11. Epilogue
Epilogue
Jagger
She won.
I’d known she would. I’d known since the soufflé, since the first bite of chocolate and sea salt rearranged something in my head that never went back to how it was before.
But knowing a thing and watching it happen are different animals, and watching Willa walk across a stage in front of three hundred people to accept the Prix de Patisserie was, without a doubt, the best moment of my life.
I was not composed about it.
I have a reputation, and the reputation is that I'm the composed one — the man who stays smooth when everyone else loses the thread, who’s never once raised his voice at a dinner or shown his hand at a table.
I am, generally, that man. I was not that man in the third row of the Prix de Patisserie when they read her name.
I was on my feet before they’d finished saying it.
I was clapping hard enough to hurt my own hands.
When she got to the microphone and the crowd settled I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted “THAT’S MY GIRL” loud enough that a woman two rows ahead actually flinched.
“Sit down,” Danny scolded, from the seat beside me.
“Fuck no.”
“People are looking, Jagger.”
“Let them look. My girlfriend just won the most important pastry competition in the country and I’ll do this in any room she wants.”
Danny closed his eyes with the weary patience of a man who’d accepted his life.
Anna, on his other side, had given up filming the stage and was now filming me, delighted, because she’d correctly identified that I was the better content.
Even Caleb, three seats down, had the corner of his mouth doing something that on anyone else would have been a grin, but on Caleb constituted a standing ovation.
On stage, Willa was holding the trophy — crystal, shaped like a whisk, which I was already having a display case built for and she didn’t know it yet. She was looking at the trophy and then out at the room and then, when she found me in the third row still on my feet like a lunatic, directly at me.
And the look on her face said the thing I’d spent the whole back half of the year wanting her to believe.
I did this. This is mine. I earned it.
She had. That was the part that mattered, the part I’d nearly cost her and hadn’t, in the end.
I’d asked her about the Prix the night we put ourselves back together — asked, in her kitchen, the right way, the way I should have done everything: “There’s a competition I think you should enter.
Do you want me to send you the link?” Not I entered you.
Not I signed you up. Just the link, and then her choice.
She’d looked at me a long moment, weighing it, weighing me, and then she’d said send it.
And she’d done all the rest of it herself.
The menu, the technique, four elimination rounds I wasn’t allowed anywhere near, because the first time I’d offered to help she’d looked at me and said this one’s mine, Jagger.
So, I’d shut my mouth and sat in the audience eating my own fingernails and texting Danny score updates he hadn’t asked for.
I’d wanted to smooth the path. I’d wanted to make a call, pull a string— every instinct I had screaming to help.
And I’d done none of it, because she’d asked me not to, and I’d already learned, the hard way, what happens when I decide I know better than she does about her own life.
So she’d won it clean. Her name on the trophy and no one’s fingerprints on it but hers.
About Dwayne — she’d made her decision weeks ago, after she finally read the folded paper I’d left on her counter. She’d read it twice, sitting at my kitchen table with her coffee going cold, and then she’d folded it back up and slid it across to me.
“Leave it,” she’d said.
“Leave it how?”
“Leave him where he is. Don’t put the contracts back.
Don’t take the thread down. But don’t do anything else, either.
No more calls. He’s done what he’s done and the industry’s done what it’s done and I don’t want to spend one more minute of my life arranging things around him.
” She’d picked up her coffee. “I’m not going to beat him by having you destroy him, Jagger.
I’m going to beat him by being so good that nobody remembers his name. That’s the only ending I want.”
And then she’d entered the Prix, and now she was standing on a stage with a crystal whisk and three hundred people on their feet, and somewhere in the city Dwayne Evans was exactly as finished as he’d made himself, and nobody in that room was thinking about him at all. They were thinking about her.
She’d been right. She was usually right. I was getting used to it.
* * *
The Sterling Club threw her a party that night.
Lola had pulled the inner circle together, the Founder’s Table expanded, the good champagne open.
Danny and Anna. Caleb. Elliot, who’d run a probability model on her odds of winning weeks ago and announced it to the table unprompted and had now been proven correct, which he was insufferable about.
Matteo behind the bar, several drinks into his own celebration.
Evie pretending she wasn’t emotional and convincing nobody. A few other regulars Willa spoke to.
Willa walked in and the room applauded — real applause, not the polite kind the members usually managed in those booths — and she went pink to her hairline and tried to wave it off but couldn’t.
She was wearing a deep gold dress I’d never seen before, fitted, with a neckline that emptied my head of every thought I’d ever had, and she was holding the trophy in both hands like she still didn’t quite believe it was hers to hold.
When she reached the table I took the trophy from her, set it down carefully on the booth, and produced the box I’d been carrying around all night.
“Jagger, what—“
I opened it.
A gold dessert fork. Small, elegant, engraved down the handle: Willa Grace — The Sterling Club.
She went very still. Looked at it, then at me, then over at the Whiskey Wall behind the bar, where the decanters sat — Danny’s, Caleb’s, mine — each one engraved, each one meaning the same thing. Belonging. A permanent place. A name that stayed.
“Your fork,” I said. “Permanent. Every dessert at the Founder’s Table comes off your menu from now on.
Your name on the roster, your place at this table, for as long as you want it.
” I had to keep talking because if I stopped I was going to lose my composure entirely and I’d already done that once tonight in front of three hundred people.
“You earned it. Not because of me. Because you’re the best there is and now everyone knows it, including you. ”
She lifted the fork out of the box and held it in both hands and read her name on the handle, and she pressed her lips together and breathed hard through her nose, and when she looked up at me her eyes were wet and shining.
She laughed and grabbed my face in both hands and kissed me in front of the entire table — the staff, the founders, the trophy, the fork, every person who mattered.
I kissed her back and tasted champagne and Willa.
Matteo popped a bottle behind the bar, and Evie made a sound that was definitely crying, and it was, by some distance, the best night of my life.
Across the room, at the far end of the bar, Caleb was standing alone.
He wasn’t watching us. His attention was fixed on the concierge desk, where a woman I didn’t recognize was working at the computer — dark hair, focused, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who was good at her job and used to nobody noticing her doing it.
Caleb did not look at people for very long. Four seconds, maximum. Assess, move on. It was a thing about him I’d noticed years ago and never mentioned.
He’d been watching her for two minutes.
I filed it away, turned back to Willa, and decided that was a problem for another night.
* * *
Later. My apartment. The city spread out gold below us, the trophy on the coffee table, the fork still in her hand because she hadn’t put it down once all night and showed no sign of starting.
“You can set it down,” I said from the bedroom doorway. “It’ll still be there in the morning.”
“I’m not ready.”
“To put the fork down, or to come to bed?”
“Both.”
She looked at me across the apartment — I’d lost the jacket somewhere, sleeves rolled up, leaning in the doorway watching her in that gold dress — and something in her expression shifted. Sharpened. “Come here.”
“You can bring the fork. I’m secure enough to share you with cutlery.”
She set the fork down, finally, and crossed the living room toward me.
She stopped right in front of me, close enough that I could smell her perfume and the faint trace of sugar still on her skin.
Her hand came flat to my chest, right over my heart that was already hammering like I’d run a marathon.
“My way tonight,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“You’ve been in charge every single time. Every time.” Her palm pressed firmer against my chest, and her eyes met mine, steady and certain with just a hint of nervous heat underneath. It undid me more than the confidence did. “I want a turn. Can I have you?”
I’d spent months being the one who set the pace.
Who decided. Who told her to close her eyes and trust me.
It was who I was. But the idea of handing all of that over to her — letting Willa Grace back me into my own bedroom and take whatever she wanted — sent a rush of heat through me that felt dangerously close to surrender.
“You can have whatever you want,” I said, voice already rough. “Tonight. Every night. Take it, darling.”
She pushed me back into the bedroom with one hand on my chest. I let her. This woman who was half a foot shorter than me backed me toward my own bed with nothing but the flat of her palm, and I watched her do it like it was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. Because it was.
The backs of my legs hit the mattress. She pushed gently. I sat.
She stood between my knees in that gold dress and looked down at me. I kept my hands at my sides and let her run it, even though every instinct screamed at me to take over. She reached back, unzipped the dress, and let it fall.
I made a sound I wasn’t proud of.
“Jesus Christ, Willa.”
She stood there in nothing but tiny gold lace panties, looking powerful and a little smug at the reaction she’d pulled out of me.
“You’re staring,” she said, smiling.
“You did that to me on purpose.”
“I’m running a distraction and exploiting it. Basic strategy. Caleb's been teaching me.” She pushed my shirt off my shoulders, then climbed onto my lap, straddling me. “Now shut up and let me have you.”
She kissed me slow and deep, taking her time, rolling her hips against me until I was hard and aching under her. I groaned into her mouth when she reached between us and palmed me through my pants.
“Willa—”
“Shh. My turn.” She nipped my bottom lip. “You’ve spent months making me fall apart. Tonight I get to watch you lose it.”
She stripped the rest of my clothes off with teasing hands, then pushed me flat on my back. When she took me in her mouth, slow and warm and confident, my head dropped back against the pillow with a curse.
“Fuck… baby, that’s—”
She hummed around me, and I lost the rest of the sentence. She worked me with her mouth and hand until I was gripping the sheets, hips twitching, barely holding it together. Then she climbed back up, straddled me again, and sank down onto me in one smooth motion.
We both groaned.
“God, you feel so good,” she whispered, starting to move. “So deep like this.”
I gripped her hips, but I didn’t take over. I let her set the pace, watching her ride me, gold light from the city painting her skin. She looked like a goddess, confident and beautiful and mine.
“You’re incredible,” I rasped. “Look at you. Taking what you want. You have no idea what you do to me.”
“I’m learning,” she said, rolling her hips faster, grinding down on me just right. “And I really like what I’m learning.”
I sat up, wrapping my arms around her, mouth on her breasts as she kept riding me. The new angle made her moan louder, fingers digging into my shoulders.
“Jagger… I’m close—”
“Come for me, baby. Let me feel you.”
She came hard, clenching around me, crying out my name. I followed right after, burying my face in her neck as pleasure slammed through me.
We collapsed together in a sweaty, laughing tangle. She ended up half on top of me, head on my chest, hand splayed over my heart.
“I love you,” she said into my skin, soft and certain.
“I know.”
She lifted her head and narrowed her eyes. “You’re supposed to say it back, asshole.”
I laughed and pulled her closer. “I love you. I loved you first. Since the soufflé.”
“You loved my soufflé.”
“I loved the woman who made it.” I kissed the top of her head. “The soufflé was just her opening line. You keep fishing for it anyway.”
“I like hearing it.”
“Then I’ll keep saying it. Every day.” I ran my hand down her back. “Stay.”
“I live here, Jagger. My plant lives here. My toothbrush has its own spot. I’m pretty sure I live here.”
“You do. I just like hearing you say it.” I kissed her again, slower this time. “Stay anyway.”
“Always.”
She fell asleep first, the way she always did — face down, duvet stolen, completely dead to the world.
I lay there underneath her arm, watching the city glow outside the windows, and thought about the woman who had handed me a soufflé and told me it wasn’t revolutionary…
and who had turned out to be the single most revolutionary thing that had ever happened to me.
I’d spent thirty-four years being the most charming man in every room and never once being the most important person in anyone’s.
I’d given people feelings instead of the real me.
She got the real me. All of it. And she slept through most of it with her hand over my heart like it was the safest place in the world.
The little trophy and the ridiculous fork sat on the coffee table, catching the city light.
Mine, I thought.
Hers, too.
I closed my eyes and slept better than I had in years.
T H E E N D
Jagger and Willa’s story is complete. The Sterling Club continues in Book Three.