Matt shook his head again. “And so it begins…”
Frowning, I turned to Evan and Jenny. “He just lost his turn. Which one of you wants him?”
I extended Linken in their general direction, and Jenny immediately scooped him up. “Oh my God! He’s so cute! Evan, look how sweet he is.”
She cooed in Linken’s face while Evan smiled at her. “Yeah, for being part Hancock, he is pretty adorable.”
Liam, Matt, and I reacted at the exact same time with “Hey!” Shaking my head, I added, “Not cool, dude. Hancocks are awesome.” Liam, Matt, and I bumped fists together in a show of family unity. While the band’s Hancock to non-Hancock ratio had been fifty-fifty before, it wasn’t anymore; the band was cock-heavy now, as it should be.
“Damn straight,” Liam said.
I indicated Jenny cuddling with my son. “Evan just forfeited his turn. Give him to Liam when you’re done, Jenny.” I patted Liam on the back. “You’re next, bro.”
Liam’s eyes widened, like I’d just told him his nonexistent girlfriend was expecting. Matt laughed while I shook my head. I was surrounded by a bunch of newborn-fearing pansies. Wusses.
When Linken was ready to come home, we took him to our new place. We’d recently moved from Anna’s tiny apartment. Now that the cash was flowing again, and we’d paid off the money we’d borrowed from Kellan, we could have bought just about any house we wanted, but we’d decided on a modest four-bedroom rambler in a quiet neighborhood that was close to some good schools. Anna and I wanted to live a simpler life, less opulence, less extravagance. We just wanted to concentrate on us, and on the kids, and we wanted to be smarter with our money. Plan better, just in case it ever did dry up again. And we wanted to give back.
One thing I’d learned throughout this whole mess was that I’d been given a gift that first go-round, and most people weren’t so lucky. Listening to the other contestants on that show, watching them struggle to make something of themselves…it had moved me, and I wanted to help them. I wanted to keep the dream alive, give people a reason to keep going, even when the obstacles seemed too high, the odds too big. I wanted to give people hope for their future.
At first, I’d had no idea how to do that. The task seemed too big, the different ways to go about it too vast, the overall idea too vague. But then Anna suggested I focus in on one aspect of my vision, and then, when I had it, that I start out small. Made sense to me, so I decided to start with the youngest dreamers and my favorite occupation. Anna and I were in the beginning stages of creating our charity—Strength Through Sound. Our goal was to enrich, encourage, and empower children through music. Our hope was to expand band and choir in schools, and offer activity centers where kids could go to express themselves in healthy ways. Even I could admit our plan was an ambitious one, but it meant something to me, so I felt like it was worth it. No, I felt like I was meant to do it.
Once Kellan heard our plan, he was 100 percent on board. Music had shaped his childhood, same as it had mine. The other guys quickly asked to be a part of it once they heard us talking, and pretty soon, Strength Through Sound was officially being sponsored by the D-Bags. Our first center was opening next year.
I could have happily stayed at home, planning my new charity while holding my new baby and playing with my girls, but the D-Bags had a job to do, and before I knew it, our summer tour was starting. When I asked Anna what she wanted to do, I fully expected her to say she wanted to stay home with Linken. I was shocked when she said she wanted to come with. “Are you sure? I mean, I know we’ve done it with a newborn before, but we only had one kid at the time.”
Anna gave me an unworried smile. “It will be fine. Linken’s a dream baby. He’s already sleeping through the night. And I’m already on maternity leave with work, so now is really the perfect time for me to go.”
Grinning, I gave her a quick kiss. “I’m glad you said that, because I really wasn’t looking forward to not seeing you guys for three months.” With a sigh, I placed a kiss on Linken’s forehead. “I don’t want to miss that much time with them. I don’t want to miss any time with them.”
Anna cupped my cheek. “You don’t have to. We’ll find a way to make this work, just like we do with everything else. And we’ll do it together.”
I nodded. “’Cause we’re a team.”
“Exactly.” She gave me a deep, lingering kiss then, and we put Linken down for a nap in his room, so we could benefit from one of the many perks of being partners.
Kiera and her kids ended up coming on the tour too, and so did Jenny and Rachel, so there were no shortages of people to help with the kids. And maybe it was my changed attitude, or my new position with the band, or quite possibly my brother’s overabundance of excitement, but that tour was by far the best one we’d ever done. We adjusted some of the classic D-Bags songs for me, adding a second line for my guitar, or just having Matt and I play together. There were ramps on the stage set up in an X pattern that let us run up and down, back and forth, burning off adrenaline and engaging the crowd. We even had pyrotechnics for one of our songs. It was fucking amazing, and when the tour finally wrapped up at the end of the summer, I was sad that it was over with.
And then, once the tour was done and the album was a monstrous smash and all the expected babies had been born, the D-Bags had wedding after wedding after wedding after fucking wedding. Okay, it wasn’t that many, but it felt like it.