Chapter 21

Finally, it was the time that Emily had been half dreading, half looking forward to. It was time to go back to work. Three weeks before, Mark had put his two-week notice in. His boss was sad to see him leave but understood. He made it clear to Mark that if he ever wanted to come back to work, all he had to do was ask. Emily’s first day back was one of the longest in her life. Not only was she kept constantly busy, but she found that she was missing her family immensely. For the first time in her life, she wished that she wasn’t a doctor. Finally, her shift was over and Mark had dinner waiting for her when she got home. Since Emily was breastfeeding the triplets, she had with her the milk that she had pumped during the day and Mark put it in the fridge for her. After dinner, Mark helped her get undressed and get a hot, relaxing shower. After Emily got out of the shower, Mark started the laundry and they went to bed for it was 1 AM after all.

This generally set up the pattern for Mark and Emily. Emily would go to work while Mark would not only keep the farm running but also take care of the kids with decreasing help from Kat. She and Brandon were working on making sure that their own lives would get off to a good start. Kat was accepted to MIT for engineering and Brandon was extremely supportive of her. All he wanted was for Kat to be happy in life. Brandon in the meantime had gotten a job at one of the fanciest restaurants in town and quickly impressed the head chef/owner who took him under his wing.

All three kids were started crawling early and it was obvious that Gretchen was the natural leader of the three of them, while the other two seemed to have more curiosity about their surroundings. All three of the kids were also large for their age which surprised no one. For even though they had been born a bit small, they were growing quickly.

On Mark and Emily’s second anniversary, it was time to give Cindy the paperwork for Tekla’s trust fund. Cindy and Emily had gotten even closer after she had married Mark and had kids. Often Cindy would help take care of the kids and Evan and Tekla had a blast playing with them.

The following spring was a time for another great upheaval for Mark and Emily, Kat and Brandon were graduating high school. Kat had earned valedictorian and had sent an invitation to her biological mother and grandparents for her graduation and open house. Brandon had just earned a spot about midway in the class but neither he nor Kat cared. After all, Brandon wasn’t going to college although he did sign up to take business classes at the local community college so that he could run his restaurant one day. To everyone’s surprise, Kat’s real mother and grandparents did show up and were surprisingly civil toward everyone. For Kat’s speech, she talked about life’s many trials and how they could make you stronger by reminding you what was important in life and what wasn’t. She also touched on the need for her fellow graduating students to not follow their dreams in life but to follow the money. For the vast majority of people, their dreams were outside their abilities no matter what they did so it was worthless to chase after something that couldn’t happen anyway. Where if they followed the money, they could at least support themselves and their families. Kat knew that her advice was like a bucket of ice-cold water in her fellow student’s faces and that many wouldn’t take that her advice to heart. She did, however. She knew that she could be a world-famous detective with her people reading skills, but knew that might attract the wrong kind of attention to her. Since she was also good with science and building things, she decided to go into robotic engineering.

During Kat’s open house, she couldn’t help but rub her mother’s face in the fact that while Kat was very successful and had a loving family, her mother was still living with her parents and unable to find decent work. Her mother was rendered speechless when Kat told her that she was already getting job offers for when she graduated from MIT and that Kat wouldn’t have to have any loans because she had a full-ride scholarship even though, she had secretly rejected it. She didn’t tell her mother that she rejected the full ride because the last thing she needed was her mother trying to extort money out of her. Brandon didn’t even know just how loaded Kat was, although he did know that she was well off.

There was another reason that Kat was really happy during her open house and that had to do with the ring that she was now wearing proudly on her left hand. Before the party started, Brandon proposed to her and she gladly accepted providing that they got married before she left for school, and they would wait to have kids until after she graduated and had a job. Brandon happily accepted this and being that he was wanting to own his restaurant he didn’t care where Kat’s job search took her. Before the party had even started, Brandon and Kat had settled on a date and would start inviting their family during their open house.

Kat and Brandon’s wedding went off without a hitch that August, at the farm, with Evan playing the role of best man while Tekla was the maid of honor. Gretchen was a flower girl while David and Mason split the role of ring bearer. All of Kat’s and Brandon’s friends and family showed up. Even her real mother and grandparents. Her mother had even begged Kat to forgive her for all the things that she had done to Kat over the years.

“I forgave you a long time ago mother.”

“Thank you, Katelynn,”

“After all, if you hadn’t been such a bitch then I would have never known what it was like to be part of a loving family. I now have three adorable siblings, a real mom, and dad who love me more than life itself, and now a husband who loves and supports me in everything I do just like I do for him.” Kat’s mother just cried hearing this for she knew that everything Kat said was true.