“What if I go first? I love you, Kates.”
“I love you too,” I whisper.
Tom takes the box from me and rests his forehead on mine. We both watch as he slips the ring back onto my finger. Exactly where it belongs.
He lifts his arm and checks his watch. Grins. “Twelve-oh-one. Nailed it.”
“You got it right this time,” I tease lightly.
“We’ll get it right this time,” he corrects, bending his head once more.
My phone buzzes on the bar top, and Tom gives me an amused look. “I should have known you’d waste no time getting a new phone.”
“Ah, but it was important,” I say, lifting a finger to explain. “It turns out my emergency contact information was very out-of-date, and I wanted to update it—”
“No need,” Tom says, wrapping both arms around my waist. “Your old one’s right here. And he’s not going anywhere.”
His head lowers again. And again, my phone buzzes. Instead of getting annoyed, he smiles. “Go ahead. I can wait.”
I glance down at my screen. See Harry’s name. There’s only one reason, and one reason only, why my boss would be calling me on Christmas Eve.
I reach out and send the call to voicemail, then turn back to Tom.
“Merry Christmas,” I whisper.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispers back. And then he kisses me.
The Grinch’s heart grew three sizes on Christmas Day.
Mine? I wouldn’t know.
It belongs to Tom.
And always has.
EPILOGUE
Christmas Eve, One Year Later
“It’s not fair!” Clara exclaims in the too-loud voice of a six-year-old who snuck too much of the Christmas cookie dough. “Why does Grandma get to open a present early, and the rest of us have to wait for morning?”
“Shh,” Meredith says, smoothing a hand over her hyper daughter’s ponytail. “You heard Uncle Tom. This is a gift for the whole family. Grandma’s just the one to open it.”
“Ehhhhhh,” Katherine makes a skeptical noise. “Gift might not be the best word.”
“Definitely not,” Tom agrees, reaching out to kiss his wife’s temple. “More like a potential termagant?”
“Quite possibly,” Katherine says, scooting over on the couch of her in-laws’ living room to make space for her niece to snuggle up beside her.
“What’s a termagant?” Sophia asks.
Tom points at Katherine, who bats his hand away. “It’s a word for a strong woman.”
“Sure, we can go with that,” Tom says before kissing her again. On the mouth this time.
Sophia pretends to vomit but doesn’t vacate her place between them.
“Mom, what are you doing? Just open it already,” Tom’s brother demands.
Nancy Walsh clutches the half-opened red envelope to her chest, her eyes already red-rimmed and shiny. “I’m savoring the moment.”
“You don’t even know what it is yet.”
“Oh, yes, I do. A mother knows.” She tears open the rest of the envelope and peeks inside, letting out a happy squeal. “I knew it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Nancy,” the usually imperturbable Bob says impatiently as he grabs the envelope. “Let the rest of us . . .”
He fumbles the envelope, and the entire Walsh family stares at what slips out.
“What is that?” Sophia demands, unimpressed.
“That, sweetheart, is a sonogram. Auntie Katie and Uncle Tom are going to have a baby,” Meredith exclaims with a happy sniffle.
Sophia is more impressed now, wiggling off the couch and bouncing in front of them excitedly. “A cousin! Finally. Boy or girl?”
“Girl,” Katherine and Tom say at the same time before exchanging happy smiles.
“A baby girl!” Nancy is full-on crying now. “Do we have a name?”
“Not yet,” Tom says, just as Katherine says, “Yes.”
“We do?” Tom asks, frowning slightly.
Katherine rests a hand on her still-flat belly and beams at her husband for the second time. “Yeah. I was kind of thinking Gorby.”
Tom’s smile is immediate and approving. “I love it. But as a middle name.”
Katherine frowns, as ready for an argument as ever. “But—”
“I was thinking Danielle,” Tom cuts in. “Danielle Gorby Walsh?”
It takes Katherine a moment, but when realization dawns, she blinks in stunned surprise. “Danielle. You want to name her after my dad?”
“I do,” he says, pulling her closer. “I’m hoping if I name her after her grandfather, then she’ll have no choice but to take after her mother.”
“You should be so lucky,” Katherine says with a smile as she starts to move her mouth down to his. At the last minute, she pulls back and narrows her eyes. “You meant Danielle Gorby Tate, right?”
Tom smiles against her lips. “We can bicker about it later?”
Katherine’s lips curve upward as she kisses him back. “I can hardly wait.”
AUTHOR NOTE
Thank you so much for taking the time to read Emergency Contact! Every creative endeavor is a labor of love, but we’d be lying if we said that this project wasn’t extra special to us.
Who is “us”?
We’re Lauren Layne and Anthony LeDonne, and in case you missed this sneaking fact on the back cover, we are actually . . . married! And high school sweethearts! Cue the awwwwwwws.
And if you’re wondering how the heck we came to write a book together . . . so are we!
We kid, we kid. (Sort of.)
The truth is, we backed into this book from a very atypical direction. It started with, fittingly enough:
A road trip.
But not in the way you think, where we were on a road trip and thought, “Hey, we should write a book about a road trip!” It was more . . . halfway through Montana, we were desperate for entertainment—you can only count tumbleweeds for so long—and turned to our Audible library, where we’d downloaded a few screenwriting books for reasons that neither of us can remember.
Fast forward to several road trips and thousands of tumbleweeds later, and we’d devoured everything by Robert McKee, Blake Snyder, Chris Vogler, Michael Hauge, and a dozen more experts on writing screenplays. The only thing left to do? Actually write one.
So, of course, we did nothing. For years.
And then, one magical weekend (not magical like that, don’t be weird), we drove from NYC to Lake Placid with one goal: write a screenplay.
Ambitious? Totally. But we didn’t know that going into it, and that worked in our favor. We believed it was possible, so we made it possible. Sort of.
Every morning in Lake Placid, we’d wake up at the crack of dawn and sip mediocre coffee in our room, talking about things like beat sheets and the three-act structure and whether we should shower, all while watching the clock until Starbucks opened. And the second those Lake Placid Starbucks doors opened, we were inside. Armed with Venti cold brews, breakfast sandwiches, and our Rhodia notebooks, we’d settle at a table and get to work.
The good news: we already knew the premise. We’d plucked a random idea from Lauren’s bulging idea notebook: “Woman wakes up from a coma to her estranged husband because she forgot to update her emergency contact information.”