Updated Apr 12, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 20: Positive
Cole
Three months after the wedding, Cole wakes up to Quinn throwing up in the bathroom and immediately knows.
“You okay?” he asks from the doorway.
“Fine. Just—” Quinn retches again. “Just food poisoning or something.”
“Or something.”
She looks up at him, pale and miserable, and Cole watches realization dawn.
“Oh,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.”
“We weren’t—I mean, I’m on birth control—”
“Birth control isn’t one hundred percent.”
Quinn sits back against the bathroom wall, processing. “I might be pregnant.”
“You might be pregnant,” Cole confirms, sitting beside her. “How do you feel about that?”
“Terrified. Excited. Like I might throw up again.” She laughs weakly. “We just got married. We’re still figuring out the business stuff. The house isn’t even fully renovated. This wasn’t the plan—”
“When have we ever followed the plan?”
“Fair point.” She leans against him. “You’d be okay with this? If I’m pregnant?”
“I’d be more than okay with it. I’d be thrilled. Terrified also, but thrified.” At her look, he clarifies. “Thrilled plus terrified. It’s a word now.”
“It’s not a word.”
“It is in this family.”
Quinn picks up a pregnancy test later that day—Betty sells them at The Grind, apparently Montana general stores carry everything—and takes it in Cole’s office bathroom while he paces outside.
“Cole, you’re wearing a path in the floor.”
“I’m nervous.”
“You’re adorable when you’re nervous.”
“I’m a thirty-one-year-old man. I’m not adorable.”
The timer goes off.
Quinn opens the bathroom door, holding the test, eyes wide. “It’s positive.”
Cole whoops, picks her up, spins her around despite her protests about the nausea, and kisses her thoroughly.
“We’re having a baby,” he says against her mouth.
“We’re having a baby. Oh god, we’re having a baby. I don’t know how to have a baby—”
“Nobody knows how until they do it. We’ll figure it out.” He sets her down gently. “Together. Like everything else.”
“Together,” Quinn echoes, and she’s crying now, happy tears, overwhelmed tears, terrified tears all mixed together.
They tell Margaret that night over dinner, and she cries and hugs them both and immediately starts planning—”We’ll need to convert the upstairs room, and baby Hartford will need—”
“Mom, we literally just found out today—”
“Which means we have nine months to prepare and that’s not nearly enough time—”
Quinn laughs, watching Margaret spiral into grandmother mode, and Cole thinks that this is his life now.
Married to Quinn.
Building a business together.
Expecting their first child.
Living in Montana with family and community and everything he didn’t know he wanted.
The Cedar Ridge Meadows development is halfway complete, and every house has already sold at premium pricing—the “eco-luxury” marketing worked even better than projected, with buyers from Seattle and California and Colorado competing for environmentally-responsible mountain living.
Quinn’s consulting practice is thriving—she has more clients than she can handle, has hired an associate to help with the workload, is being featured in environmental law journals as a model for collaborative rather than litigious approaches.
And their partnership—both professional and personal—is everything Cole hoped it would be.
“We’re doing good work,” Quinn says one evening, both of them reviewing plans for a new project one of her clients brought. “Actually making a difference. Building things that last.”
“We are,” Cole agrees. “Together.”
“Together,” she confirms, her hand resting on her still-flat stomach where their baby is growing.
Six months later, Quinn is visibly pregnant and glowing and more beautiful than Cole’s ever seen her, and she’s presenting at a national environmental law conference about sustainable development as a model for the future.
Cole watches from the audience as she explains their project—the compromise they found, the partnership they built, the way they turned opposition into collaboration—and he’s never been more proud.
“That’s my wife,” he tells the person sitting next to him unnecessarily.
After her presentation, people swarm Quinn with questions—developers interested in replicating their model, environmental lawyers interested in less litigious approaches, even former colleagues from her Seattle firm who admit they were wrong to criticize her decision.
“You’re kind of a big deal now,” Cole says that night in their hotel room.
“We’re kind of a big deal. This is our model, our work. I just present it.”
“You built it. I just provided the construction expertise.”
“We built it together. Stop trying to give me all the credit.”
“I’m allowed to be proud of my brilliant wife.”
“And I’m allowed to be proud of my brilliant husband who had the humility to listen to the lawyer trying to destroy his business.”
They’re both right, and they both know it.
The partnership works because they both contribute.
The marriage works because they both choose it every day.
The life they’re building works because they’re building it together.
Baby Hartford—they’ve decided not to find out the gender, want to be surprised—arrives two weeks early during a spring storm that’s nowhere near as dramatic as the blizzard that brought them together but still manages to close roads and cause chaos.
Quinn goes into labor at the ranch, and Margaret drives them to the hospital with the kind of aggressive competence that makes Cole grateful his mother is terrifying.
Twelve hours later, Cole holds his daughter—Emily Margaret Hartford, named for Cole’s grandmother and his mother—and thinks that he’s never been more terrified or more in love.
“She’s perfect,” Quinn says, exhausted and radiant in the hospital bed.
“She looks like you,” Cole observes.
“She has your chin.”
“That’s unfortunate for her. My chin is not my best feature.”
“Your chin is very nice. Our daughter will have a nice chin.”
Emily makes a sound, and both of them laugh because they’re parents now, responsible for this tiny perfect person, and the weight of it is overwhelming and beautiful.
“We made this,” Quinn says quietly. “You and me. We made a whole person.”
“We did. And we’re going to screw up a lot as parents.”
“Absolutely. Constantly. She’s going to need so much therapy.”
“But we’ll figure it out.”
“Together.”
“Together,” Cole echoes, because that’s their promise.
Through everything—business partnerships, environmental challenges, parenting chaos, Montana winters, whatever comes next—they’ll figure it out together.
One terrible decision at a time.
Until their whole life is built from those moments.
Beautiful and imperfect and exactly what they chose.
Together.
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