Epilogue
EPILOGUE
NINE MONTHS LATER
CHASE
“Do you have the link?”
“I thought you were finding the link, I have Pickles.” I held up our rabbit and the carrot he was gnawing his way through.
“Rita Hayworth’s hair,” Caroline cursed. “I’m sorry, I was distracted.”
With a grin, I tucked Pickles back under my arm. “Distracted by…?”
Floss turned pinker than her hair and I grinned. This morning she’d had new costume pieces delivered to our Chelsea apartment and spent a few hours modeling the strappy panties for me. Just the panties.
There was no better way to spend a Sunday morning.
Eventually, Caroline found the link, but not before teasing me about what she called my Capricorn obsession with punctuality. We settled on the sofa with her laptop to join our regularly scheduled Holli-ford family call.
Pickles twitched a long ear as the abrupt sound of many voices in mid-conversation burst through the laptop .
“Hi, Mom!” I said loudly.
“Hey, Dad!” Caroline waved. “Mike!”
Two men in one frame, both wearing plaid shirts, waved back at her. Caroline looked nothing like her dad, Kevin, or her brother, but they looked a lot like each other, not including Mike’s mustache, which was a recent addition. Their other main difference was Kevin didn’t hate my guts or call me Silver Spoon.
“How’s the blog going, Spoons?”
Or Spoons, when he was in a good mood.
I didn’t take this personally. If I could get my own brother to bury the hatchet, Mike would warm up eventually. He’d thawed slightly when Caroline and I bought the property next to Levitate so her dad could extend the courtyard, like he’d been wanting to for years. Unlike his sister, Mike had zero qualms about taking money from me. I liked that about him. The investor who owned the café had signed off on the plans this morning, and Kevin was delighted. Caroline had enacted one condition of us funding the extension—I didn’t care, but she insisted—which was that Kev’s friend Noddy wasn’t allowed to be the builder.
Caroline was working on setting up her scholarship and making good on her artist residency idea with the place in Toronto. In the afternoons, she taught at a downtown studio, and at night, she performed. I knew she sometimes still felt guilty about Gerry’s scam, but it helped that he hadn’t made contact with either of us in months. I saw him at shareholder meetings, where I was impressed by how diligently he worked; but that was it.
After a few weeks of working at the Dragonfly Den, Caroline was scouted by a new club. This place had better hours, better facilities, and less Gerry. She’d taken it, and I loved seeing her beam as she packed her bag for work.
“Great,” I answered Mike, pretending the question had been in earnest. “I’ve signed on with a podcast company here to join a panel of columnists. I’ll bring my audience, who’ll get more diverse expertise than just me, and I will focus more on outreach. It’ll be hard with me working mornings and Caroline doing shows in the evenings, but we’ll make it work.”
“Chase is being modest. This podcast is a big deal,” Caroline said, kissing me on the cheek.
Caroline was fiercely supportive of my career, but she also wasn’t afraid to check me when she thought I needed it—and she championed my work loudly in public, knowing that I wasn’t going to. It had taken time for my friends to get over the fake Teddy thing, but they had. Time moved fast in New York, and people had surprised me. Sonya and Greta had made a big show of embracing Caroline—Greta in particular had been unphased by the impersonation scandal.
“I suspected you weren’t a Bircher from quite early on,” she’d told Floss over coffee in midtown last week. “For starters, I liked you.”
Lyssa dialed into our family call then, as she was part of Caroline’s family even though they no longer lived together. Not that you’d know that, because she was at our apartment all the time.
“Sorry I’m late!” Lyssa said, pushing stacks of paper and something that looked like clay off her bed so she could sit down. “I had an issue with a livestream.”
Mike snorted. “Some people use the internet for remote surgery, but don’t keep us in suspense, Lyssa. How many corners did you cut your toast into this morning?”
Caroline and I shot each other a look. Mike never took anything seriously, but especially not Lyssa.
Caroline’s former roommate scowled into the camera. “Influencer culture is a billion-dollar empire, Michelangelo. You should support female digital entrepreneurs.”
“Oh, I do.” Mike grinned. “I just have to put my credit card into a paywall first.”
“Anyway!” Caroline interrupted loudly, probably worried Mike would say more about subscription-based adult websites in front of my mother.
“Is the podcast the news you wanted to share with us, Chase, honey?” my mom asked. “Because that’s lovely, but you already told me that, and I have something on the stove…”
“That’s not the news!” Caroline couldn’t keep the smile off her face.
I reached out and stroked the apple of her cheek, so round when she was excited like this. When I looked back, our screen had frozen. Mike was leaning back in his chair, eyes frozen midroll, and my mom was looking off camera, probably at her stove. Lyssa was frowning at her phone.
Caroline reached for the trackpad and whirled her finger in circles over it.
“Give it a minute, Floss.”
I loved her for many reasons, but none had anything to do with her aptitude with technology. To soften the instruction, I grabbed her index finger and kissed it. But because she liked being in trouble more than she liked reassurance, I nipped the pad of her finger with my teeth before I let her go. Heat flared in her eyes and I grinned.
When my laptop roared back to life, everyone was talking at once.
“—Why would anyone care what you had for breakfast?—”
“—It’s a mushroom risotto?—”
“—I lost ten thousand followers?—”
“Everyone,” I interrupted loudly. “Meet Pickles.” I held the lop rabbit up to the camera.
“Isn’t he sweet!?” Caroline cooed. “Our baby boy! His name is Pickles Sanford-Holliday!”
Pickles twitched his nose.
“I thought you were going to say you were pregnant,” her father said, careful to keep his voice neutral.
“Or that you were engaged,” said my mom, who made no such effort.
“No,” I answered so Caroline didn’t have to. None of us needed to hear her life is a tapestry with many threads speech again. Especially not me, I had it memorized. “We might have announcements like that one day, or we might not. We’re happy the way things are right now.”
My mom made a face, but she didn’t press because she was still trying to seem easygoing in front of Kev and Mike. I passed Pickles to Caroline and he sniffed at her hair, looking like he might start chewing it, so I pulled them both into my arms.
Caroline snuggled into me. “Yes, very happy.”
“This is what it looks like for us.” I dropped a kiss on her forehead. Mike groaned, but we ignored him.
Caroline smiled up at me. “And it’s Fanny Brice perfect.”
THE END