Epilogue
EPILOGUE
‘And where are you sneaking off to?’
‘We’re going to get ice cream,’ Elsie says, looking suspiciously innocent. I know my daughter. At sixteen, she looks like Ariella, fights like Honey and has absorbed just enough of Lara’s personality.
‘It’s Christmas Day. Nothing is open.’ I narrow my eyes at my child.
‘The corner shop is. It’s only a few minutes away.’
‘Why is he going?’ I point accusingly at Raife, Jasper’s son, who is standing next to her with his coat on. His twin brother, Axel, disappeared with his girlfriend back to Jasper’s home across the street straight after eating the feast Ariella and Lara’s catering company had delivered. This year, a two-Michelin-star chef had created, run the food lab and trained the kitchen team to prepare the Christmas Day menu for their deliveries. Just over seven hundred households ordered exactly what we have just eaten, automatically sponsoring just over two thousand free meals for shelters across London.
‘Caleb, let them go.’ Ariella smiles sympathetically at her daughter as she gets up from the couch.
‘Actually, no, Caleb, continue. This is good.’ Hugh chuckles, biting into a mince pie as he watches from the armchair.
‘That’s your fourth, baby. No more for you,’ Dahlia says, wiping the grin from his face. ‘Oh! Did you two see that Dominic is leading the polls to be the next POTUS?’
Ariella and I smile at each other. Of course we knew. He’d called Ariella to beg her not to speak to any journalists. Before she could respond, I took the phone from my wife, told him he was lucky she was taking his phone call and hung up. We never would, but he can wrestle with the uncertainty. Melissa hasn’t been so lucky. She’s still on the run, or so we think. No one has heard from her since she sent us matching Hermès luggage for our wedding. We dropped it off at the shelter’s charity shop.
‘Daddy, can I go and get ice cream with them too?’ our youngest daughter asks from my lap. Her little seven-year-old arms are round my neck, with her head on my chest.
‘Yes, good idea, Gracie.’
‘I have ice cream in the freezer for you, Gracie.’ Ariella extends her arm out and Gracie bounces her cute curly-haired head over to her mother.
‘What’s wrong with the ice cream in the freezer?’ I ask Elsie.
‘I don’t want Milky Pops, Dad.’
‘Caleb, if anything was going on, all one of them would have to do is cross the road to the other when we go out to dinner or we’re working late,’ Jasper says from the dining table.
‘Yeah, Dad.’ Elsie smirks.
‘They do that anyway,’ our son Spence adds as his hologram lowers his arm to pull his younger brother up the side of a building on the gaming wall.
‘Uh-huh,’ Josh confirms as his hologram makes it to the top. ‘Grandpa!’ he calls.
‘I see them,’ Hugh Mason says, picking off the enemy holograms one by one with disturbing precision.
‘Thanks, Grandpa!’ they both say as they carry on infiltrating the building.
‘Aunty Lara?’ Elsie pleads, returning my attention to her.
‘Leave her alone, Caleb. Raife doesn’t have half of the female population traumatised just because they bumped into you in a nightclub once and made the wrong choices.’
Honey laughs as she pats Lara’s leg.
‘Exactly,’ Elsie says. She looks just like Ariella at that moment, with her eyebrows meeting in a little v in the middle of her forehead.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Nothing.’ She backs down.
‘Lara?’
‘We’ve had sixteen years of bedtime stories. A couple of historical facts may have tumbled out.’ Lara shifts her seven-month-pregnant body around on the sofa to get comfortable.
‘Raife, remember, Elsie can kill you with her bare hands.’
‘Caleb, we’ve been training at the fight studio all our lives. I know Elsie is impressive.’ He smiles at her and she blushes.
What the?!
‘At least you know where we live,’ Sophia says, and laughs, then yawns and snuggles into Jasper.
‘Come back before Uncle Zachary, Aunty Isszy, Lola, Deola and Bola call from their holiday in Lagos.’
‘Okay!’ They are out before I change my mind.
‘Black, you really shouldn’t give Raife a hard time. He is such a good boy,’ Ariella says as she follows me out of the shower to get ready for bed. I have both her towels waiting.
‘No way. At that age they are all hormones.’
‘He’s asked her to go skiing with them. I think it would be nice to let her go. Just because we’re missing it this year doesn’t mean that she should. Jas and Fi will be there with her family.’
‘So will Axel and Summer – and they are practically living together in that house, doing goodness knows what.’
‘Caleb, breathe. She was going to get a boyfriend eventually and Raife is sweet. It was either him or some other boy named Viggo.’
‘Viggo from her fight class? He’s going to uni this year and is built like a forty-year-old wrestler! I’m going to kill him.’
‘Come to bed. Elsie can kill him herself. She has a cabinet full of gold medals to prove it.’ She pats my side.
‘Are you still okay for Tim, Em, Jack and Ophelia to come over tomorrow?’
‘Of course – are they coming with the kids?’
‘Just Jack and Ophelia’s girls. Alfie is working tomorrow. He’s trying to convince me to open a sixth studio in Manchester. I’ve asked him to find me the roughest area in dire need of a community class and I’ll think about it while we are in Bali with Ms Pat.’
‘I can’t wait to see her new renovations.’
‘She still hasn’t told me how she retired so quickly after we left Singapore, then managed to buy and move into a three-bedroom beach villa in Seminyak within a year.’
‘You might need to get used to it being a mystery Caleb,’ Ariella says, laughing.
I get into bed and arrange us in our usual positions, with her head on my shoulder and her hand on my heart. I indulge in my admiration and adoration of this woman. She, over the years, has given me everything I could ever wish for, including the family I always wanted, the love I deeply craved and the safety I so desperately needed. Everything about her makes me feel complete and my only motivation is to make her feel the same.
‘So I was thinking, MrsBlack…’ I start as she lets my finger trace up her ribs suggestively. Her back arches.
‘It’s very late and I’m very tired, but continue?’ She smirks.
I relieve her of her vest and keep her in my boxers for now. There is something very sexy about the way her beautifully curvy body looks in them. I sit up in bed, then pull her over to straddle me and hold her close as she kisses me. I will never tire of this girl’s kisses, even after all this time together. I slide my hand behind her underwear and do that thing she likes that makes her gasp. She doesn’t disappoint.
‘You know, good girls would go to sleep right now,’ she says softly.
‘I know, but naughty girls tend to do whatever they want,’ I respond, and then I place my mouth on her neck and make love to my wife; grateful for everything that was, is, and is yet to come.
*