Epilogue
ANNA
Six months later
I stood in a gallery in Wynwood surrounded by my photographs and tried to remember the woman who arrived in Miami with two suitcases, eight hundred dollars, and a name she couldn’t say.
My first solo show. The gallery was packed. Friends, strangers, people from the industry who’d seen the preview and wanted to be part of it.
The series was called "After." Portraits of people rebuilding.
A woman reopening her bakery after a hurricane, flour on her hands, the new sign not yet painted.
A teenager learning to walk after an accident, his physical therapist behind him, both of them grinning.
An old man planting a garden where his house used to be, kneeling in the dirt, seedlings in his palm.
Diane behind her counter in Cedar Key, Marcus on her hip, the Gulf blue through the window behind them.
Every photograph was about what comes next. The after. The part nobody sees because the story usually ends with the disaster and forgets that people keep going.
Mona was in the corner, loudly telling Priya the complete story of how Jace and I met.
The coffee. The collision. The kiss. The vomit.
The sanitizer. Priya was laughing so hard she had to hold the wall.
Miles was attempting to intervene. He was failing.
Nobody had ever successfully stopped Mona from telling a story and tonight was not going to be the breakthrough.
Caleb was at the drinks table, trying to pour a glass of wine for Miley with hands that were shaking. He’d flown in for the opening and had been circling Miley all evening like a satellite that couldn’t commit to an orbit.
"So I’ve been thinking," Caleb said, handing her the glass and sloshing a quarter of it onto his own shoe. "About what you said about maybe visiting North Carolina sometime. For the, um. The food. Because you’re in the food industry. And North Carolina has food."
Miley took the glass, sipped it, and looked at him over the rim. "North Carolina has food?"
"Really good food. Famous food. Like, um." He went blank. "Barbecue?"
"You’re inviting me to North Carolina for a barbecue."
"And other things. Museums. Nature. Trees." He was sweating. "There are a lot of trees."
Miley smiled. "I like trees," she said.
Caleb lit up like a man who’d just been told the meaning of life involved trees and he’d been right all along.
Jace appeared at my side wearing the black suit I chose and a gray tie I'd knotted this morning in the hallway of our penthouse, while he stood still and watched me with eyes that matched the silk under my fingers.
He was watching me the way he always did. Like I was a frame he wanted to memorize.
"Your brother just invited Miley to North Carolina for trees," he said.
"I heard."
"Is that going to work?"
"With Miley? Probably. She has a weakness for men who try too hard and knock things over."
"I understand the appeal."
I looked at him. "You never knocked anything over."
"I sanitized my mouth after you kissed me. In front of you. In front of everyone." He paused. "I would argue that’s worse."
I laughed and took his hand. The ring caught the gallery light and scattered a tiny rainbow across his lapel.
Catherine and Richard were by the door—Catherine leaning on Richard’s arm—looking at the photographs. She stopped in front of Diane’s portrait for a long time. Richard put his hand on her back, and they stood together.
I watched them from across the room, and thought about the boy with the airplane in Catherine’s painting, the man he’d become, and the woman who never stopped worrying about him.
Miley appeared. "The show is a hit," she said. "Also, I’ve been talking to Mona and we’re best friends now and Jace should be afraid."
"I’ve been afraid since Mona learned to talk," Jace said.
Mona appeared beside us, Priya with her, their hands intertwined. "I heard that."
"You were meant to."
Miles appeared and put his arm around my shoulder. "Congrats on your huge success," he said.
Jace removed it. Physically. Lifted Miles’s arm off my shoulder and placed it back at Miles’s side.
"That was my arm," Miles said.
"And that is my fiancée."
"We’re family, Jace."
"Family can maintain appropriate distances."
"This is appropriate."
"Not for my brother and my future wife."
Mona leaned to Priya. "Are you getting this?" Priya held up her phone, recording.
I told Jace to behave. He said he was behaving. Then he kissed me, right there in the gallery, in front of everyone, his hand on my waist and his mouth warm against mine. I could hear Caleb groaning, Miley whooping, and Miles holding up both hands in surrender like a man who’d seen too much.
"Find your own woman, Miles," Jace said when he pulled back. "Stop living vicariously through mine."
"I’m not living vicariously." Miles grinned. "Also, you just kissed your fiancée in front of forty people. My work here is done."
I laughed. The sound filled the gallery and I let it. I was surrounded by people I loved, in a room full of my photographs, with the love of my life beside me holding my hand.
I glanced at my phone. Two missed calls from my parents. Mom and Dad, probably wanting to know how the opening went. I’d call them in the morning, tell them everything. Well. Most of everything. Some things a daughter keeps for herself.
Later that night. The gallery was emptying. Caterers packing up. My photographs still on the walls.
Jace stood in front of the last piece, the one I hadn’t told him about. Framed and lit at the end of the gallery where the eye lands last.
Black and white. A man in a window. Light falling across half his face.
Glasses catching the glow. One hand resting on a Rubik’s cube on the windowsill.
He wasn’t looking at the camera. He was looking at something off-frame, and whatever he saw had pulled an expression out of him that was unguarded, warm, and full of tenderness.
I’d taken it on a Sunday morning at the penthouse. He was at the window watching something on the street below, a father helping a child onto a bicycle, and his face bloomed. I had my camera and I pressed the shutter once and captured it. He never heard it.
The title card read: "Safe."
He stared at it. Then at me.
I shrugged. "I take pictures of things that matter."
He pulled me close, his forehead to mine. His glasses bumped my nose the way they always did because the geometry of his face and mine hadn’t figured out how to accommodate the frames yet, and we’d stopped trying to fix it because the bump had become ours.
I laughed. He didn’t let go.
My phone buzzed. A text from Miley. I opened it. A link to an entertainment article. I read the headline and grinned.
Hunter Interactive’s blockbuster Ethereal Vanguard adaptation was back on track. After the Tobias Hart scandal collapsed the original casting, Meridian had renegotiated with a new lead. The announcement went public just minutes ago.
Christopher Vale.
I showed Jace the screen. He read it. His expression didn’t change but his eyebrow went up a fraction.
"His handwriting is still atrocious," Jace said. "But his screen test was undeniable."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It’s an observation."
"For you, that’s practically a love letter," I teased.
He took the phone from my hand, set it on the nearest surface, and then pulled me back against him.
"The gallery is closed," he said. "The caterers are gone. We’re alone."
"I noticed."
"I’d like to take you home. Our home."
He said it back to me. "Our home." And the word settled into his accent like it had always belonged there, softer at the edges, the way his voice only got when he meant something too much to say it louder.
Outside, the Miami night was warm. Traffic humming, music drifting from somewhere down the block, the ocean underneath it all if I stood still long enough to hear it.
I took his hand. He took mine. We walked to the car.
The gallery light spilled out behind us onto the sidewalk.
My photographs were still on the walls. His ring was on my finger.
And ahead of us, through the windshield, Miami stretched out in neon and the promise of a morning we’d wake up to together.
We were going to our safe space.
We were going home.
A new chapter of a love story begins soon—where longing hides in every silence, healing demands sacrifice, and love will be pushed to its limits.
Stay tuned to be a part of Miley and Christopher’s love story. Will they find their way to each other… or lose themselves along the way?
Find out in the next book, Devotion.