Epilogue
GRAYSON
Ten months later and I still wake up before her.
Old habit. New reason. The old reason was that I didn't sleep much and the quiet before sunrise was the only hour of the day my brain wasn't running a loop.
The new reason is that I like to watch her do the slow stretch she does about ten minutes after I get out of bed, back arched, arm thrown over the pillow where I was, hand reaching for me before her eyes are even open.
She finds the cold side of the sheet and her mouth turns down in her sleep.
Every morning.
It kills me every morning.
I put the coffee on.
The cabin has changed in ten months. Not much.
Enough. There's a second leather chair in the office now because she works from mine and I built myself a new one on a Saturday last August. The wall above the couch has three of Darius Kane's smaller canvases on it, a gift when we went to his opening at Iron Vine.
Her grandmother's cast iron lives on my stove full time.
My stove is now our stove. I stopped tracking the pronouns three months in.
The big change is outside.
The second cabin.
It's not done. Still needs the interior trim and the wiring finished on the upper floor. I've been building it with Callum Ridge on weekends since May, his crew doing the heavy lifts, me doing the finish work because I wanted my hands on the thing she was going to work in.
Simone's office cabin. Fifteen minutes walk from the main house down a cleared path through the pines.
Soundproofed for her Zoom calls. A wood stove.
A desk she picked out from a guy in Nelson who does reclaimed barn wood.
Windows that face east so she can watch the morning come in over the ridge while she writes.
It will be finished by her birthday.
Which is in two weeks.
I'm nervous about it in a way I haven't been nervous about anything in a long time.
I pour two cups. Take mine to the porch.
The morning is cold in the way autumn mornings are in the Kootenays, sharp and clean, and I stand with my hands around the mug and I look at the trees and I think about how a year ago I was a man who had forgotten what the point of a morning was.
Now the point of the morning is the woman who's about to come downstairs in my shirt and complain that I let her sleep too long.
"You let me sleep too long."
I don't turn around. The porch boards creaked under her bare feet so I heard her coming.
"It's seven."
"That's too long."
"It's Saturday."
"I have a deadline."
"You have a deadline Tuesday."
She leans into my back. Arms around my waist. Chin on my shoulder. The gold disc at her throat clicks softly against my collarbone through the shirt.
"Saturday breakfast."
"I know."
"Sage is going to make the thing with the plantains."
"I know that too."
"You love the thing with the plantains."
"I tolerate the thing with the plantains."
"Liar."
She bites my shoulder through the flannel. Not hard. Then leans against me and breathes in my back for a second.
"Gray."
"Yeah."
"I'm happy."
"I know, baby."
"I just wanted to say it out loud."
I set my coffee down. Turn around. Pull her in.
Kiss the top of her head.
"You say it out loud every morning."
"Well. It keeps being true."
Bean & Bloom at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning is a specific kind of controlled chaos.
Sage is behind the counter in a flour-dusted apron laughing at something Luna just said.
Luna is in the corner booth with a notebook and a pen and an air of pretending she's not eavesdropping on the rest of us.
Venus is at the long table in the back, honey blonde curls loose, pouring coffee from a carafe and waving at Simone the second we walk in.
"Baptiste. Mercer. Sit down. Simone, sit here. Gray, you get the end, I don't want you hovering over her."
"I don't hover."
"You hover."
Sage yells from the counter, "He hovers, Gray."
Luna, without looking up from her notebook, "Mmhm."
I sit on the end.
Simone slides in next to Venus and gets pulled into an immediate three-way conversation about someone's sister-in-law and an Instagram thing and a new wine Eli Kane just bottled.
I drink my coffee.
Nadia Smith walks in five minutes later with Zara Montgomery behind her, both of them in jackets against the morning.
Nadia clocks me first. Lifts her coffee cup in a small salute and makes her way to the table, curvy and confident, braids piled high, a silver key on a chain at her throat that catches the light.
"Mercer."
"Nadia."
"Callum said you got the upstairs wired."
"Callum's got a big mouth."
"Callum can't keep a secret to save his life."
Zara slides in next to her, a nurse on a Saturday morning looking like a woman who has not worked a night shift in six days and is deeply pleased about it. Her hand goes to Nadia's forearm in the unconscious way it does, and Simone leans over the table toward her.
"Zara. Tell me about the clinic thing."
Zara launches. Simone listens like a journalist, which is to say she listens like it's the only thing in the room, and Zara laughs halfway through and says, "Don't write this down," and Simone says, "I'm not writing anything down, Zara," and Sage yells from the counter, "She's writing it down, Zara. "
Plantains arrive.
The thing with the plantains is griot-style pork and slow-cooked red beans and coconut rice and fried sweet plantains on the side, and Sage has been working on the recipe for three months because her new best friend is a French-Haitian chef named Margot who moved into the building next door to open a restaurant, and I'm told Margot has opinions about how Sage's version compares to the real thing.
"Margot says my pork is underseasoned."
"Margot is wrong."
"Margot is not wrong, Venus."
"Margot is a mean chef."
"Margot is not mean. Margot is French. There's a difference."
Zara, deadpan, "Margot is both."
Nadia, snorting, "Margot is both."
Laughter around the table.
Simone's hand finds my thigh under the table.
She squeezes.
I put my hand over hers.
Marcus shows up at noon.
We're still at the table. Sage has joined us.
Luna has migrated over with her notebook.
Ayanna Bishop drifts in on her way somewhere else and gets pulled in for a coffee and stays for an hour.
Darius calls Ayanna twice while she's sitting with us and she does not pick up and finally he walks in the door to collect her and has to eat a plantain standing up to make it worth the trip.
It's not a breakfast anymore.
It's a holding pattern.
Marcus has a bag over his shoulder and a couple days of travel on his face.
Simone sees him first and she's up out of the booth and across the café before he can set the bag down. He catches her. Picks her up. Spins her once because he's ridiculous. Sets her down.
Then he looks at me over the top of her head.
"Mercer."
"Brother."
He lets her go. Crosses. Grabs me by the shoulder and pulls me into the one-armed thing. Holds it a second longer than usual.
"You're doing alright."
"I'm doing alright."
"She's doing alright."
"Go ask her yourself."
"I'm asking you."
"She's doing alright, Marcus."
He steps back. Nods once.
"Good."
"You staying through the weekend."
"Through Wednesday."
"You staying with us."
"If you'll have me."
Simone, from behind him, "Of course we'll have you. Where else would you stay."
He turns and lets her tow him into the booth. Venus pours him coffee. Sage takes his order without asking.
He settles in like he's been coming here for years.
Simone catches my eye across the table.
She does not say anything.
Her smile does the whole thing for her.
That night, on the porch, after Marcus has gone to the guest room with a beer and a book, I pull her into my lap on the porch swing and I wrap us both in the blanket she keeps out here for this exact purpose.
The sky is the kind of clear you only get on a Kootenay night. The Milky Way is a thick band across the top of the sky. The air smells like woodsmoke from somebody's stove a mile down the valley and like pine and like the faint edge of the first real cold coming in.
Her hand is on my chest.
Her thumb is tracing the pendant at her throat without thinking about it.
I've watched her do that a hundred times in ten months.
It is one of my favorite things.
"Gray."
"Yeah."
"Two weeks from Thursday."
"What's two weeks from Thursday."
"My birthday."
"Is it."
"Gray."
"Don't know what you're talking about."
"I know about the cabin."
"You don't know anything."
"Callum told Nadia. Nadia told me last Saturday."
"Jesus Christ."
"Don't be mad."
"I'm not mad. Callum has the biggest mouth in the valley and he has no business being trusted with a secret."
She laughs.
Tilts her head up.
"I love it."
"You haven't seen it."
"I don't need to see it. You built it. That's the part I love."
She kisses the underside of my jaw.
"Gray."
"Yeah."
"Ask me."
My chest goes still.
"Simone."
"Ask me. Please. I've been waiting."
"I was going to do it the day I gave you the cabin."
"Don't wait two weeks."
"It's supposed to be."
"It's supposed to be whenever you mean it. You mean it now. Ask me."
I slide her off my lap. Stand up. Take her hands. Pull her up to her feet.
I don't have the ring on me. It's in a drawer upstairs in a velvet box I've been looking at every morning for six weeks.
I don't care.
I sink down onto one knee on the porch boards.
Her hand flies to her mouth.
"Simone Marie Baptiste."
"Gray."
"I've loved you since the second morning when you told me you'd cook eggs in a firefight."
"That's a weird way to start a proposal."
"Shut up."
"Okay."
"I've loved you since you said yes sir in my office and I've loved you since you ran down a staircase in Toronto in bare feet in April and I've loved you every single morning for ten months when you reach for the cold side of the bed.
The ring is upstairs. I'll get it. I'll do it again properly with the cabin and the ring and the speech if you want me to.
But right now, on this porch, will you marry me. "
She drops to her knees in front of me.
Puts her hands on my face.
"Yes."
"Yeah?"
"Yes, Grayson. Yes. A thousand times yes. Yes when you ask me and yes when you don't ask and yes before you ask. Yes. Marry me tomorrow. Marry me next year. Marry me whenever. Yes."
I laugh.
She laughs.
We laugh on the porch boards on our knees in a blanket under a Milky Way sky in a mountain town with a valley full of people who we now know by name, and Marcus opens the door behind us and says, "Are you kidding me right now," and Simone yells back without turning around, "He asked, Marcus," and Marcus says, "I'm going back to my beer," and the door closes and we are left kneeling in front of each other in the half-dark.
"Come inside."
"In a minute."
"What."
She puts her forehead to mine.
"Just. One minute. Let me stay here one minute."
So we stay.
One minute becomes five.
The sky does what the sky does.
And for the first time in my adult life I understand what it means to stop counting the hours until something.
Because there isn't an until anymore.
There is only this.
Grayson and Simone continue on to have such a heart-warming HEA, and I bet you’d love a sneak peek. Don’t worry I’ve got you.
Thank you so much for reading