A/N: All right! Sorry about the barrage of alerts, you guys, but this story is done and over with and I felt I shouldn't leave it hanging on FF. Thanks for sticking with me this far! Y'all are champs.

Let me know what you think!

(Fall in love, and stay there.)

I clutched Eric's hand as he led me into his living room and pursed my lips together in a terrible imitation of a smile when he pressed a kiss to my temple.

"Is she upstairs?"

"Yeah. Ready for me to call her down?"

I nodded no but said, "Yes." Eric chuckled and kissed me, his lips lingering briefly.

"Okay, sit. I'll go get her." He nudged me and I sank down onto the couch. I watched him climb the stairs and heard him speaking to Mac for a minute before her little footsteps trailed his down the stairs.

Mackenzie looked adorable in a pair of white shorts and a sky blue top, her blonde curls pushed back with a headband with a smiling sun embroidered on it. She smiled at me, putting her asymmetrical dimple on display, and I tried to get over how much bigger she'd gotten and how much her resemblance to her Daddy had grown.

"Hi." She dropped Eric's hand and climbed up onto the armchair next to me. Eric smirked and took the remaining armchair and watched us quietly.

"Hi Mac, it's very nice to see you again." I smile, feigning calm, heart beating erratically in my chest.

"Dad says you were his friend who-is-a-girl when I was a baby but then you went away."

"Uh." Is this what happened when lawyers raised children? She was just cutting right to the chase. I shot a look towards Eric who gave me an encouraging nod. "That's right."

She tilted her head in the same way that Eric had when he was confused about something. "Why did you leave then?"

"Well, sometimes things don't turn out the way you'd want them to."

She frowned at me in a way that let me know she wasn't having any of my bullshit. Oh yes, she was a Northman all right. "My Pammy says that I have permission to kick your butt if you hurt my dad."

"Mackenzie! You certainly do not have permission to do that."

"But Pammy said!"

"And Pammy doesn't have permission to give you permission to do anything like that. I'm a big boy, I can take care of myself." I could see he was fighting a smile even as he chastised her.

"She said you're too much of a girl," Mackenzie mumbled.

"All right, that's it, no more lunch dates with Pammy."

"But dad!"

"Not without a chaperone, Mac." The corner of his mouth twitched up and I couldn't help my own grin at their exchange. I was much more comfortable now that the focus was off of me.

"Mackenzie, I promise, you won't need to kick my butt," I offered at last. "And I'd really like it if you and I could be friends. Maybe we can hang out?"

"And do what?"

"Well, I was thinking of getting a puppy and I could really use some help picking one. Maybe you could come with me?" Her face lit up then, and I knew I had her. It was strange, loving somebody so tiny and having to walk the thin line between overwhelming her and neglecting her. Though I figured I'd spent enough time neglecting her after I'd left.

Fucking Felipe.

"Dad, can we get a puppy too?"

"Nope. But if Sookie says it's okay, you can play with hers."

Mackenzie pouted. "But dad!"

"You're very cute, but no."

"You're more than welcome to play with my puppy, Mac."

"Okay," she grumbled.

"What do you say, Mac?"

"Thank you, Sookie," she sounded automatically.

888

Two years later…

I awoke to the sensation of something brushing over my hip.

"Hey, early riser."

"Hi," I whispered, hiding a grin into my pillow. He pulled on my hip, so that I'd turn to face him, and then pressed a kiss against my forehead. I sighed, recalling hundreds of similar kisses, on similar mornings, in the past couple of years.

"Happy first-first anniversary."

"First-first?" I grinned, all greedy hands and lips.

"We didn't get the chance to celebrate an anniversary last time," he murmured, breathless from the path my fingers were taking. His words, though they brought back memories of the demise of our first marriage, no longer wiped the grin from my face. It had taken almost a full year for us to reach an agreement regarding our marriage; more specifically, regarding whether or not we wanted to remarry. He'd been the hesitant one initially, understandably so, since the lion's share of the hurt had been inflicted upon him by me. By the time he'd started to come around, however, I'd become the one too afraid to shift our dynamic when the current state of affairs had been working so well for us. We still lived apart, and only spent the night together when Mackenzie was at a sleepover, which was rare. Aude had stayed in rehab only as long as she had to, despite the facility's recommendation that she stay longer, and had promptly relapsed. It had been messy and had scared Mackenzie to no end, since it had really gone down during one of her weekend visits Eric had very reluctantly agreed to. As a result of that and the screaming match between her and Eric, Aude spent another ten months in rehab, and emerged completely different. Mackenzie was intially quite hesitant about spending time with her, so more often than not Eric or I would accompany her, much to Aude's displeasure. She understood though, she admitted, which made it quite easy for us to support the court's decision to grant her partial custody. When Aude decided to move to New Orleans for work, we worked out a plan for Mac to spend summers with her and school years with us, with alternating holidays and room for spontaneous visits. It all became quite amicable, much more so than before.

Felipe DeCastro was married, during Aude's second stint in rehab, to one of his former mistresses who had unbeknownst to him been raising twins. Felipe's twins. Andre and Sophie, when we had the displeasure of running into them at the Shreveport Police Department gala, were awful human beings and the obvious offspring of Felipe. Though Eric was furious that his father had other children in their twenties, he was relieved that he was no longer the sole bearer of Felipe's hopes and dreams for the future of the company.

In fact, that became Eric's primary argument in favour of us remarrying. With Felipe's focus elsewhere, there was no need for my reluctance. When I finally gave in, almost a full year after we got back together, we'd had to take a minute to decide how we wanted to go about the rest of it. Eric teased that I should sell my condo to make sure I wouldn't have a backup plan the next time I decided to leave him, and I'd hit him with a particularly firm couch cushion in response.
I did decide to sell it though.

The next obstacle was our desire to have Mackenzie present for the wedding, which was really only a problem since we wanted to elope and she was currently in New Orleans with her mother. Tara and Pam managed to talk us out of that, since they both claimed to have felt so robbed when we'd eloped the first time. Plus, planning an actual wedding would give Mackenzie more time to get used to the idea of us getting married, even though she had personally asked me on more than one occasion if I was planning on marrying her Daddy.
So we married on the date of our original elopement, October 16th. And despite the best efforts of our self-proclaimed, perfectionist wedding planners, we managed to have a blast. Even though the florist sent the wrong flowers and the champagne wasn't rosé and there was a tiny grey stain on the hem of my dress, Eric and I made faces at each other as I walked down the aisle and poked each other in the kidney while we kissed and did our best to make the other person laugh during the wedding photos. I won, hands down.

I have the pictures to prove it.