Emmett’s Epilogue
EMMETT’S EPILOGUE
Three years later
“Ah! Shit,” I flinch, pulling my now-burned hand away from the casserole dish in front of me.
I lean in to give the food a good sniff and make sure that the dish actually turned out okay. Potatoes, check. Cheese, check. Golden brown on top, check. I was given two jobs this year: host and make the potatoes, and I’m pretty sure I just nailed it, despite taking an injury in the process.
At the sound of the front door opening, all five dogs careen out of the kitchen, barking and whining. The sound ebbs and returns as Nash rounds the corner, coming home from church.
“It smells like you might have gotten it this time,” he teases, leaning over to press a kiss to my lips.
“How’s God doing?” I ask him.
“He’s good,” he answers with a laugh. “He says hi.”
“Was he there?”
“No,” Nash answers with a shake of his head.
“It’s for the best. Christmas Mass isn’t a great time to meet your estranged brother.
” As he pulls his coat away from his arms, he digs into a drawer and pulls out a fork.
He scoops out a bite of the potato dish and stuffs it into his mouth, giving me a nod of approval while using the utensil to gesture toward the casserole dish. “Oh, yeah. This batch is delicious.”
“Helloooo, family!” Rowan’s voice sings out as she walks into the house, trailed by Dad and the girls.
As they round the corner, her smile lights up and she drops her bags of food to wrap Nash in a hug. Dad and Macie follow suit, greeting each of us, while Sarah stays latched onto Dad’s leg. It isn’t until I crouch down to her level and scrunch my face up at her that she rushes toward me for a hug.
“There she is,” I laugh, kissing her on the head. “Hi, Jellybean.”
“Well?” Dad asks, gesturing toward me. “Are you going to show us or do we have to wait for the Davises?”
“It still needs a couple days,” I tell him. I roll up the sleeve of my dress shirt to show him the vibrant oceanscape tattoo that wraps around my forearm, covering the long, raised scar that extends between my wrist and elbow. “A couple of spots aren’t totally healed yet.”
Taking my hand, he carefully rotates my arm to get the full view of the piece, giving a small nod of approval as he does. “It’s beautiful, Emmett,” he tells me with a warm smile. “Really well done.”
“The jellyfish was such a good call,” Rowan adds.
Nash’s hand drapes over my shoulder with a squeeze as if to say ‘I told you so’ and he tells them, “That was my idea.”
Emotion swells in my throat and I clap my hands together to send it away. “Hey, let’s get these kids loaded up on some sugar, huh? Santa brought a bunch of crap for them last night.”
Macie and Sarah cheer as all of us move to the living room, where they’re allowed to dive into the bowl of ‘candy salad’ that we set out for them, complete with a note from Santa telling them that his elves insisted he bring them some of their favorite food.
Davis and his wife arrive shortly after, their presence announced by Davis shouting ‘it’s colder than a witch’s tit out there!
I’m fuckin’ freezing!’ Sophia’s friend, Ava, is in tow with them, today.
We brought her onto the Fowler Enterprise legal team last year at Davis’s suggestion because she’s brilliant, but as it tends to happen with our group, she became part of the family, too.
Rowan settles onto Dad’s lap as they sit on the couch.
His hand lovingly rests low on her stomach, sharing a secret that they clearly aren’t ready to tell us yet.
I consider teasing them because they’d both been adamant after Sarah that she was it, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that life can have a sense of humor about those kinds of things.
I smile as my heart warms for them, and I know that as soon as she can, Rowan will blab to me about it.
The girls fill up small bowls with a disgusting amount of candy before circling the Christmas tree like a pair of vultures on the hunt for their next meal.
They have the world sitting at their feet and a dad who can’t ever bring himself to tell them ‘no,’ but they still get so excited about Santa bringing them something. It’s kind of nice.
“Don’t touch anything until Uncle Davis and Aunt Sophia are back,” I warn them. “I’ll go find them if you promise.”
Macie rolls her eyes with a flourish, but Sarah sticks her little arm up in the air with her pinkie finger extended and shouts, “Pomise!”
I wrap my pinkie around hers and give it a shake as Ava chuckles and asks, “You know where they are, right?”
“Of course I do,” I answer with a disgusted roll of my eyes.
My knuckle raps against the bathroom door and it opens seconds later with Davis poking his head out. “Yeah?”
“We’re about to do presents if you kids wanna stop making out and come join us,” I tell him.
“We’re fuckin’ actually,” he corrects me, “so if you could give us a minute, we’d be real grateful. I got a record to break.”
“Eric!” His wife laughs from somewhere in the room.
“Oh, Christ.”
With a wide smile and a wink, Davis shuts the door in my face and I hear the lock engage, followed by a muffled shriek and a fit of giggles on the other side of the door.
I laugh with a shake of my head as I make my way back to my family. Handing the girls their stockings, I tell them to go wild and I drop down onto the couch next to Nash, resting a hand on his thigh as he drapes his arm around my shoulders.
Davis and Sophia rejoin us as the girls finish tearing through their stockings and opening everything inside of them. He drops down onto his wife’s lap, forcing a loud ‘oof!’ out of her, and she tries to shove him off. “Get off of me, giant!” She cackles.
“Y’all hear somethin’?”
As he stretches his arms out and leans back against her in spite of her flailing limbs, Sophia shouts, “I can’t breathe!”
Leaning forward to grab his eggnog from the table, Nash raises his glass.
“Before we get started, I would like to propose…” he looks at me with a smirk, “a toast. To patchwork families,” he says with a nod to Ro, who meets him with a smile as she raises her glass.
His eyes move to mine as he continues. “And to second chances, however we get them.”
“I’ll absolutely drink to that,” Dad says.
As everyone raises their glasses for a drink, I lean in and press my lips against Nash’s ear. “And to the men who save us until we’re able to save ourselves,” I whisper.
“I love you,” he tells me just before pressing his lips to mine.
A tiny hand pats my leg as my not-so-baby sister approaches. “I want toast,” she whines, and I can’t help but let out a hard laugh.
“You can have toast, jellybean,” I tell her, holding her tiny hand. “I’ll make you some after presents.”
As much as he didn’t want to, I convinced Nash to lessen the amount of staff around the house; not all of them, because I think it might have shocked his system and killed him to do everything on his own, but we now do our own shopping and cook our own meals – including toasting our own damn bread.
I’ve even gotten Nash to change the bedding once or twice since I moved in.
It doesn’t take long for the adults to exchange gifts among ourselves, but the girls take considerably longer. By the time they’ve finished, the living room is a disaster area, covered in gift wrap, tissue paper and discarded ribbon – and I’m so thankful that I’m here to see it.
“Oh wait,” Nash says, standing as he steps toward the tree, “there’s another in here.”
I glance at my best friend, who squeezes her fists together in excitement, trying not to let herself smile, and I stand to move closer to my boyfriend.
I attempted again two years ago, and my prizes for surviving were thirty-two stitches, a shitload of EMDR and talk therapy, and a ninety-day inpatient stay at a treatment center two hours outside of the city.
Nash visited me twice each week and accepted any call that I was allowed to make to him; he dropped anything and everything just to be able to talk to me for our allotted ten minutes.
When I was able to go home, he met me at the facility with three dozen black roses and my entire family in tow.
That was when I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him; but I also knew that I wanted to be sure that I was okay before I ever acted on it.
I didn’t want to promise him forever if I wasn’t able to deliver it.
As Nash moves for the gift in front of him, I glance to my dad, who throws me a nod and a wink in silent encouragement, tightening his grip around his wife.
Taking a steadying breath, I drop to one knee, holding a green wooden box in front of me.
I open it as Nash turns to face me, and surprise etches into his features.
“You don’t like rings,” I tell him, gesturing toward the watch inside.
Nash breaks out into roaring laughter, opening the velvet-lined box in his own hand as he joins me on the ground, taking a knee himself. “Neither do you.”
“It’s the fact that you both asked me for help picking them out!” Rowan cackles, and Davis joins her, reaching over to slap her on the leg in his own laughter.
“Are you kidding me? That better be two yeses,” Ava all but demands.
“It’s a yes from me.”
Nash smiles, his hazel eyes glued to mine. “It’s been a yes from me for years.”
He takes off his watch so that I can slide the new one into place, and he slips the bracelet from his box onto my wrist. Our lips fuse in a kiss so deep that I almost forget my family is sitting five feet away from us, watching, until we’re forced away from each other by their whoops and hollers.
Rowan, Ava and Sophia point and laugh at each other as they each wipe at their eyes, and Dad pulls me into a crushing hug.
“I am incredibly proud of you,” he tells me with a kiss to the side of my head that makes me scrunch up my face.
Nodding toward his wife, I quietly ask him, “So are you guys actually done after this one, or…?”
Surprise crosses his features, and I shrug with a laugh. “I’ll be sixty-four when this one graduates high school,” he says, pinching his nose.
“If they don’t get held back,” I tease.
Davis approaches with two glasses of eggnog in his hands, handing one of them to Nash with a nod. “Merry fuckin’ Christmas, huh?”
“Davis!”
“Shit, sorry,” he cringes.
I look around at my family; at my sisters on the floor, sharing their new toys and my fiancé helping them to open more. I look at my best friend, gossiping with Ava and Sophia on the couch. I look at my uncle, jumping onto my dad’s back as he cheers and laughs.
I look to the tattoo on my arm and the scar that hides beneath it; and I think about how close I came, twice, to missing this.
It took a lot of hard work, and I wanted to quit on more than one occasion, but the man that I am today couldn’t look more different from the man that I was when I gave myself this scar; and I think that man would be proud of me.
I hold those memories close and I use them to remind myself of how far I’ve come and what I’ve survived, but I don’t let them win anymore.
I’m a constant work in progress, but I can finally say that I am happy.