Chapter 94

Only once did McKayla ever ask if I was sure I knew what I was signing on for. I looked her in the eyes. My voice was firm and direct.

"My love," I told her. "I will never leave your side. I promised before God and all our friends that I was going to love you forever, and nothing on this Earth is going to stop me from fulfilling that promise."

The look in her eyes was heartbreaking, but we both knew what we were getting in to after that night I tried to break the door down at her parents's house.

As is often the case when people get out of college, start working and have kids, the next few years flew by for us.

Maureen became the one constant delight in our lives. She may not share a single strand of DNA with McKayla, but she is definitely my wife's daughter.

They walk and talk the same way. Our daughter mimics McKayla's mannerisms. They have the same temperament. And they're both the two smartest people I know.

Like her (other) mother, Maureen is a voracious reader. We buy her books and she blows through them. When she started kindergarten, she was reading at a first grade level. When she started first grade, she was almost to third grade level. Sometimes, she's too smart for her own good, but we don't mind.

I never told Travis about his daughter and I don't intend to. She has never asked about him, and I hope she never does. Maureen has two mommies and knows we love her more than life itself.

When our daughter was three, McKayla came home one afternoon and told me that she had quit her job. I stared at her in stunned disbelief when she asked me to quit my job, too.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I said.

"You don't need to work at the warehouse anymore," McKayla said. "Let's go into business together."

"Doing what?" I asked. "Don't tell me you want to open a bar with a bunch of your friends, because only guys do that and boys are stupid."

"No, silly," she replied with a smirk. "Think about it this way: How much of my commission does the bank take off the top of my accounts?"

I shrugged.

"About twenty percent." She reached into her briefcase and laid a pad down on the table. I looked into the other room where Maureen was playing with one of her little friends from daycare to make sure everything was alright. "What if we got to keep that twenty percent?"

She turned the pad around so I could read the figures at the bottom. My jaw dropped.

"Think of it as a 25% pay increase," she winked. "We can both work from home and be here full time for Maureen."

The only thing I worried about was whether she would be able to keep all her clients. She said she would lose some of the people who wanted to stay with the bank, but her reputation was strong enough that most of them would stay with her, and she was working to pick up a few more.

After a little bit more persuasion, I agreed, went in to work the next day and tendered my resignation. My boss told me he was surprised I stuck around as long as I did and he told me I was welcome back any time. I stayed until they had hired a replacement and had her trained to the point where I was comfortable leaving. The guys at the warehouse threw me a big going-away party and McKayla and I started on a new chapter in our lives.