Epilogue
Melody
Five Years Later
The sunset paints the water in shades of gold and pink as I watch from our terrace.
In the distance, the limestone cliffs rise up from the Andaman Sea like something out of a dream - the same cliffs I saw on a calendar in my dentist’s office when I was twelve years old.
The same ones I spent years saving pictures of, never believing I’d actually see them.
Now I see them every day.
“Mama!”
I turn as Melania comes running across the deck, her dark hair flying behind her, her face lit up with the particular joy of a two-year-old who’s just discovered something extraordinary.
“Look what Daddy found!” She holds up a shell, pink and perfect. “A pretty one!”
“That is very pretty.” I crouch down to her level, brushing sand off her cheek. “Where did you find it?”
“The beach! Daddy said we can go swimming later if I eat all my dinner.”
“Daddy’s pretty smart.”
“Daddy’s standing right here,” Noah says, appearing behind her with that smile that still makes my heart flip after all this time. He’s tan and barefoot, wearing the same kind of casual linen he wore the day I met him, looking like he belongs here. Because he does. Because we do.
He drops a kiss on my head and scoops Melania up in his arms. “Tell Mama about the fish we saw.”
“Blue fish! And yellow fish! And one that was stripey!”
“That sounds amazing.” I stand, sliding my arm around Noah’s waist as Melania chatters about the wonders of the reef. This is my life now. This impossible, beautiful life that I never saw coming.
We sold the Chicago penthouse two years ago, after Melania was born. Noah restructured his business so he could manage most of it remotely, and we moved here, to Thailand, to the place I’d been dreaming about since before I knew what dreams were.
The resort is still his - ours, really, now that we’re married - but we don’t live in the main building. We have a house on the bluff overlooking the water, all windows and warm wood, filled with the sounds of our daughter and the smell of the sea.
The pavilion on the north beach is mine, though.
Mine alone - Noah signs the vendor contracts like everyone else, a fact I remind him of constantly.
Hayes & Dorothea does forty weddings a year now, here and in Chicago, small and honest and planned within an inch of their lives.
Every couple gets the same speech from me at the first meeting: I don’t do performances.
I do beginnings. If you want doves, there’s a bigger company down the beach.
“The grandmother wants us for dinner tomorrow,” Noah says as Melania squirms down to chase a gecko across the deck. “She says Melania’s getting too skinny.”
“Melania is not getting too skinny.”
“I tried to tell her that. She threatened me with a ladle.”
I laugh, leaning into him. The pad thai grandmother - whose name is actually Somsri, though we still call her by the title she’s earned - has become a kind of surrogate great-grandmother to our daughter.
She spoils Melania rotten and scolds us in two languages and makes the best food in the entire region.
“She just likes having someone to feed.”
“She likes being right.” Noah presses his lips to my temple. “Just like someone else I know.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.”
My phone buzzes on the railing. Jessica - who runs the Chicago office now, and who still calls it “the office” with air quotes, like she can’t believe either of us gets paid for this - has sent a photo of next season’s booking calendar, completely full, with three words underneath: told you so.
She flies in next month for Melania’s birthday.
She’ll drink wine on this terrace and look at me too long and say you’re doing the face, the way she has since we were nineteen.
And I’ll let her, because she’s right - except the face means something different now.
It used to be the look of a woman dreaming her way out of her own life.
Now it’s just what my life looks like from the inside.
We stand there watching the sunset, Melania’s laughter floating up from the garden where she’s chasing butterflies now, and I think about how different this is from everything I imagined my life would be.
Five years ago, I walked down an aisle toward a man who was lying to me. I stood in a honeymoon suite and felt my whole world collapse. I cried in a bar and met a stranger who saw me when I couldn’t see myself.
Now I’m here. Married to that stranger. Mother to his child. Living in the place I dreamed about for twenty years.
“I love you,” I say, because I can. Because I’m allowed. Because the words don’t feel heavy anymore.
“I love you too.” He pulls me closer. “Always have. Always will.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Melania comes running back, demanding to be picked up, and Noah swings her onto his shoulders while I laugh at the expression on her face - pure, uncomplicated joy.
This is what happiness looks like, I realize. Not the absence of struggle. Not the perfect plan. Just this: the people you love, the place you belong, the life you built out of the ashes of the one that burned down.
I used to dream about Thailand.
Now I dream about tomorrow.
THE END