Seize The Day

Chapter Twenty Five - THE END!

Five years later.

Paris in the height of summer was a daunting prospect, but for Sophie it was a no-brainer. With road closures and people lining the streets, ten deep in some places, she was more than grateful to complete the trip from her hotel to the Champs-Elysee.  A liveried man guarded the gate in front of her, and she was escorted to a seat, thankfully in the shade.

Lowering herself gratefully down to the chair, she looked down at the small hand encased by hers, Sonny, her beautiful blonde little boy. He looked a little stressed; it had been a hairy walk through the crowds.

                “Come here chicken!” He managed to climb onto her lap and link his hands around her neck. Sophie stooped her head to kiss his hair; his face was buried into her chest. With his blonde curls and his big blue eyes he was the image of his father.  “Is that Zia Vin I see over there?” Vincenza who was more of an aunt than a real sister could be seemed to have appeared in the distance.

Sonny’s head snapped up and he scanned the crowd, then with a whoop he dropped from Sophie’s lap and ran through the milling people to Vin who had just come through the same gate as them.

Vin squatted to catch the cannonball that was Sonny, then lifted him up for a huge kiss. Sophie watched as she turned to check that Ed was still following negotiating the crowds with the pram containing Mia their tiny newborn offspring.

                “Sit here.” Sophie patted the chair beside her as Vin came closer, then leaned over for a hug from her friend and her husband Ed. “Let me see my little cherub!” She peeked into the pram and “aahhed”, Mia Crossley was beauty personified, and Aunty Sophie worshipped her too.

Vin grabbed Sophie’s hand,  “Are you excited? I am...you MUST be! I mean it’s amazing!”

Sophie smiled, taking Sonny back from her friend, “I’m petrified. This is a dream come true for Bill...but what if he crashes or something. He SO wants to just finish!”

Despite four seasons as a professional cyclist, this was Bill’s first trip in to Paris on the last stage of the Tour de France, and it was his dream come true. Everything he’d always wanted. The first two seasons he was with a team who couldn’t dream of entering the Tour it was far too out of their league. Last year having joined a new and much higher ranked pro team, he’d fallen during the second stage of the race and broken his collar bone, he’d had to settle for watching the rest of that Tour on TV. Today, he was due to travel into Paris as part of the peloton for the final stage of the pinnacle of the cycling calendar, despite not figuring in the top places, he didn’t care. Bill had dreamed since a child of whizzing around the Paris streets at the finale of the greatest race in the world, and here he was about to do it, with the world watching.

Glancing at her phone, Sophie checked up on the race info. He was safe, cycling and about to hit Paris for the six laps of the city centre that famously ended the race. It had been a hard three weeks watching him toil relentlessly from a distance or on TV, and being so close to him, yet so far away. But Sophie had got used to that over the last few years. He was away a lot.

But now she had Sonny to keep her busy, groaning at the sudden shift in her huge stomach, she placed a hand on what she now knew was definitely their second baby’s bottom and whispered, “not now little one!”

Vin looked over at her, “you ok?”

Sonny had been a very difficult arrival for Sophie, and her best friend was more anxious than Bill at the impending birth of this new baby. This time there could be no unexpected blood loss, no early labour and no collapsing after delivering the baby this time she wouldn’t spend her first night of mother hood on the intensive care unit, added to that there would be no NICU experience and no more heartache. Sophie was convinced and her determination had been Vincenza’s only hope.