And so they found themselves a family of five—six if you counted Taylor, which they almost felt like they should even though they paid her a small fortune at the end of every week. They named their daughter Tess, and where Asher was calm, she was a spitfire. Tess was in complete control of her body at an early age, learning to roll and sit and crawl and walk months before Asher reached each milestone, though they smiled and cooed and said their first words around the same time. Her eyes were the same mysterious color as Kurt’s, and when she stared off into the middle distance, as babies do, Kurt and Blaine and Taylor had the eerie feeling that she was watching magical creatures dance and play. Kurt took to calling her Tess of the Fairies.

They started to get a lot of attention whenever they went out as a family. Two babies will draw people’s eyes, and it seemed they couldn’t go anywhere without being asked, “Are they twins?” Which proved difficult to answer.

“Well … their birthdays are three days apart and they are not biologically related. But we adopted them both and they’re growing up together, so, kind of?” It was way too much information for a random stranger in the grocery store.

“Yes,” was the simple answer, except that it always led to the follow-up question, “But why don’t they look anything alike?” Then the whole story had to come out anyway, and it took longer.

Sometimes they tried answering “No,” but then the inevitable assumption was that Blaine was Asher’s biological father (“You have the same hair!”) and Kurt was Tess’s (“Those eyes are a dead giveaway!”). The questions were much more awkward after this, with people shamelessly prying into their personal lives. “Do they have the same mother? Did you implant a surrogate with embryos from each of you, or were there two separate women involved?” So they gave up on “No” as an answer.

When Kurt was in a bad mood, he answered, “It’s none of your goddamn business,” and people assumed his wife had cheated on him, but at least they didn’t ask any follow-up questions.

Taylor had no problems. When she took them to the park in the double stroller, Colin walking along beside, everyone just assumed she was a shared nanny hired by two different families, and they didn’t blink an eye or ask her anything.

Colin seemed to see the babies less as rivals and more as experimental subjects. What happens, for instance, if he pokes them in the nose? (Asher cries, Tess tries to grab his finger.) What if he takes away their pacifiers? (Loud crying from both.) What if he tries to lean on the back of the bouncy chair? (Immediate parental intervention spoils the experiment.) What if he tries to give them Legos? (Taylor thanks him very nicely but intercepts the gift.) What does formula taste like? (Disgusting.)

But there were moments of sweetness also. The day Colin added “Baby Ash-oh” and “Baby Teff” to his small vocabulary. The day he offered his beloved stuffed elephant to a crying Asher. The day he tried to teach Tess, five months old, to count to ten. Hugs and kisses and laughter and stick-figure drawings of the whole family. He was so proud whenever anyone called him a big brother.

It was immediately obvious that their apartment was too small. They were at a loss for what to do, so they toughed it out for a few months, tripping over each other and having fits over the lack of personal space. Upgrading to a larger place in Manhattan was prohibitively expensive. They considered getting two two-bedroom apartments next door to each other, but that would be expensive too, and the logistics were too difficult to work out.

They talked to a real estate agent and decided to buy a place in Brooklyn’s South Slope, where the amount of space they’d need was affordable, at least by New York standards. They found a lovely place in a multi-family townhouse with a couple of extra bedrooms they could use for a playroom and office space for the children’s clothing business Kurt had started a year before.

Kurt sighed about giving up the pleasures of Manhattan, but to be honest, they hadn’t really been taking advantage of them in the years since they’d adopted Colin. Blaine pouted a bit about the commute, but it was doable, and at least they didn’t have to live in New Jersey. The space, the yard, the neighborhood were just what they needed.

Taylor came with them, of course. She said it would take more than Brooklyn to drive her away, and that she was looking forward to exploring the new neighborhood anyway. Kurt and Blaine let out sighs of relief, because they honestly didn’t know how they could ever have survived without her.

They moved to the new place the day after Tess learned to crawl. It grew on them, bit by bit, until one day they realized that this truly felt like home, and their family seemed like perfection. None of it had been planned, but they couldn’t imagine it any other way.