I was onto my third cup of coffee, second playlist, and approximately twelfth napkin, discarded and covered with doodles. I was procrastinating. Well, let’s be honest – I was always procrastinating. It really should’ve been my middle name. Arabella Beatrice “Professional Procrastinator” Cavanaugh. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I was working my way through the third and final edit of my novel, and in an attempt to hurry it along, my publisher had sent me the entire printed out copy alongside a $25 Starbucks gift card. Could you tell they were getting desperate? I could just imagine them in the board room going “How do we best motivate Arabella? How do we make her realize this is really getting ridiculous – she’s had this last edit for two months now” and then someone comes up with the smart of idea of bribing me. But you know what, good old fashioned bribery worked. Here I am, sitting in Starbucks, and actually getting some work done – between all that procrastinating.

Anyway, I did have a point to this story before I got sidetracked, and that was to mention the particularly handsome man who was up at the counter ordering a venti iced mocha. I tried to ignore his crazy dark locks and went back to my work. I flipped the page, and moved my hand to take another sip of my flat white and instead managed to tip the cup on its side, spewing hot liquid all over my just-edited words. I let out a sound that was the bastard lovechild of a squeal and a grunt, and pulled my macbook and my unbound novel away from the spreading coffee. I turned around wildly, searching for napkins or anything to stop the spread before I ended up wearing all the coffee down my own front, only to have a whole wad of napkins passed to me by non other than mister fancy-hair himself.

He helped me clean up my coffee, offered to buy me another, and I fell in lust somewhere between our second and third cups together. My edit never got finished that day, I was too busy starting to write a new story instead of wrapping up the old one. Coffee led to an exchange of numbers, a late night text for Chinese food, and sitting on a park bench in Central Park at 11pm. Not necessarily the safest or smartest of decisions, but just being near Derek made me feel safe. His full name was Derek Christopher Shepherd, and he works as a lawyer, specializing in family law. He lives in a brownstone – a family investment – on the upper east side, a far cry from my studio apartment across the city. He pays for my uber home, and just before he waves me off, I grab his hand and ask him to come with me. I never was one for moving slow.

Two years pass and we’re living together happily in his brownstone. My writing has continued and my young adult contemporary novels are flying off the shelves. No love story I could write competes with mine and Derek’s though. By no means perfect, our story does involve a lot of fighting (or maybe bickering is the better term) but also a lot of make-up sex. Not necessarily appropriate for my reading audience, given that my books are aimed at teens. Derek proposes on a Sunday morning, out at brunch. My pancakes come with a side of bacon, and a tiny blue box. He pulls out a beautiful diamond ring, and implores me to spend the rest of my life with him. I say yes, through tears, and Derek leaves a $50 note on the table to cover the bill and we go home together without eating a bite. We marry just two months later at my parent’s estate in North Carolina – an outdoor wedding, wildflowers and butterflies abound. That night I fill Derek in on my little secret. Underneath the lacy white wedding dress, I am harbouring a parasite – one made of the two of us, conceived on that fateful Sunday morning. He promises our kid will never end up in family court like the kids of his clients, and I promise to write our child a thousand happy endings.

We move out of the brownstone and into a bigger house in Brooklyn, big enough for our growing family. Derek turns into Mister Overprotective, babyproofing the entire house before my due date hits, despite me telling him that our baby won’t be crawling and sticking forks in sockets for a while yet. He reads all the books he can, and peppers me with baby name suggestions every single day. No matter what we hear, we can’t find one that fits.

The night I go into labour, I make Derek stop at Starbucks on our way. Funnily enough, the barista there is the same one from the day we first met. I remember from her crazy curly hair and wide smile. Her name tag reads Luella, and I point it out to Derek. Just four short hours later, our own little Luella Kate joins the world. With a shock of dark hair and bright blue eyes, she looks just like her daddy and we are both so in love. We’re not so in love with the accompanying grazed nipples and sleep deprivations and poo explosions, but those things wane with time as Luella grows into a toddler and then a little girl.

Derek has begged me for another baby since Luella’s first birthday, but it takes until the eve of our little girl turning six for me to agree. Luella is thrilled to find out that we are having a baby, and proudly carries her baby doll everywhere with her. She names it Delilah after her favourite song (yes, early 00s pop music plays far too often in our house), and insists we name the baby Delilah too. When her little sister is born, Derek and I manage to find a compromise and name her Charlotte, with Delilah as her middle. When Charlotte wakes in the night, I often hear Derek walking around our bedroom humming the song softly to her. Charlotte is another Derek doppelganger – dark hair, blue eyes, and a smile that melts me in an instant.

We make Sundays our family days, exploring museums and parks, and there’s nothing I like more than hanging back and watching Derek with our little girls in each of his hands. After one of our favourite outings, I put the girls down in front of a Disney movie and pull Derek into the bedroom. It’s my idea this time, another baby, but it doesn’t take long for him to agree. It takes a little longer to conceive this time, but Derek lives by the motto “practice makes perfect” and perfectly indeed it does happen. Matilda Hermione was born at 34 weeks – tiny, but a fighter. I gave her a name honouring my own job, and also the names of two of the strongest female characters I knew. I filled her nursery with books and wrote her letters each day she was in the hospital nursery. The day we brought her home, Derek and the girls came to collect us both with a bunch of balloons and matching grins.

Life rolls on, and the girls grow. Matilda grows up begging for a pet, and it doesn’t take too long before we give in, and get not just one, but two puppies. Golden retrievers, we name them Scout and Finch. The two playful pups complete our family photo, our metaphorical white picket fence to frame our good fortune.