Epilogue
The aspens are turning again, and my daughter is up on a step stool at the counter, explaining September to the trout I’m breaking down for dinner.
“It’s gold,” Riley tells the fish, her expression grave but confident. She’s four years old and never once wrong in her life. “It has to go in the butter, Mama. The whole gold town.”
She learned that from me. I don’t remember teaching it to her, which means she learned it the only way that sticks, by watching—the same as I learned to brace for loss by watching my own mother agree every time I asked for less.
Except my girl isn’t learning that one. My girl is learning that when something’s beautiful, you put it in the butter, and you don’t apologize for how much you love it.
Reid comes in through the back door with leaf-mulch on his boots and the last of the daylight on his shoulders. Home by six—the hours he’s kept for five years now.
Riley abandons the fish to launch herself at his knees.
He scoops her up one-armed, already asking the day’s important questions.
Whether she jumped in the leaf pile. Whether Mama let her have sugar before dinner.
If there’s a soft touch in this house, he wants it on record, and our daughter snitches on both of us without mercy.
I watch the two of them from behind the counter.
Five years ago, Marchetti retired and handed me his whole kitchen instead of just a slot, and there’s a brass plate with my name on it down at Prospect House now.
My turn came, and then it kept coming, which is the part nobody warned me about back when I was sure the bus stopped one block early on purpose.
It doesn’t. It never did—it was only ever late, and I was the one who decided late meant never.
Reid catches me not-working and crosses the kitchen with Riley still clamped to his side. He kisses me over her head.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says against my temple. “Where you look at us and can’t believe it.”
“I’m checking the trout.”
“The trout’s raw. You’re counting your winnings.” He pulls back enough to see my face, and there it is, five years of him reading straight through every efficient word I own. “I told you I’d have bet the whole season on you.”
“You did bet the season on me. You lost the season and won anyway.”
“Won twice that day.” He says it into my hair. “Been winning ever since.”
Riley, who has no patience for grown-ups going soft when there’s cooking to supervise, decides to reclaim the room. “The butter, Mama. The gold town goes in.”
So I set her on the stool between us, and I show my daughter how you take the whole ridiculous gold-drenched town and fold it into something warm on purpose. It’s beautiful, and she’s allowed to want beautiful things.
Reid’s hand settles at the small of my back. The trees burn gold outside the window. And I stand in the middle of the life I was so sure would go to somebody else and let myself have every last second of it.
I’m not efficient anymore.
Turns out I was never any good at it.