Epilogue
MARCEL
TWO YEARS LATER
The book arrives on a Tuesday.
I'm in the workshop when Tina's car pulls up the access road, triggering the familiar green blink of the sensor that I no longer check with tactical urgency.
The cameras are still there. The motion sensors still work.
Logan and Sawyer made sure of that even after Volkov's operatives were intercepted by federal agents outside of Billings fourteen months ago and Dmitri himself was arrested in Vienna on an international warrant that Erica's nonprofit helped coordinate.
The threat is gone. The infrastructure remains. Old habits.
But the cabin is different now. Tina's books are on every shelf, mixed in with mine.
Her reading chair sits by the fireplace next to the chess set that lives permanently on the side table, pieces mid game because we play one move per evening and the current match has been running for three weeks.
Her vintage glasses are on the bathroom counter next to my razor.
Her shampoo is in the shower. Her handwriting is on the grocery list stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet that reads Still Water, Still Fire and has the A.
Connolly cover art on it, except it doesn't say A. Connolly anymore.
It says Tina Ackley.
She moved in eight months after we got together.
Married me four months after that, in a ceremony on the observation tower platform at sunset with Sawyer McKenna officiating and Logan standing beside me and her mother crying in the front row of folding chairs that Beckett Hayes hauled up the ladder one at a time.
Tina wore a simple white dress and bare feet and her vintage glasses and she said her vows from memory because she's a poet and memorizing words is what she does.
I said mine from memory too. It took me three weeks to write them. Four hundred words. The most important four hundred words I've ever assembled, and my hands shook when I delivered them, which made Tina smile because she knows what it means when my hands shake.
It means something matters more than precision.
Her car door slams. I set down the stock I'm shaping and wipe my hands and walk outside.
She's standing by the truck with a cardboard box and a smile that could power every light in Grizzly Ridge.
Her hair is longer now, past her shoulders in those warm brown waves that I wrap around my fist when I'm inside her and she's gasping my name.
She's wearing one of my flannels over a tank top and leggings and her belly is round and full beneath the fabric.
Seven months pregnant. Our daughter. Maya Hope Hale, due in November.
"It's here," she says, holding up the box. "The publisher sent the advance copies."
I cross the yard. Take the box from her because she shouldn't be carrying anything heavier than a coffee mug, a position she finds infuriating and I find non negotiable.
She rolls her eyes the way she always does when I take things from her hands, and I kiss her forehead the way I always do when she rolls her eyes.
We go inside. She sits in her reading chair because her back has been aching this week, and I open the box on the kitchen counter.
Still Water, Still Fire: The Complete Poems of Tina Ackley
New edition. Hardcover. The cover is beautiful. Dark blue with silver lettering and a mountain ridge silhouette along the bottom. I open it to the first page.
Foreword by Marcel Hale
My foreword. Three pages. The most honest thing I've ever written, just like I promised her. I don't read it now because I've read it a hundred times during the editing process, but I remember the opening line.
I found these poems before I found their author, and they saved me before she did.
"Read me the dedication," Tina says from the chair. Her hand rests on her belly. Maya is kicking. I can tell by the way Tina's fingers press and shift, following the movement.
I flip to the dedication page.
For Marcel. Who crossed the distance. Who stayed. Who taught me that the most precise thing a man can do with his hands is hold on.
I close the book. Set it on the counter. Walk to the chair and kneel in front of my wife and put both hands on either side of her belly and feel our daughter press her foot against my right palm.
"She's strong," I say.
"She's stubborn." Tina's hand covers mine. "She gets that from you."
"She gets that from both of us."
Maya kicks again. Hard enough that I feel it in my wrist. I press my lips against the spot where her foot just was and Tina's fingers slide through my hair, short as it's always been, silver at the temples spreading further than it was two years ago.
"The school board approved the creative writing program," Tina says. "Full funding. Starting in January."
I look up. "The grant went through?"
"The grant went through." Her eyes are bright. "Two sections of advanced creative writing, plus an after school workshop open to the community. Dakota is going to TA the workshop as an independent study."
Dakota. The girl who wrote about her grandfather's hands and then about mine.
She's a senior now, headed to the University of Montana in the fall on a creative writing scholarship that Tina helped her secure.
Her portfolio includes a piece called Precision that won a statewide contest. The judges didn't know that the man who inspired it was a Marine Scout Sniper with a hundred and fourteen confirmed kills.
They just knew the writing was extraordinary.
"I'm proud of you," I say.
"I'm proud of us." She tugs my hair gently. Pulls me up. "Come here."
I stand. She stands. The belly makes the geometry complicated, but we've been adapting for seven months and I've learned that there is no configuration of Tina's body that I can't work with.
She wraps her arms around my neck and I hold her waist, her belly pressing warm and firm against my stomach, and Maya kicks against us both like she's reminding us she's part of this conversation.
"I want you," Tina whispers against my jaw.
She always wants me. And I always want her. Two years of marriage haven't diminished the hunger. If anything, it's gotten worse, more specific, more consuming, because I know her body now the way I know my rifles. Every curve. Every response. Every point of pressure that makes her dissolve.
I lead her to the bedroom. Our bedroom. The bed that was mine alone for a year before she changed everything.
I unbutton the flannel. Slide the tank top over her head. Her breasts are fuller now, heavy with pregnancy, the nipples darker. I cup them gently and brush my thumbs across the peaks and she sighs, leaning into my palms.
"Careful," she murmurs. "They're sensitive."
I lower my mouth and take one nipple between my lips, barely there, a ghost of pressure, and she melts against me with a moan that goes straight to my cock.
I worship the other one the same way. Light.
Reverent. Learning the new landscape of her body the way I learned the original, with patience and precision and total attention.
I ease her leggings down. Help her onto the bed, propping pillows behind her back the way she likes. She's beautiful like this. Rounded and glowing and completely, ferociously alive. Her hair fans across the pillows. Her glasses are fogging slightly from the heat of her skin.
I take them off. Set them on the nightstand. She watches me undress with those hazel eyes gone soft and hungry.
I stretch out beside her. We've learned the positions that work best now, and I guide her onto her side, facing away from me, and pull her back against my chest. My hand slides over her belly, down between her thighs.
She's already wet. Slick and hot against my fingers and the sound she makes when I stroke her clit is the sound I want to hear every day for the rest of my life.
I work her slowly. Circling. Pressing. Reading her breath and the tension in her thighs and the way her hand grips my forearm. Two fingers slide inside her, curling, finding the spot, and she rocks back against me.
"Marcel." My name in her mouth when she's like this. Broken open. Nothing hidden. Pure Tina.
I withdraw my fingers. Guide my cock between her thighs from behind and push into her in one slow, deep stroke. She gasps. Reaches back and grabs my hip, pulling me deeper. I groan against her neck and begin to move.
This position lets me hold her. One arm under her head, the other wrapped around her, my hand on her belly where Maya is quiet now, sleeping through what her parents are doing, which is probably for the best. I thrust into her with slow, measured strokes, deep and deliberate, angling upward to find the spot that makes her clench around me.
"Right there," she breathes. "God. Right there. Don't stop."
I don't stop. I press my mouth against the back of her neck and fuck her exactly the way she needs, my fingers finding her clit again, circling in time with my thrusts.
She's tight and wet and making sounds that bounce off the cabin walls and fill the room with proof that this woman is mine and I am hers and the distance between us is permanently, irrevocably closed.
"Come for me," I say against her ear. "Let me feel it."
She shatters. Her pussy grips my cock in waves that drag my own orgasm out of me with a force that makes my vision tunnel. I bury myself deep and come with her name growled against her skin, holding her, holding our daughter, holding everything I never thought I'd have.
We lie together in the aftermath. Her breathing slows. My hand makes lazy circles on her belly. Maya kicks once, sleepily.
"I have something for you," I say.
"If it's another orgasm, give me ten minutes."
I laugh. Still rusty. Still rare. Still the sound that only she can pull from me. I reach into the nightstand drawer and pull out a small wooden box.
She opens it.
Inside is a chess piece. Hand carved. Dark walnut. A queen, but not like the ones on the board. This one is different. This queen is holding a book in one hand and a pen in the other, and at her feet, carved so small you have to look closely, is an open notebook with two words etched into the page.
Still Water.
Tina stares at it. Her eyes fill. Her lips tremble.
"How long did this take you?"
"Forty seven hours." The same amount of time as the walnut stock she touched in my first classroom session. "One hour for every year I plan to spend with you. Give or take."
She closes the box. Sets it on the nightstand. Takes my face in her hands.
"I love you, Marcel Hale."
"I love you, Tina Hale."
She kisses me. Soft. Deep. The kind of kiss that isn't going anywhere because it's already arrived.
Outside, the observation tower stands against the stars. I haven't been up there at dawn in six months. I don't need the scope to see what matters anymore.
It's right here. In my arms. In my bed. In the belly that holds our daughter and the book that holds her words and the foreword that holds mine.
One hundred and fourteen men.
One woman.
One life worth every word I've ever learned to say.