EPILOGUE – ROWE
Jules gets married in her biker boots.
The dress is real enough—ivory, long, slit high so she can move—but when she walks down the center aisle of the Big Top on nobody's arm, because Jules Beck belongs to no one she didn't choose, the boots flash under the hem with every stride, and Elias looks at her like a man watching his whole religion arrive on schedule.
The tent is ours tonight. No crowd. Two hundred folding chairs full of carnival family, strings of warm bulbs looped between the rigging, and the ring floor swept and scattered with petals that Nova insisted on and Silas pretended to argue about while ordering three more boxes.
Cole officiates, because the threat turned out to be a promise, and he's taking it seriously in the way only Cole can—dead solemn delivery, a knife tucked into his cummerbund, and a ceremony he wrote himself that includes the phrase till death, which is negotiable in this family.
Wren sits beside me and cries through the whole thing.
I can't stop looking at her. Her dress is deep green, gathered at the waist, and it holds her the way I want to—snug at the hips, generous everywhere she is, the neckline framing collarbones I've traced with a feather and, lately, with my own fingertips.
She caught me staring while she got ready and turned pink from her hairline down.
"Do you, Elias Vale," Cole intones, "take this terrifying woman—"
"I do."
"I wasn't finished."
"I do anyway."
Jules laughs, bright and cheerful, and the tent laughs with her, and when Elias slides the ring on her finger, Logan whoops from the front row loud enough to spook the peacocks outside.
Rome trumpets an answer from the menagerie like he's been waiting for a cue his whole life.
Marek stands at the edge of the ring with Beau sitting patiently at his heel, and when the kiss happens—long, theatrical, Elias dipping Jules while her boot kicks up—Marek smiles at his cards like they told him so months ago.
Dinner is Deke's finest hour. Long tables get dragged into the ring, with lanterns down the center, and more food than a town could eat.
Nova holds court with her belly leading the way now, one hand permanently resting on it while Teddy and Silas orbit her with plates and water and arguments about whether the baby can hear music yet.
Jonah gives a toast that starts as a joke and ends with him wiping his eyes with a napkin the size of a pillowcase.
Jules dances with every single one of us in turn—for me, she holds her palms up, and I press my fingertips to hers, and we turn a slow circle at arm's length.
She grins at me with wet eyes and says, "Look at you, Holloway," and doesn't make it a thing, which is why I love her.
Wren dances with everyone too. I watch Logan spin her until she shrieks. I watch Deke shuffle her through something that might be a waltz. I watch her laugh with her head back under the string lights, hay-country girl in a green dress, and my chest gets so full it starts to hurt.
Two months since Thistlewood. Two months of a bed built for two and a careful two feet of air that keeps shrinking.
Her fingers on my forehead, brushing hair back.
My palm at the small of her back when we walk.
Last week, her cheek against my shoulder for the length of one whole song on the radio, my heart slamming and then, minute by minute, going quiet.
Every day, an inch. Every inch, a country.
And every night, I lie beside her and want more than inches.
The band Elias hired—actual musicians, in the Big Top, playing something slow and old—starts another song, and Wren drops into the chair beside me, flushed, glowing, a strand of hair stuck to her temple.
"Your family," she pants, "does not pace itself."
"They don't know how."
She reaches for her water glass. I watch her throat move when she drinks, the lantern light on her collarbones, the crease of her smile still lingering from whatever Logan said, and the decision that's been building in me for weeks has never felt more right.
"Wren."
"Mm?"
"Come with me?"
She sets the glass down. Something in my voice must alert her, because her eyes search my face, and whatever she finds there makes her breathing change.
"Okay," she says. No questions. She never needs to be told twice.
We slip out the performers' entrance into the night. Behind us, the music follows—the canvas holds nothing in, it never has—and the lot is dark and quiet, the trailers sleeping, the moon fat over the menagerie. She walks beside me with her hand swinging close to mine, and halfway home, I take it.
Her fingers go still in mine. Then they curl, carefully, and hold on.
Neither of us says anything. Her thumb moves once over my knuckles, and we walk the rest of the way like that, hand in hand under the moon, and it's the first time, and she knows it's the first time, and she keeps her eyes forward and lets it be ordinary because she understands that ordinary is the whole prize.
At the trailer door, I stop.
"Close your eyes."
She narrows them instead. "Rowe Holloway."
"Trust me."
Wren closes her eyes. I open the door and guide her up the steps with my hand on her back.
"Okay. Open them."
She gasps. “Candles…”
They're everywhere. On the shelves I built, in the kitchenette, lined along the window ledge in glass holders, a few dozen small flames lighting our four hundred square feet.
One of our mechanics, Jack, did it—I asked him at dinner, slipped him the lighter and the bag from town, and he nipped out between toasts and set every one of them where nothing can catch because Logan trained the whole crew in fire discipline out of pure self-interest.
Wren's hands come up over her mouth.
"When did you—" Her voice wobbles. "We were together the whole—"
"Jack."
"You planned this," she breathes.
"For two weeks."
The music reaches us here, faint and warm through the walls, the band playing something with strings in it. She turns in the candlelight, taking in every flame, and her eyes are shining when they come back to me.
"Dance with me," I say.
She goes very still.
"Rowe. That means—"
"I know what it means."
I hold out my arms. Both of them. An open circle, an invitation into the one place no one has ever stood, and I watch her understand it, watch the tears arrive and spill without a sound, and then she steps in.
Her body settles against mine.
All of her. Her chest to my ribs, her arms sliding around my waist, her cheek finding the hollow below my collarbone, the whole soft warm weight of the woman I love pressed along the front of me, and I close my arms around her and hold on.
We dance—a slow turning in place, my hand spread over the small of her back, her heartbeat against my sternum, the music drifting in from a wedding still going on without us.
Her tears soak through my shirt, and she's smiling.
I can feel the shape of it against my collarbone, crying and smiling at once, and I press my cheek to the top of her head and breathe her in.
"You're holding me," she whispers.
"I'm holding you."
"Don't stop."
"Never," I vow.
We turn through one song, then another. Her hands move over my back, slow, learning it, and my skin lets her, and sometime during the third song, she tips her head back and looks up at me, lashes wet, candle flames doubled in her eyes.
And I do the thing I've wanted to do since a woman with a field kit crouched in the dirt of my tent and talked softly to a frightened monkey.
I cup her face in both hands, lean down, and kiss her.
Her lips are soft and taste of salt, and the sound she makes against my mouth is small and broken and joyful, and I swallow it whole.
It starts carefully—two people who've never done this with each other, one who's never done it at all—and then her mouth opens under mine, and I stop being careful.
I kiss her deep, tangling my tongue with hers, thirty-five years of never pouring into it, and she rises up on her toes and gives it all back, her fingers curling into my shirt.
We stand in the candlelight kissing until neither of us can breathe.
I pull back an inch. Her mouth follows mine, chasing, and I laugh against her lips.
"Hi," I whisper.
"Hi," she sobs, laughing, tears sliding freely now, and I kiss them off her cheeks, one side and then the other.
I walk her backward to the bed. Slow. Her hands stay flat against my chest, and I find the zipper at the back of the green dress and draw it down, inch by inch, listening to her breathing speed up.
The dress slides off her shoulders, and I kiss the skin it uncovers.
Her shoulder, the wing of her collarbone, the curve where her neck meets it.
My mouth is on her body for the first time above the waist, not frantic in the dark, but deliberate and unhurried, and she shakes under every kiss, crying without sound, her hand cradling the back of my head so lightly it weighs nothing.
The dress falls. I kiss her sternum. The soft upper swell of each breast as I unclasp her bra and let it drop.
Her nipples, one and then the other, drawing each into my mouth until she gasps, her fingers tightening in my hair.
I go to my knees and kiss her belly, long, worshipping presses of my lips while her tears fall onto my shoulders like rain.
Her hips as I slide her underwear down. The tops of her thighs. The inside of one knee.
"Rowe," she chokes.
"I know."
"You're touching me. You're just—touching me."
"I'm never going to stop."
I stand and strip for her. Shirt over my head, belt, jeans, everything, until I'm as bare as she is, candlelight moving over both our bodies.
Then I lay her down in the middle of the bed I built for exactly this night, and I follow her down, and for the first time in my life, my skin meets another person's from mouth to ankle.