Epilogue
KIMBERLY
Some stories end with forever. The lucky ones begin there.
Greta’s roses were blooming. The garden smelled like earth and rain and the first warm days, and every time I knelt in the soil and pressed my fingers into the dark, wet ground, I heard her voice in my head, calm and clear: Not too short, Kimberly. You’re pruning, not punishing.
I still got it wrong sometimes. But the roses forgave me. They always did.
Penny was back on campus. Loud and gloriously alive.
The surgery had gone exactly as Dr. Reeves predicted, ninety-four percent clearance, clean margins, a recovery that the surgical team called remarkable and Penny called boring because it involved too much bed rest and not enough pizza.
She’d returned to university with a scar she wore like a badge and an energy that made everyone around her feel slightly exhausted and deeply grateful.
But the wish remained unresolved, and Penny brought it up at every available opportunity.
"He said I was too young." She was sitting on the kitchen counter at the Beacon Hill apartment, swinging her legs, a mug of tea in her hands and righteous indignation in her voice. "I’m twenty years old. I am a legal adult. I survived brain surgery. I negotiated the terms of my own medical procedure with a licensed physician, and he tells me I’m too young? For a date? One date?"
Katelyn smiled into her coffee. I bit the inside of my cheek.
"He said, and I quote, ‘Penny, you’re my patient and you’re twenty, and I’d like to keep my medical license and my dignity, so the answer is not yet.’" She set her mug down with the force of a woman delivering a closing argument. "Not yet, Kim. He said not yet. That’s not a no. That’s a timeline."
"It does sound like a timeline," Katelyn agreed, her voice suspiciously innocent.
"It sounds like a man who is aware that his patient is persistent and terrifying," I said.
"I am NOT terrifying. I am determined." She eyed me. "He blushed, Kim. I made a grown man with a medical degree blush. That is not a rejection. That is a slow yes."
Katelyn raised her mug in a silent toast, and I loved my sister so fiercely in that moment that my eyes stung with it, because eight months ago I’d been bargaining with the universe for one more year, and now she was sitting on a kitchen counter arguing about a crush with the same stubborn fire she’d brought to everything in her life, and she was here, and she was whole, and the world had given her back to us.
Jackson had proposed two months ago. In Greta's garden, on his knees in the dirt, which was the only place it could have happened.
I'd said yes before he finished asking, and then I'd cried for three days, and he'd let me, and on the fourth day he handed me coffee and said, 'I assume the emotional phase has concluded and we can proceed to logistics,' and I threw a pillow at his head.
On a clear morning in July, the four of us drove out together.
Jackson and Logan in the front, Lily and I in the back.
Lily was wearing a yellow sundress and rain boots.
She was holding a bouquet of roses we’d cut from Greta’s garden that morning, clutching them in both fists with the solemnity of a girl who’d been told these flowers were important and had decided to take the assignment very seriously.
The cemetery was on a hillside overlooking the water.
Greta’s headstone was simple, gray granite, her name and dates and a line from a poem she’d loved.
The grass around it was green and clean, and someone had placed a small ceramic cat beside the base, which I hadn’t done and Jackson hadn’t done, and when I looked at Logan he gave me a half smile that said don’t ask.
Lily placed the roses very carefully against the stone, arranging each stem with the concentration of a surgeon, and then she stepped back and looked up at her father.
"Is grandma under there?"
"Yes, sweetheart."
"All of her?"
"All of her."
"Can she hear us?"
Logan knelt beside his daughter. "I think so. I think she hears everything."
"Then why doesn’t she talk back?"
"Because sometimes listening is enough, Lily."
Lily considered this, frowning hard at the grass like the answer might be hiding in it.
She came to some six-year-old's verdict on the limits of the universe. Then she leaned forward, pressed her face very close to the headstone, and said, "Hi, Grandma. It’s Lily. I’m your granddaughter.
I have an elephant named Gerald and Uncle Jack is funny on the inside.
Also your roses smell nice. Daddy says you liked roses a lot.
I like purple flowers better but that’s okay. "
Logan’s shoulders were shaking. He was either crying or laughing or both, and he turned his face away so Lily wouldn’t see.
Jackson and Logan stood close, the way they couldn’t have a year ago, shoulder to shoulder near their mother’s grave. They didn’t speak much. They didn’t need to. Logan said something low that I couldn’t hear, and Jackson nodded, and then Logan put his hand on his brother’s back and left it there.
Jackson's hand found mine without looking. It did that now.
"She liked you more than her own sons." He studied the granite for a moment. "I've accepted that. It took therapy, but I've made my peace."
"You’re not in therapy."
"I’m in a relationship with you. It’s the same thing."
I laughed, and the sound carried across the green hillside, and I pressed my shoulder against his and looked at Greta’s name carved in the granite and missed her with a fierceness that time hadn’t dulled.
"I get the pruning wrong sometimes," I told her silently. "But I’m trying. And your sons are standing next to each other. And your granddaughter just introduced herself. And your cat is fat and happy and still rules the house. And the man you chose for me is holding my hand. So I think you’d be pleased. "
I touched the pendant at my throat, warm from resting against my pulse. Jackson had clasped it around my neck that night after the safe was opened, standing behind me in the bathroom mirror, his fingers gentle on the chain. It settled into the hollow of my collarbone like it had come home.
That evening, Jackson found me in our room. The estate was our permanent home now.
He kissed me slowly. It started at the corner of my mouth and traveled along my jaw and took its time.
His hands found the hem of my shirt and pulled me against him, and he looked at me like I was the best decision he'd ever made, turning the quiet bedroom into the only place in the world that mattered.
"I can’t wait to make you my wife," he said against my neck.
"You’re going to have to wait at least three months. Katelyn is planning the wedding and she has opinions about centerpieces."
"I’ve survived hostile takeovers. I can survive your sister’s centerpiece opinions." He pulled back and looked at me, and underneath the humor his eyes were steady and full. "Kim. If you’re willing. I want you to be the mother of my children."
The tears came fast and without warning, the good kind, the ones that taste like gratitude. "You want kids?"
"I want a family. The kind my mother wanted for this house." He traced the line of my jaw with his thumb. "I want a daughter, specifically. With your curls and your beautiful eyes, and your complete inability to let me win an argument."
I laughed through the tears. "Lily got under your skin, didn’t she?"
"Lily got under my skin, into my bloodstream, and directly into whatever organ is responsible for wanting to buy miniature rain boots and build pillow forts. It’s a terminal condition. I’ve accepted it."
"I’m willing," I whispered. "I’m so willing, Jackson."
He kissed my tears, then my mouth, deep and thorough and full of promise.
He pulled me onto the bed and wrapped his arms around me, and for once everything was exactly where it belonged: the night quiet outside the window, the house full and warm beneath us, the roses blooming in the dark.
He held me close and said, against my hair, "Let’s be happy forever. "
"That’s not how the world works," I told him.
"Then we’ll negotiate better terms." He tightened his arms. "I’m very good at negotiation."
"I know." I pressed my cheek against his chest and listened to his heartbeat. "I know you are."
The pendant was warm at my throat. Greta’s garden was blooming outside the window. My sister was alive and fierce and arguing about a date with a doctor. My other sister was planning a wedding. Logan and his daughter were happy. And the man I loved was holding me in the dark.
I was happy. Full. Whole.
And if Greta Whitlock was watching from somewhere, I hoped she was pouring herself a very large drink and being spectacularly smug about the whole thing.