Epilogue
I passed over a tissue, but discretely. My bag was stuffed with them because Silas had been a mess all day.
He had been trying to hide it, which didn’t work very well for him.
For one thing, his size drew your eyes—his size and his amazing good looks, of course.
For another, he kept blowing his nose in a way that sounded like a royal fanfare.
“Thanks, Cammie.” He took the tissue and blew his nose again, and heads turned. But our daughter, nestled in his arms, didn’t even blink her blue eyes. “Are they going to do a valedictorian speech?”
“Not for eighth grade,” I whispered, then clutched his arm as the students filed onto the platform at the front of the room. “There she is!”
Someone else had seen, too.
“Lyra! Lyra!” our son hollered. She was, without a doubt, his favorite person in the world.
“Shh,” Silas and I both told him, and put our fingers against our lips to demonstrate. He nodded and did the same, but the next second?
“Lyra! I love you!”
She got a huge smile and we convinced her nephew to whisper. Well, technically he was her nephew, and he called us “mommy” and “daddy” while she said “Silas” and “Cammie,” but she was a sister to both of our kids. The best sister in the whole world.
Silas passed me a tissue, because he had also brought some for me. “I can’t believe she’s a graduate,” he said.
A middle school graduate, but this was just one of many diplomas in her future. We’d all been there when Silas had gotten his diploma, too, and I had cried just as much.
“Pass me a tissue,” Mrs. Alford ordered, and her grandson (whose ceremony we had attended the year before) took it from me and handed it over to her. “Octavia? You need one?”
“I have my own,” my colleague announced.
She had brought a lace-trimmed hankie but not, on my express instructions, her monitor lizard.
Later, after we had lunch at our house, she would bring home some leftovers for him to enjoy, but he wasn’t lonely as he waited there for her.
He was surrounded by lizard friends. Octavia had started a small reptile rescue and when she retired, she planned to devote herself to that full-time.
Speeches started and both our kids got a little feisty, so Silas and I took turns bringing them out of the gym. Fortunately, we timed it right so that we were all on scene to hear her name: “Lyra Stone.”
The audience was supposed to hold applause until the end but it was very hard.
And when the last kid had crossed the stage, her fans all erupted.
Silas, whose hidden talent was whistling with his knuckle, put his other large hand over our little girl’s ears and let loose.
Luckily, my dad had turned off his hearing aids because that would have hurt.
My mom was beaming and also crying as she blocked her own ears.
“We’re so proud!” she said, when the ceremony ended and Lyra came hurrying to find us.
We all were. She was growing up into an amazing girl—oh, she was growing up so fast!
“Cammie,” she scolded, but she was smiling as she hugged me.
“I knew you were going to cry. She cried when she did my hair this morning and I said she was going to be a mess for the whole day,” she told everyone else.
I suspected that they’d already guessed that, based on my behavior at the end of fifth grade.
“Lyra!” my son demanded, and she picked him up.
“You’re the best eighth grader. I love you,” he told her again, and she said it back.
Then his sister started to demand attention as well, so Lyra also picked her up.
She was so strong from sports—not just softball, but also volleyball and cross country.
And she was smart, and kind, and…oh, no. I had just used my last tissue.
“Let’s get pictures before we go,” my dad directed, so we arranged ourselves in various ways.
We did one shot with friends; one with her grandparents; one with Silas, me, and the kids.
I watched everyone smile with pride and happiness.
I felt six inches taller myself due to those emotions, and I didn’t bother to try to hide them.
After the lunch that Silas and I had prepared, we all sat in the back yard together, enjoying the June sunshine.
Our kids played on the swing set that we’d assembled, Octavia told her friend Mrs. Alford about a sinister plot involving the Detroit sewer system, and Boris talked to my parents about rocks.
The study of geology was definitely in his future.
“Christ on a cracker.”
I turned to look at my husband. “What’s wrong?”
He smiled at me. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m looking around and…
” He trailed off, but I understood what he meant.
I often did the same thing. When I was at my desk at work and saw my screen saver with the picture of our family, or when I was turning out the light in the kids’ room at bedtime, or when I was watching one of Lyra’s games…
“We’re lucky,” I told him. “We’re lucky in life.”
“We sure as hell are.” He bent and kissed me. “You walked into the Chateau Moderne wearing that big diamond, and somehow, this happened.” He picked up my hand and studied the silver band on my ring finger. I liked it much, much better.
“It’s because I fell for you,” I explained. “I fell in love with you, since you made yourself impossible to resist.”
“I fell for you, first. I was thinking that it wasn’t going to work. A girl like you? You could have had anyone.”
“But I only wanted the best,” I said, and he kissed me again.
“This is the best.” Silas looked at me, then at the kids and Lyra, and then up at the sky. “This is it, for real.”
It was. There was nothing simulant about it.