Epilogue #2
“We shall see,” Vic replied, with the stubbornness of a woman who had, against all odds, coaxed three reindeer, four small children, and a full Christmas dinner into harmonious existence.
Erin’s card said “crown.”
Matilda thought this was deeply obvious and therefore unfair.
Erin did not.
“Am I alive?” she asked.
“Not technically,” Alex said, lips twitching.
“That’s a worrying answer,” Erin muttered.
She spent a good five minutes asking if she was a house, a tree, or a specific dog.
“You wear it,” Frank blurted out eventually, forgetting the rules entirely.
Erin blinked. “I—I what?”
“Frank,” Matilda hissed. “You’re not supposed to just tell her!”
Erin turned to Alex slowly. Their eyes met.
Alex’s smile was... something. Playful. Tender.
“Do you wear me?” Erin asked, voice low enough that the children didn’t hear the extra layer.
“Every day,” Alex replied quietly. “Even when you don’t think you do.”
Erin swallowed.
“Am I… a crown?” she asked aloud.
“Yes!” the children shouted, delighted.
Erin laughed, shaking her head, and pulled the card off her forehead to look at it.
A crown. Yellowed drawing. Slightly bent corners.
Not alive, no.
But in that moment, with Alex watching her like she was the thing that held Alex’s spine upright, Erin felt more alive than she had in a long, long time.
The game rolled on, round after round, until the children’s questions grew slower, softer. Their objections less sharp. Their laughter trailing into yawns.
Hyzenthlay puzzled her way to “snowflake” eventually, then spent five minutes discussing uniqueness and structural patterns with anyone who would listen. Vic listened, rapt, as if “snowflake load-bearing capacity” was the most interesting thing she’d heard all year.
Frank guessed he was a snowman only after someone asked whether he was at risk from climate change and he shouted, “I’m made of SNOW?”
Florence fell asleep first, head tipping gently sideways until it landed on Alex’s knee. Alex untangled her hand from Erin’s long enough to smooth hair away from Florence’s face.
Matilda nodded off mid-protest about bedtime protocols, still insisting she could handle “at least two more rounds.” She curled against a cushion like a cat, fingers still loosely holding an unused card.
Frank lasted longest, out of sheer determination not to be the first Kennedy triplet asleep. He lost his battle like a soldier on the front line—eyes closed one second, completely limp the next. Juno immediately climbed into his lap and decided he made an excellent mattress.
Hyzenthlay, true to form, attempted to document the exact time and position of each child’s collapse. Her pencil slowed, slowed, slowed… and slipped from her hand as her chin dropped to her chest.
Vic caught the notebook before it hit the floor.
“Data collection paused,” she whispered, gently easing the notebook aside. Her face softened as she looked at her sleeping daughter. There was still a hint of earlier fragility in her eyes, but tonight it was cradled within something steadier.
Love. Acceptance. A quieter kind of determination.
Julia saw it too. She rested her cheek briefly against Vic’s temple.
“You did well,” she murmured.
Vic didn’t answer aloud, but her hand reached for Julia’s and curled around it, squeezing.
Across the room, Alex and Erin made eye contact again.
We did it, Alex’s look said.
We survived, Erin’s answered. We did more than survive.
They gently ferried children to bed—Alex scooping Florence up with practiced ease; Erin lifting Frank, murmuring “got you, mate” into his hair. Vic carried Hyz, Julia trailing behind with Matilda.
Dogs followed, pads silent on ancient stone.
The sitting room, emptied of its smallest inhabitants, felt bigger for a moment. Echoey.
Then the adults drifted back in.
No one suggested more games. No one suggested bed just yet, either.
Instead, they returned to their seats, this time falling into them with that particular post-Christmas heaviness that only came from a day done right.
For a while, no one spoke.
They didn’t have to.
The fire cracked. The stereo hummed something soft. Snow tapped gently at the windowpanes.
Erin leaned back into the sofa, head turning toward Alex almost automatically.
Alex was already looking at her.
“Hi again,” Alex said softly.
Erin let out a small, contented sigh. “Hi.”
“How are your knees?” Alex asked. “You spent an hour on the floor pretending to be various festive objects.”
“I’ll survive,” Erin said. “I’ve had worse missions.”
“None this important,” Alex replied.
Erin’s smile faltered slightly, then settled into something deeper. “No,” she agreed. “None this important.”
Alex’s hand found hers beneath the blanket. Fingers threaded through fingers.
On the other sofa, Vic watched them quietly, her head tipped against Julia’s shoulder.
Tonight, every part of it felt… right. As if the room itself exhaled.
“You’re staring,” Julia murmured.
“At them?” Vic asked.
“At all of us,” Julia said. “Your face does that thing when you’re thinking about six things at once.”
“I’m not,” Vic protested. “I’m only thinking about five.”
Julia hummed, unconvinced.
“It’s a good scene,” Vic said quietly, gaze returning to the ring of empty cushions around the table. “Isn’t it?”
“It is,” Julia agreed.
“Feels like… the picture I used to make up,” Vic went on, eyes unfocused now, looking not at the room but slightly beyond it.
“When I was small. I’d lie in bed and imagine a house that was warm.
People who weren’t shouting. Games after dinner.
Everyone tired and… happy-tired. Not survive-the-day tired. ”
“And now you’re in it,” Julia said.
Vic’s throat bobbed. “Now I’m in it,” she echoed. “Which terrifies me, because it means I could lose it.”
“You won’t,” Julia said.
“How do you know?” Vic asked.
“Because you won’t let yourself,” Julia replied. “And because you’re not holding it up alone anymore. Look at them.”
Vic did.
At Alex and Erin, curled together on one sofa, joined at the hand and shoulder and, more importantly, at the heart.
At the scattered evidence of children everywhere: a small sock under the coffee table, a toy knight guarding a coaster, a crumpled drawing of a lopsided reindeer leaning against the skirting board.
At Juno now snoring with her head half on the rug and half on Mrs. MacLeod’s slipper.
At Mrs. MacLeod herself, pretending to be asleep but clearly listening to every word.
Big, messy, imperfect. Alive.
Vic’s chest ached in the best way.
“You did this,” Julia said softly.
Vic shook her head. “We did this.”
“Yes,” Julia said. “We did. And they did. That’s the point.”
Vic leaned into her, letting herself be held again, just a little.
Across the room, Erin felt a wave of gratitude that she knew, without quite understanding how, was shared by everyone present.
They had weathered so much. Individually. Together. Seen and unseen.
There would be more storms to come. Life promised nothing less.
But tonight—this Boxing Day evening, with the snow holding steady and the fire burning warm and the sound of small breaths echoing faintly from upstairs—they were at peace.
Alex turned her head and rested it on Erin’s shoulder, eyes drifting shut for a moment.
“You know,” she murmured, “if you told me ten years ago this would be my life, I would have assumed you’d mixed up your files with someone else’s.”
Erin smiled faintly. “Ten years ago, if you’d told me I’d be voluntarily spending Christmas with four small children and live reindeer, I’d have assumed you were having a stroke.”
Alex laughed softly. “Do you regret it?”
“Not a second,” Erin said.
Not the triplets.
Not Hyz.
Not the chaos or the sleepless nights or the worry or the way her heart now existed in four small fragments that ran up and down castle stairs.
And certainly not Alex.
“If you had to go back and choose again?” Alex asked quietly.
Erin turned, kissing her hair, tasting salt and smoke and a hint of the chocolate they’d shared after dinner.
“I’d still choose you,” she said. “Every time.”
Alex’s fingers tightened around hers.
“Good,” Alex whispered. “Because I’d choose you too. Every time.”
“And Vic,” Erin added, deadpan.
“And Vic,” Alex agreed.
From the other sofa, without opening her eyes, Vic said, “I heard that.”
Julia patted her knee. “They meant it lovingly.”
“Debatable,” Vic muttered, but she was smiling.
Later, they would turn off lights and bank the fire and check child-sized blankets and convince the dogs to move.
Later, the outside world would intrude again—emails, headlines, meetings, the never-ending pull of crown and country and duty.
But Boxing Day evening was theirs.
A quiet coda to a year that had nearly broken them, and to a Christmas that had mended more than any of them had expected.
A queen and her bodyguard, finally resting against each other again.
A friend and her advisor, discovering that letting go did not mean losing control.
Children upstairs, sleeping safe in rooms that would be the background of their memories.
Dogs at the hearth.
Snow at the window.
The kind of warmth no spreadsheet could ever quantify.
A family, in all but name and in every way that mattered.
Together.