because it's early. I'm about eight weeks pregnant. I saw the heartbeat."

The heartbeat.

I kept one hand clasped to Emily's hip and my face against her stomach, but my other traveled up her skin to rest over her heart.

"Do you want this?" I asked, scared and my voice thick with tears.

I had to ask. It was the first time I'd wished I had a head full of hair, so she could dig her fingers into it and press my face to her skin and cling onto it and never let go. I didn't have that. Her fingers with their torn up nails rested gently against the bare skin of my scalp and I had free movement if I wanted it. But there was no way I was moving from where I was and the several seconds of silence nearly broke my heart.

"This baby is you and me. Of course," Emily finally breathed.

Emily's thighs were warm against my rib cage and her sparse, trimmed pubic hair was pressed somewhere around my neck, my hands clasped her hips and my cheek rested over her belly button. "Our baby," I whispered.

Maybe two kids under the age of two should have scared the crap out of me with Emily like she was right now, but it didn't. In that moment, I thought that a baby was the one certainty that could bring her back to me.

"Hi baby," I whispered over and over while pressing my lips to the silkiness of her stomach and her hands rested gently on my head and she cried.

We fell into an exhausted sleep like that at some point that evening and woke up in the same position the next morning, smiling softly at each other when the alarm went off.

I've done some sleuthing on the internet. There's an infinitesimally small chance that a woman can have an IUD fall out. There's an even smaller percentage of women who are forty-seven years old who conceive naturally. In fact, one doctor quoted online that in twenty-six years of practice he'd never seen a woman over the age of forty-six conceive naturally. And then there's the small percent chance that a woman Emily's age won't miscarry.

I'm sure Reid could extrapolate the numbers for me, but I won't ask him because right now we're keeping this pregnancy under wraps. And I'm not sure I need his fractional percentage either, or that I want it. I'm smart enough to know that the odds of us actually having a healthy baby sometime in the spring is about on par with winning the national lottery.

I'm thinking of buying a ticket, even if we don't need the money.

But she's come back to me since then, in small ways. She's not so distant when the kids aren't around. Her arms loop around me when I'm doing the dishes, her lips on my skin are her choosing, not my insistence.

She's still picking at her nails, but she's taking care of herself in other ways. She's not leaving our bed to exercise in the middle of the night, though I know she's walking a lot during the day. She can't stand the smell of eggs or meat cooking, so I get downstairs before my mother shows up in the morning and start a big pot of oatmeal that I happily watch Emily stuff away.

Her hand is in mine before I clasp onto her fingers, and her smile is more frequent. And this morning, Dr. Craig called before I left for work. Leon had already left with my mom for his walk to school. We're all operating under the guise now that Rory wants to tag along, so Leon is never left without an adult at least a few steps behind him; my mom was following him on this walk to school with his friends this morning.

And Dr. Craig called.

And Emily answered and put the phone on speaker.

"Everything looks amazing," Dr. Craig said. "Fantastic. Do you want to know the gender?"

This time, it was me who wanted to be surprised, more than Emily, but Emily looked at me and nodded with tears in her eyes, so I nodded back.

"Yes," I hushed out over the speaker in Emily's phone.

I thought I'd be totally caught up in the words that came from Dr. Craig's mouth, but I wasn't and couldn't be. Because Emily grabbed her phone as soon as Dr. Craig started speaking and turned her body. She sank down against our kitchen cupboards and clasped her phone.

"How can this even be real?" she whispered.

I took the phone from her and spoke softly into the speaker. "We'll call you back," I said to Dr. Craig before disconnecting and placing the phone on the floor.

I straddled Emily's legs and placed my hands on her cheeks. "You look at me, Emily Morgan. What happened with the break in and my mom was a fluke. That's it. It happened and you saved us all and it's over. This is not a fluke. This baby is meant to be. This baby was meant to be before my mom was taken. This baby is meant to be now. Because we deserve this crazy, beautiful life. This baby is NOT a fluke. This is real. It's you and me and everything that's right in this world."

She shook her head. "I don't deserve this."

"How can you even say that?" I asked.

She shook her head and put her arms around me and sobbed into my shoulder, but didn't say anything more, and hasn't said anything more about it. But she's not crying and she's never uttered another word about not deserving this baby in the two weeks since Dr. Craig's phone call.

It's the Monday before Thanksgiving now. Two years ago, we went to Dr. Craig's office and had HIV tests on this day.

Today, Dr. Craig sees us during the lunch hour again. Emily went in for another blood draw last week, and things are still looking good. She's a little over eleven weeks pregnant.

Today, Emily looked at me in Dr. Craig's exam room, a cloth gown tied in the front and a sheet over her lap. She touched my face. She said, "Only you," and smiled. "These types of miracles could only happen with you."

Today, I saw our baby's. I saw minuscule arms and legs moving on the monitor. I heard and saw the rushed fluttering of a tiny, healthy heart beating.

Today I saw our son for the first time.

I clutched Emily's fingers and kissed her cheek and whispered over and over again, "You deserve this more than anyone."

It's cold today, but there's not a cloud in the sky. The trees have lost all their leaves and the grass is brown and it's supposed to snow on Sunday. Without the bushes that used to line the water's edge and with the bare trees, I can see the house from here, the windows lit up and glowing softly in the late afternoon.

I'm bundled in a jacket and sweater and I had to rummage around in the basement this morning and pull out some of my smaller maternity pants that I'd packed away to donate but had never actually gotten around to doing so. They say you start showing earlier with your second baby, and that certainly seems to be true for me. This morning, I couldn't button my regular jeans.

From the boat, I can see figures moving the house. Leon is busy making place cards for the dining room table, and Sarah and Desiree are helping Fran with the turkey and food. My father is napping in his cabin and Rory is napping in her crib. People will be here in an hour for Thanksgiving, and I couldn't stand the smell of the turkey cooking. I excused myself for a quick walk, but I really headed down to the boat. I've seen Derek looking this way from the back door in the living room a few times; he knows where I am.

The water is gentle and the boat is barely rocking, which is good. I don't think my stomach could handle the motion right now.

It's been nearly four weeks since I found out I was pregnant, and I still can't believe it. I watch my breath puff in the air when I breathe out for several minutes before closing my eyes. We've decided we'll tell people on Sunday, when I've officially hit that magical twelve week mark. Only it's not so magical when you're forty-seven years old. It's a great accomplishment, but second trimester miscarriages at my age are incredibly common.

"Em?" JJ's voice calls out.

I open my eyes and see my friend on the dock. I've barely seen her since we've been back from London, avoiding get-togethers and declining evening visits because I wasn't feeling well, had a headache, or any other excuse. I know Leon's been missing Henry, which is a large reason that I didn't cancel on having everyone over for Thanksgiving. That, and the fact that I couldn't stand the thought of people being more worried about me.

"Welcome to Maryland," I say to JJ.

"What?" she asks with a smile as she gets on the boat.

I sit up more on the bench seat. "This dock is technically an easement. Where land meets water, Virginia ends and Maryland begins."

"Huh," JJ says as she sits down next to my feet where they're resting on the seat. "Why are you freezing your ass off out here?"

"It's not that cold. I needed some air," I reply. "You're early."

"A little. Henry was dying to see Leon, so I brought him early. Will will bring the rugrat later, after his nap." She looks at my face and then her eyes travel down my body. She reaches a hand out and touches my knee. "Em," she whispers.

"What?" I ask. Something about her voice causes my heart to start racing.

"I miss you. I know it's just as important to you to work through things on your own as it is to me, but I don't like this. I've barely seen you in weeks, and Derek's worried about you. We all are."

"I'm okay." My reply is automatic and without emotion.

I feel her lean her body towards me so she's resting against my raised legs. "No you're not. I saw you, Emily."

I finally meet her eyes and notice the tears in them. I watch her blink rapidly. "What do you mean?" I ask.

"I ran back to the door at the house after the bombs exploded and saw your arm and hand clutching the piano leg. I yelled at you to hold on. Then Gil asked if there was a parachute in the helicopter, and when I nodded, he and Patrick went off running. I knew we wouldn't be able to reach you from the front door because the porch was so unstable, so I ran to the side of the house, looking for a window. You were dangling there, clutching the baby's sweater. I looked away when I heard Gil and Patrick running back, and when I turned back around, your hand was empty and you were pulling yourself up onto the floor by the piano."

I stand abruptly from my seat, and JJ tips slightly before righting herself.

"Who did you tell?"

I can't believe those are my first words, or that my tone is so harsh.

"No one, Emily. I didn't tell anyone. I know what it feels like to not be able to talk about something painful. I've been waiting for you to talk about it, but you're not. So I wanted to let you know that you could talk about it with me, because I already know. You let him go to save yourself. I'm thankful you did. You deserved to come home, Em. This is where you belong."

I clench my jaw. "I wouldn't have let you go. I wouldn't have let Rory or Leon or Derek go. I would have found a way. I gave up on that little baby. You wouldn't have let him go."

JJ stands up and faces me, "To save myself in a situation like that, I think I would have. I would have wanted to get home to my family just like you did. I've thought about this a lot, Emily, and you probably could have used your strength to fling him up onto the floor, but you would have fallen in the process. And we wouldn't have been able to get an unconscious child out of a situation like that. You both would have died, Emily. You didn't die. You came home."

I can feel the contents of my light lunch churning in my stomach. I'd been thinking for weeks that all I wanted some comforting words of absolution all this time, but I can't believe them.

"I wasn't strong enough," I mumble before I feel my stomach lurch and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I consumed a couple of hours ago makes a reappearance over the side of the boat and into the Potomac.

JJ's hand on the back of my head is gentle. "You're the strongest person I know, Em. You did what you had to do. You did everything you could. I love you. You need to talk to Derek."

"He'd never have let that little boy go," I whisper as I wipe my mouth. I keep my knees up on the bench and rest my forehead against the railing of the boat, keeping my eyes from JJ. But she's not letting me hide away. Her arms are around me.

"He'll understand," she says. "He loves you unconditionally, Emily."

I stand and move away from her arms. "I'm pregnant," I say. "I'm pregnant and I shouldn't be pregnant. There's no conceivable medical probability that I'd get pregnant at my age, and I am. And it's a boy. I was pregnant before we left for London, but I can't help thinking that if I carry this pregnancy to term, and this baby comes into the world, all I'm going to be thinking about is the little boy I let fall to his death. And if I tell Derek, I'm worried that's all he's going to be thinking about, too."

I go into the cabin of the boat and find a bottle of water. I swish some in my mouth and spit down the sink, then splash some on my face.

"Emily," JJ says softly from the doorway. "You need to talk to him."

I nod. I need to end this conversation or I'm never going to make it through Thanksgiving dinner.

"I know. But it's Thanksgiving, so come on. They're probably wondering where we are," I say while managing to plaster a slight smile on my face.

I walk and get off the boat, and JJ follows. She walks a few paces behind me and her voice is a loving whisper in the cold air, getting at the crux of the issue far better than I'd been willing to admit to myself since I'd been home.

"You can't only trust his love when things are perfect, Emily."