Epilogue
It had snowed overnight.
Enough to dust the pine branches and soften the edges of everything outside the cabin windows.
The kind of snow that made the world feel like it was keeping a gentle, unhurried secret.
The light coming through the glass had that muted, diffuse quality it only got when the ground was white, the whole world turned down to a hush.
I’d been awake for a while. Not restlessly, not the way I woke up on shift when every sound was something to catalogue and assess, but in the easy, unhurried way I’d been waking up all week.
Aware of the quiet. Aware of the cold pressing against the outside of the glass.
Aware of the warmth of my wife still asleep against my side, her breathing slow and even, her hair against my shoulder.
My wife. I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of that.
Of knowing this woman, my best friend, the center of my world, was mine, wholly and completely.
That unshakeable foundation of friendship made everything else so much deeper and richer.
And in the quiet here, I could admit to myself that I was grateful to Gus for his meddling, because I had no idea if we’d ever have been able to get out of our own way without it.
Not that I would ever admit that to him on pain of death.
This trip was what we’d needed. I understood that now in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated until we’d gotten here and exhaled for the first time in what felt like months.
Not merely a few days away in the abstract, but a full week where nobody needed anything from us, where the station wasn’t calling, where the hardware store was being managed by someone else, and where Gus was, for the first time in longer than I wanted to think about, in his own house under his own power and not our immediate responsibility.
That last one had been the hardest to let go of. But we’d managed it.
Ellie stirred, shifted, and I stroked a hand down her bare leg. She gave a big, shuddering stretch before relaxing back against the warmth of me beneath the blankets.
I pressed a kiss below her ear. “Snow.”
She turned her head toward the window, blinking once at the pale light. “Oh.” A pause, soft and unhurried. “That’s pretty.”
We lay there for a while watching the fat flakes swirl through the air beyond the window, our legs tangled together simply because we wanted to be touching.
No hurry. No agenda. Outside, the pine trees held their white cargo with the patience of things that had been doing this for a very long time and intended to keep doing it long after we’d packed up and gone home to Alabama.
Inside, the cabin was warm. It smelled like the wood fire we’d let burn down to embers sometime in the small hours, that low, sweet scent of ash and pine resin that had already started to feel like this place, like this week, like us. A hallmark of this time out of time.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
We both looked at it. Neither of us moved for a second, just staring at it the way you stared at something you’d been half expecting.
“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” she said.
“He’s been up since six,” I said. “By his standards, this is monumental restraint.”
She checked the buttons of my flannel shirt that she’d claimed sometime in the night to make sure nothing was exposed, and reached for the phone with the resignation of a woman who had known this man her entire life and had long since made her peace with his particular brand of relentless.
I dragged on a t-shirt. Gus’s face filled the screen the moment she accepted the video call—broad and familiar, wearing the good flannel he reserved for occasions that warranted it.
He looked pleased with himself for having waited until a civilized hour and expected to be commended for it.
“There she is,” he said warmly. “How’s the snow up there?”
“How do you know it snowed?”
“Looked it up this morning. Good couple of inches. Nice.” His eyes tracked sideways. “Where’s Daniel?”
I leaned into the frame. “Hey, Gus.”
“Danny boy.” He looked between us with a slow, satisfied assessment of a man examining his own handiwork. “You both look rested.”
“We are rested,” Ellie said. “That’s what happens when you go on vacation and people leave you alone.”
“Mm.” He settled back in his chair, and I knew from the way he got comfortable that he had things to say and intended to take his time about it. “Mrs. Petty came by yesterday with a casserole.”
“That was kind of her.”
“It was. Very kind.” He paused. “She also brought her granddaughter along. Visiting for the holidays, apparently.” Another pause, which was doing absolutely none of the work of appearing casual. “Nice girl. About the right age for—“
“Grandpa.”
“I’m only making an observation.”
“You are never only making an observation. Not once in your entire life have you just made an observation.”
I stayed quiet. I didn’t even want to know who’d made it onto his radar as a suitable candidate, partly because I’d have to hear about it for the foreseeable future, and partly because I had lost track of how many people he’d decided needed to be paired off since he’d successfully navigated us to the altar.
“It’s what I do,” he said, with the serenity of a man completely at peace with himself and his methods.
He folded his hands over his stomach. “Anyway. Speaking of the holidays. Christmas.” He said it as a statement rather than a question—the way he said most things he’d already decided.
“I was thinking this year we do it properly. Here, at the house, now that I’m back on my feet.
Tree, the whole business. Proper Christmas. ”
Ellie frowned. “We always do Christmas at your house. Why would this year be any different?”
He looked directly at the camera. “I was thinking it would be a fine time for some kind of announcement.”
Ellie went very still beside me. “What kind of announcement?”
“The kind,” Gus said simply, with great dignity, “that a man waits for. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.”
“Grandpa. We’ve been married for two months.”
“Your grandmother and I didn’t waste any time,” he said, as though this settled it.
“You and Grandma were twenty-two.”
“People mature at different rates.” He appeared to consider this a complete and airtight argument and had no interest in entertaining any counter-evidence. “I’m just saying Christmas would be a lovely time for news. That’s all. I’m not pushing.”
“You’re absolutely pushing,” I said. “With both hands and possibly a skid steer.”
“I’m expressing a preference,” he said. “There’s a meaningful distinction.
” He smiled at us then, the wide, warm, entirely unrepentant beam that I had come to understand meant he was certain he was right and had no intention of pretending otherwise.
“You two enjoy the snow. I’ll let you get back to whatever it is you were doing. ”
“We were sleeping,” Ellie said.
“Of course you were,” he said pleasantly, and ended the call.
Ellie set the phone back on the nightstand and lay back to stare at the ceiling with the expression of a woman who knew she’d been outmaneuvered by a man with a video call, a Christmas timeline, and seventy years of accumulated tactical experience, and was working through her feelings about it.
“He’s never going to stop,” she said.
“He’s really not,” I agreed. “It’s not in him.”
“He faked a deathbed. It worked. And now he thinks he can just aim that same energy at whatever he decides needs sorting.” She paused. “Which, apparently, is now us. Again. Even though he literally just sorted us.”
“He’s not wrong that it worked,” I said.
She turned her head to look at me. Outside, somewhere in the pines, a small accumulated weight of snow gave way and slid from a branch, and the tree bounced gently back, lighter and unburdened. “No,” she said. “He’s not wrong. Annoyingly.”
“Christmas is three weeks away,” I said, keeping my voice very even.
“I am aware of when Christmas is, Daniel.”
“I’m just noting the timeline. As an observation.”
She studied me for a moment, reading my face the way she’d been reading it since we were eight years old.
Something shifted in her expression then.
The small, private softness that wasn’t for anyone else in the world, that had always been just for me even before either of us had known what to call it.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I’m saying,” I said, “that we’ve been married for two months, and we’re on our honeymoon, and it is snowing outside.
Gus is going to be insufferable about this regardless of whether we give him anything concrete to be insufferable about.
” I turned onto my side to face her properly.
“And I’m saying that I am wholeheartedly, enthusiastically, in favor of the general project, whenever it happens to happen, if you are. ”
She held my gaze for a long moment. Long enough that I could hear the quiet of the cabin around us, and the soft, distant sound of snow falling through pine branches outside. “We’re on vacation.”
“We are.”
“We have nowhere to be until Friday.”
“We absolutely do not.”
“And it’s snowing.”
“It is,” I said. “Very romantic snow. Really doing a lot of atmospheric heavy lifting out there.”
She laughed the real, unguarded laugh—the one I’d been collecting since childhood—and she reached for me, dragging off the t-shirt and fitting her mouth to mine.
Outside, the snow kept on falling soft and steady, through the pine trees, and there was nowhere else in the world that either of us needed to be.