I held our fourth child in my arms, watching Dylan with our growing family, feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for the life we built from the ashes of our past.
Our newest son, little Ethan, slept peacefully against my chest as I sat on the terrace. Hope, now fourteen, helped her younger siblings with a puzzle on the grass. Lucas, eleven, and Rose, nine, argued playfully over who got the next turn. Dylan watched them with a soft smile, the kind that still made my heart skip a beat even after all these years.
“They’re growing up so fast,” I said quietly as Dylan joined me. “I can’t believe how blessed we are.”
He sat beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, kissing my temple. “I think about that every day. How close I came to losing all of this. How I almost pushed you away fore
