Epilogue
CAMILLE
R elease day looked the way hope always looked to me—too early, a sky the color of the inside of a shell, and everyone pretending they weren’t crying.
The bottlenose floated calm in the sling, the lines whispering against the canvas as the surf reached and pulled back like it was practicing goodbye.
Miguel stood at the tail, hands sure. Tamika set the perimeter with two Coasties like she’d been born with a radio. Becca had the clipboard and the soft, ruined smile of a person who’d slept here more than home. Papa hummed under his breath, the tune he uses when he’s measuring something he loves.
“Breaths?” I asked.
“Twenty-two. Clean,” Becca said, not looking up. “She’s ready.”
We walked her to the waterline together—friends, family, a couple of Coasties who claimed they were just passing by and absolutely were not—and when the first cool edge of the Atlantic touched her skin, she lifted her chin like a queen remembering her name.
“Okay, ma belle,” I said, my palm on her flank one last time. “Go home.”
We let the lines go with the outgoing wash. She hung for a second in that thin place where we live half our lives—between staying and leaving—and then she chose, the way healthy bodies do. She kicked. She slid. She cleared the last break like she’d meant to all along.
Out past the outer bar, three dorsal fins rose in order, tidy as punctuation. The wild pod fell in beside her, one on each flank, one slightly behind, and for a breath they moved together, four backs breaking the morning in rhythm.
The third one—scar nicked in her fin, a crescent I knew from a dozen surveys—peeled off and came in toward us, slow. She rolled just enough for that bright, coin-dark eye to catch my line. She exhaled. The mist crossed my face like a blessing.
“Did she just—” Jacob started.
“—say thank you,” I finished, because sometimes you are allowed to believe what you want to believe.
He was barefoot in shin-deep water, jeans rolled, T-shirt already damp, short hair a lost cause. He had the look he gets when the world does the right thing: undone, relieved, a little feral at the edges. I took one step toward him, then another, and then he was already moving, too.
“Wait,” he said, and there was a tremor of laughter in it I recognized from the night the ocean gave him back to me. He went down on one knee in the swash, salt water slapping his calf, and the surf tugged the hem of his jeans like it wanted to be part of the moment.
I laughed, wet and startled. “You already asked me, you menace.”
He looked up at me with those eyes that have learned how to live again. “I did,” he said. “And I said I’d buy the ring.” He tipped his chin toward the horizon. “This is me, making good.”
“It’s been weeks,” I said, teasing, breath caught in my throat. “Your tomorrow needs a calendar.”
He grinned, wrecked and sure, and pulled a small box from his pocket.
“I bought it the next day,” he said. “I’ve been carrying it every minute since.
I just—” He glanced past me to the slick backs arcing in the dawn, to my crew, to my father with his hands in his pockets trying to pretend he wasn’t misting over.
“I wanted to give it to you when the water was listening.”
He opened the box. The ring was simple—warm gold, a brilliant diamond cupped in a wave-shaped setting. Inside the band, a single word was engraved. Respire.
My mouth did that laugh-sob again, useless and true. “You are unbearable,” I whispered.
“Correct,” he said softly. “Camille Allard. Will you—officially this time—marry me?”
Behind us, the wild dolphin slapped her tail once, propping the moment up like a period. Tamika said, “Uh, hell yes, again,” into her radio and then remembered to release the push-to-talk. A Coastie diver who’d pulled Jacob out of the deep twice already punched the air and pretended he hadn’t.
“Yes,” I said, because my bones were already a chorus of yes. “Yes.”
He slipped the ring on my finger, and it fit like it had been waiting for me.
He stood and I pulled him into me and kissed the salt off his mouth.
The surf wrapped our ankles and let us go.
Papa clapped once, loud enough to startle a gull, and then wiped his face and looked at the sky like he had questions for it.
When we finally came up for air, Jacob touched the ring, then my cheek.
We stood there until the last fin slipped under. The day widened. Someone whooped. Someone else hugged everyone within reach. McGuire arrived a beat late, blamed traffic, and I let her, because she squeezed my shoulder like a sister and didn’t try to make a speech.
“Paperwork?” she asked, half to me, half to the water.
“Later,” I said, and she saluted me with her coffee cup.
On the walk back up the beach, Marcus fell in step with us and, without ceremony, tossed Jacob a towel like he’d already drafted him.
“Suite’s open at Dominion Hall,” he said, all casual with that not-casual glint.
“Near Caleb and Meghan’s. Big windows. Decent knives.
Think about it. Since you’ll be sticking around to work with us, anyway. ”
Jacob looked at me. We’d been circling it for days—the invitation from the Charleston Danes to move into that old beast of a house, a suite near the brother who’d riptided back into his life and settled into something gentler.
“The bungalow was a rental,” I said, wiggling my salty fingers so the ring flashed. “Maybe. We could try it. A season. Get a swing?”
“Or we could split our time,” he said. “Room at Dominion when we need to be near the storm. Bungalow when we need to be near the river.”
“And my parents,” I added.
“Especially your parents,” he said, grinning. “Your mother already feeds me like I’m endangered.”
“She thinks you are,” I said.
Papa, a few paces behind us, pretended not to hear and hummed louder. Marcus snorted, hands in his pockets. “Tell her Dominion Hall’s kitchen won’t try to compete.”
Down by the truck, Miguel was giving Becca a speech about sunscreen. Tamika pretended to check the cooler and actually checked my face.
I nodded: steady . She nodded back: good .
I loved my people. So hard.
Jacob leaned into me, hip to hip. “So,” he said, glancing at the water like it might offer commentary, “engaged engaged.”
“Engaged engaged,” I confirmed, and lifted my hand to admire the small, bright circle the way I admire a clean dorsal photo—proof you can hold.
He traced the engraving with his thumb. “Lily would have liked you,” he said quietly.
“I know,” I said, and meant it. “I like the person she made you decide to be.”
He swallowed, looked away at the horizon for one breath, then back at me. “Me, too,” he said. “Thanks for finding the rest.”
We loaded the last of the gear. Papa handed me a thermos that smelled like chicory. McGuire took a call, winced, and mouthed later at me. The Coasties did that thing where they try to be invisible and fail adorably.
“Come here,” Jacob said, tugging me two steps away from the clatter. He took my face in both hands and kissed me like a promise, then looked down at my hand again, at the word inside the ring that has always been our liturgy.
“Respire,” he said.
“Respire,” I echoed. Breathe.
The pod was gone, the way wild things go when they’ve said what they came to say.
The released dolphin had become a streak of muscle and will somewhere beyond the bar, where the bottom falls away and the light is different.
I pictured her slipping into the slot between two others, finding the rhythm, choosing the next breath.
I pictured a house that was mine because my people were in it: a suite with tall windows and a river porch with a swing; a kitchen where Jacob burned toast and my mother shook her head and smiled; a future with small, sandy feet and tide charts taped to the fridge.
We started up the beach, side by side. The ring warmed to my skin. The ocean breathed behind us, and for once, it felt like it was agreeing.
“Ready?” he asked.
“For what?” I said.
“For all of it,” he said.
I looked at the water, then at him, and thought about the way a dolphin will ride a boat’s wake not because it has to, but because it wants the joy of being carried and the work of pushing forward at the same time.
“Yeah,” I said. “All of it.”
We walked toward the day that was already waiting for us, and I counted once, for luck.
“One,” I said under my breath.
He laughed, hearing me, falling in. “Two.”
“Three,” we finished together, and we kept going.
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