Epilogue
EMMA
Six Months Later
There are moments in single motherhood that no one warns you about.
The stomach flu that hits all three kids simultaneously at two am.
The school talent show where your eight-year-old performs an original song about boogers.
The time your teenager discovers existential philosophy and spends six weeks asking “But what is reality, Mom?” every time you tell her to clean her room.
And then there’s this: standing on a pier at sunset with a fishing pole in one hand and a juice box in the other, watching your son try to catch a sea monster.
“Mom.” Aidan tugs my sleeve for the fourteenth time in three minutes. “Mom. Mom. Mom.”
“Yes, my darling child whom I love more than life itself?”
“If I catch a shark, can I keep it?”
“In what? The bathtub?”
He considers this. “The bathtub is pretty big.”
“The bathtub is on a houseboat. Where would the shark go when you need to shower?”
“I’d shower with the shark. Obviously.”
Of course. How silly of me not to realize that showering with a shark was the obvious solution.
Millie, my ten-year-old voice of reason, doesn’t look up from her line. “You’re not going to catch a shark, Aidan. There aren’t sharks in the sound.”
“There could be sharks.”
“There couldn’t.”
“There could be a lost shark. One who took a wrong turn and ended up here by accident. Who needs a home.”
I take a long sip of my cold coffee, which I brought in a thermos because I am a mother who plans ahead, except I forgot cups so I’m drinking directly from the thermos like some kind of caffeinated gremlin.
This is my life now. Houseboat. Fishing pier.
Three kids who are somehow simultaneously the best and most chaotic things that have ever happened to me.
A photography business I’m building one wedding at a time.
And an ex-husband in Raleigh who sends child support checks and occasional texts that say things like “Tell the kids I’m thinking of them” as if thoughts are a substitute for showing up.
But I’m not bitter. I’m really not.
Okay, I’m a little bitter. But I’m working on it.
“Jenna.” I turn to my teenager, who is sitting on a bench with her headphones in, aggressively not participating. “You want to try fishing?”
She looks at me like I’ve suggested she eat a live spider. “I’m good.”
“Fresh air. Family bonding. The simple pleasures of...”
“I’m literally outside, Mom. I’m bonding. This is me bonding.” She gestures at herself, sitting alone, scrolling her phone. “Maximum bonding achieved.”
I decide not to push it. Jenna is fifteen, which means she’s legally required to find everything I do embarrassing and everything I say wrong. I remember being fifteen. I remember thinking my mother was the most clueless person on the planet.
I owe that woman so many apology cards.
“Reel in a little,” I tell Millie, who’s actually taking this seriously. “Let it drift, then reel.”
“I know, Mom. You’ve told me like eight times.”
“I’m providing gentle guidance.”
“You’re hovering.”
“I’m a mother. Hovering is my love language.”
She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. Millie is my easy one, my steady center, the kid who somehow emerged from the chaos of divorce and relocation with her feet firmly on the ground.
She’s been the one reassuring me that everything will be okay, which is both beautiful and slightly concerning because she’s ten and shouldn’t have to be anyone’s emotional support child.
I’m working on that too.
The pier stretches out into the sound, weathered wood and salt air and the kind of golden evening light that makes everything look like a movie.
I still can’t believe this is my life. The houseboat I inherited from Aunt Dottie, the one that leaks in mysterious places and has electrical issues that my annoying neighbor insists are my fault.
The photography business that’s finally taking off, one client at a time.
The community that welcomed us with open arms and casseroles and weekly book club meetings where we drink too much wine and argue about fictional men.
Book club is tonight. Hazel’s hosting, which means her famous cheese dip and at least one dramatic reading of a spicy scene that will make Michelle snort wine out of her nose.
“Mom!” Aidan’s shriek cuts through my thoughts. “There’s a couple!”
“A couple of what?”
“A couple of people. Walking on the pier. Toward us.” He squints. “The lady has flowers.”
I turn to look.
He’s right. A man and a woman are walking along the pier, hand in hand, silhouetted against the sunset. She’s carrying a small bouquet of what looks like wildflowers, and she’s laughing at something he’s said, her head thrown back, completely unselfconscious.
Delilah and Levi. I’d know them anywhere.
Delilah’s become one of my closest friends over the past year, bonding over book club wine and shared stories of romantic disasters. Hers had a happy ending, though. Levi came back, she stayed, and the whole town has been waiting for exactly what I think is about to happen.
They stop at the end of the pier, right where the wood meets the water and the sky spreads out in oranges and pinks and the kind of purple that doesn’t seem real.
“They’re just standing there,” Aidan reports, because he’s appointed himself Pier Correspondent. “Looking at each other. Being weird.”
“They’re not being weird,” Millie says. “They’re being romantic.”
“Same thing.”
I should look away. This feels private, whatever’s about to happen. But I can’t stop watching, and apparently neither can my children, because even Jenna has pulled out one earbud and is watching with poorly disguised interest.
He says something to her. She laughs again, shaking her head, and then he reaches into his jacket pocket.
Oh.
Oh no.
He pulls out a small box. Gets down on one knee.
“Mom,” Millie breathes. “Is he...”
“Shh.”
I can’t hear what he’s saying. We’re too far away for words. But I can see her face, the way her hands fly up to cover her mouth, the way her whole body goes still and then starts shaking.
He opens the box.
She nods. Once, twice, a dozen times, nodding so hard it’s a wonder her head doesn’t fall off.
He stands, slides the ring on her finger, and then she’s in his arms and he’s lifting her off the ground and spinning her, and she’s laughing and crying and the sunset is painting them gold and this is everything.
“She said yes!” Aidan announces at full volume. “The lady said yes!”
I clap a hand over his mouth, but it’s too late. They’ve heard. Delilah looks over, still crying, still laughing, and her face lights up when she sees me.
“Emma!” She’s waving her hand, the ring catching the light. “Did you see? Did you see?”
“I saw!” I’m laughing now too, because her joy is contagious. “Congratulations!”
She grabs Levi’s hand and drags him toward us, practically skipping. This is the Delilah I’ve come to know over the past year of book club meetings and coffee dates and late-night texts about our respective romantic disasters. Except hers isn’t a disaster anymore. Hers is a fairy tale.
“He asked me to marry him,” she says, like I might have missed it. “Right here. On our pier.”
“I was going to do it at the restaurant.” Levi wraps his arm around her, grinning. “Had a whole plan. Reservations. Champagne. But then I realized this is our spot. This pier. This is where it all started.”
“When we were seventeen,” Delilah adds, squeezing his hand. “He kissed me right here when we were seventeen.”
My heart squeezes watching them. Seventeen.
I know this story by heart now, after a year of book club meetings.
The summer they met as teenagers. The kiss on this very pier.
The decade apart, then finding each other again at twenty-seven, only to lose each other a second time.
His fame, her running, the way she almost left town for good six months ago until he chased her all the way to Asheville.
Twenty years of almost and not-quite, and now this.
That’s the kind of love story I used to think only existed in books. The kind I definitely don’t believe in anymore, after a ten-year marriage that ended with “I just don’t feel the same way anymore” and a house I had to sell and a life I had to rebuild from scratch.
But watching them, the way they look at each other like no one else exists, the way she keeps touching the ring like she can’t believe it’s real...
Maybe Delilah’s proof that second chances are real. Even if I’m not sure I’ll ever get one myself.
“This is so beautiful,” Millie says quietly, and when I look down at her, her eyes are suspiciously shiny.
“It is, baby.”
“Do you think that’ll happen to you someday?”
The question catches me off guard. I want to give her a comforting answer, something about how love finds everyone eventually, but I can’t quite make the words come out.
“I think,” I say slowly, “that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be right now. With you guys. Building our new life. And if something else comes along someday, that’s great. But this is pretty great too.”
She considers this, then nods. “That’s a good answer.”
“I’m a mom. Good answers are my specialty.”
“You literally told Aidan that sharks could live in our bathtub.”
“I said no such thing.”
“I heard you...”
“Let’s go congratulate the happy couple.”
I herd my children toward Delilah and Levi, who are still glowing with that just-engaged energy that makes everything around them seem brighter. Up close, I can see the ring better. Simple, elegant, a single stone that catches the fading light.
They’re adorable. Disgustingly, impossibly adorable. I’m so happy for her I could burst, even as a tiny, petty part of me wonders if I’ll ever have something like this again.
“The girls are going to lose their minds,” I tell her. “You know Hazel’s going to cry.”
“Hazel cries at everything.”
“She cried at that commercial with the dog last week.”