Epilogue
Five years ago, I stood on a dock in Wildwood Valley with my jaw clenched, my watch checked, and my whole life accounted for.
I didn’t have a watch anymore. Hadn’t worn one in years. Cade had found it in my bag about six months after I moved to Wildwood Valley and held it up with one eyebrow raised. I’d laughed and told him to throw it in a drawer somewhere. We’d never discussed it again.
The hammock was strung between two white oaks in the center of the yard where the ground started to slope toward the river, close enough that you could hear the water if the afternoon was quiet enough.
This one was. A Saturday in July, the air thick and sweet and completely still.
I had a novel open on my chest that I hadn’t looked at in twenty minutes because the river was doing something interesting with the light and I’d gotten distracted watching it.
This was my life now. Getting distracted by rivers.
I spread my hand over the small, firm rise of my belly, a move that made me feel closer to the baby. Number two. We hadn’t told anyone yet except Bobbi, who’d taken one look at me three weeks ago and said, “Again?” in a tone that managed to be both accusatory and delighted.
I didn’t know how she did that. It was a gift.
Our daughter Millie had been told there was a baby coming and had received this information with the same unruffled calm she received most things—a slow blink and a considering look, and then she’d gone back to whatever she was doing.
Four years old and already more like her father than I’d ever be. I found it both humbling and hilarious.
The screen door opened, and Cade came out onto the porch.
He was smiling in a way that meant Millie was down, which could last anywhere from forty minutes to two and a half hours depending on how much of the morning she’d spent at the river with him.
From the look of things—his jeans were still damp at the hem—I was guessing two hours minimum.
He came across the yard toward me, and I watched him the way I still always watched him. That unhurried way he moved. The way he always seemed to know exactly where he was going without making a production of it.
“She go down okay?” I asked.
“Didn’t even make it through the second page.” He stopped at the edge of the hammock and looked down at me with that quiet, open expression that had undone me on a dock five years ago and showed absolutely no signs of stopping. “What are you reading?”
I held up the cover. He glanced at it.
“Any good?”
“I haven’t actually read any of it.”
“No?”
“The river’s too interesting.”
The corner of his mouth moved. He reached out, took the book from my hands, and set it on the grass. He glanced at the hammock and back at me, and I shifted to make room without being asked.
He settled in beside me, the hammock adjusting to his weight, and I ended up half against him the way I always did. The thing had a natural lean toward whoever was heavier, and after five years, that math hadn’t changed.
“She’s going to need her own room,” I said.
“I know.”
“The cabin only has two bedrooms.”
“I know.”
“Millie’s in one and we’re in the other and there’s a baby coming in approximately six months who’s going to need somewhere to sleep that isn’t a dresser drawer.”
“I know.”
I tipped my head back to look at him. He was staring at the river, that same private calculation he’d been doing since the first morning I watched him check the water from the dock. Already thinking. Already three steps ahead of the conversation, same as always.
“You’ve already been looking at options,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Cade.”
“There’s a piece of land upstream. Flat, good tree cover, close to the river.” He glanced down at me. “Kyron knows a builder.”
I stared at him. “How long have you been sitting on that?”
“Couple weeks.”
“We could’ve been talking about this.”
“We’re talking about it now.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again, and he watched me do it with that almost-smile. I gave up and laughed because there was nothing else to do with him. Twenty years from now, I would still be two steps behind, and I’d made my peace with that.
“Okay,” I said. “Talk to Kyron’s builder.”
“Already did.”
“Of course you did.”
His hand moved slowly across my belly as the river kept doing its thing with the light. Inside the cabin, Millie was asleep with one arm thrown over her face the way she always slept, same as her father. The afternoon settled around us, warm and unhurried and completely ours.
My parents had opinions about the house, naturally.
They’d had opinions about Wildwood Valley and the medical office in Hartsville and the fact that their daughter had called them from an inn to say she wasn’t coming home and, by the way, she’d met someone.
My mother had required three separate phone calls to process it, and my father had driven up to Wildwood Valley the following weekend.
He’d spent two hours with Cade on the river and come back quieter and more settled than I’d expected.
They’d lost the earnest money on the house when I called to say I wasn’t coming back. My mother mentioned it exactly once. I told her it was the best money I’d ever cost them, and she’d required a full week to process that.
They had opinions about how we were raising Millie too. She wasn’t in enough structured activities. She spent too much time at the river. She needed more academic stimulation at her age.
Millie, for her part, remained completely unbothered by all of this.
Cade and I had developed a system. We listened, we nodded, we said we’ll think about it, and then we looked at each other after the call and didn’t think about it at all. It worked beautifully.
His hand moved from my belly to my hip, and I went still in the way I always went still when he did that. “Millie’s asleep,” he said. His voice was low.
“You mentioned.”
“Cabin’s quiet.”
“It is.”
“Hammock’s comfortable.”
I tipped my head back to look at him again. He was already looking at me in that steady, open way. There was nothing ambiguous about the expression on his face.
“We’re outside,” I said.
“Yard’s private.”
“What if someone comes by?”
“Nobody’s coming by.”
I held his gaze for a moment. Five years ago, I’d stood at the top of an oak tree with a rope in my hands and looked down at a very long drop and told myself not to think about it.
Old habits.
I stopped thinking about it.
His hand slid under the hem of my sundress, slow and sure, palm warm against my bare thigh.
The hammock dipped and swayed as he shifted closer, pulling me half on top of him so our bodies aligned in the narrow space.
I braced one hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat steady under my palm, already quicker than it had been a minute ago.
“Cade,” I whispered, a half-hearted protest that dissolved the second his fingers brushed higher, tracing the edge of my underwear.
“Shh. Let me take care of you.”
His voice was low, rough at the edges, the way it got when he wanted me like this—patient but unrelenting. He kissed me then, deep and unhurried, tasting like sweet tea and summer.
While his mouth distracted me, his hand slipped beneath the thin cotton and found me already wet. A soft sound escaped my throat as he stroked me with one finger, circling, teasing, learning me all over again like he hadn’t memorized every inch of me years ago.
The hammock rocked gently with every small movement of his arm. I pressed my face into his neck, breathing him in—sun-warmed skin and river air—and rocked against his hand. He pressed deeper, moving just right, and my breath hitched.
“That’s it, Annaleise,” he murmured against my hair. “Just feel it.”
Pleasure built in slow, liquid waves, coiling tighter with every stroke. The sway of the hammock only heightened it, like the whole world was moving with us.
When I came, it rolled through me long and deep, stealing my breath. I let out a sigh, trembling under his touch, and he held me through it, kissing my temple, my cheek, my mouth, whispering my name like it was something sacred.
I was still pulsing when he eased my underwear down my legs and off.
Then he shoved his jeans open just enough, and I felt the hot, hard length of him against me.
With one strong arm around my back and the other anchoring us to the edge of the hammock, he guided me over him.
The position was tricky—we had to move together, slow and deliberate—but the way he filled me, thick and perfect, made the difficulty worth every careful shift.
We stayed locked like that for a long moment, breathing each other in.
Then he started to move, shallow thrusts that made the hammock sway in a lazy rhythm.
One hand stayed on my belly while the other gripped my hip, helping me ride him without tipping us.
Every roll of my hips dragged pleasure through both of us.
I could feel him getting closer, the tension building in his shoulders, in the low groans he tried to muffle against my neck.
“Look at me,” he rasped.
I lifted my head. His eyes were dark, locked on mine with that same steady intensity that had undone me from the very beginning. The river murmured below us. The hammock creaked softly.
And then we came together—my second release crashing over me just as he drove deep and spilled inside me with the quiet, broken sound of my name.
We stayed tangled like that afterward, still joined, the hammock swaying gently as the river kept moving. Finally, I shifted until I was tucked against his side with my eyes closed and one hand still resting on my belly.
“Cade?”
“Mm.”
“The rope swing.”
He was quiet for a second. “What about it?”
I opened my eyes and looked at the yard—at the two white oaks the hammock was strung between, at the slope of the ground toward the water, at the old oak at the yard’s edge with the branch that leaned out over the river below.
The rope swing he’d put up two summers ago hung still in the afternoon air.
Millie’s favorite thing in the world. The thing she ran to every single morning before she’d even had breakfast.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just like that it’s there.”
He looked at it. I felt him do it, the way you feel someone shift their attention without seeing it.
“Me too,” he said.
The river moved below us. The rope hung still. Somewhere inside the cabin, Millie slept, unbothered and certain and completely herself. The way she’d come into the world and the way she’d stay.
I closed my eyes and let the hammock hold us.
Kyron runs equipment and logistics for Wildwood River Co.
He’s gruff, practical, and not particularly interested in conversation.
But he keeps finding the same woman somewhere she shouldn’t be—and he’s running out of reasons to send her away.