Chapter 17 Moses #3
“Both, in a way,” I explained, warming to the topic that had consumed so much of my creative energy lately.
“We’re calling it ‘Distilled Dreams 2.0’.
It's a homage to the original gin bar in Atlanta, but expanded to include production facilities. We’ll craft small-batch gins on site, offer tastings and tours, and partner with local botanicals suppliers.
It’s the evolution of what I’ve been building at Timbers setting in motion all the positive changes that now defined my life.
Back at my apartment, as we prepared for Rhett’s early morning flight back to Boston, his last trip before our scheduled holiday visit to the Carolina property, I found myself reluctant to let the evening end.
These partings, though no longer fraught with the uncertainty of our initial separation in Gomillion, still carried a weight, a temporary emptiness that no amount of video calls could quite fill.
“Two weeks,” Rhett reminded me as we settled into bed, sensing my melancholy mood. “Then the Carolina house for Christmas. Our first holiday together.”
“In our house,” I added, the concept still new enough to bring a thrill of excitement. “Even if we are sleeping on air mattresses surrounded by construction materials.”
“The renovations will be far enough along to be comfortable,” Rhett assured me. “And there’s something poetic about spending our first Christmas there while it’s still in transition. A house becoming a home, just as we’re becoming... whatever we’re becoming.”
“A couple,” I supplied. “Partners. A family, in our own way.”
The last few words hung in the air between us, significant in its implications.
We hadn’t discussed the more formal aspects of commitment, marriage, legal documentation, the structures that traditionally defined family relationships.
But the feeling was there, the essence of family in its most important sense: certainty, belonging, and shared purpose.
“Yes,” Rhett agreed, his voice soft but certain in the darkness. “A family.”
As sleep claimed us, bodies aligned with practiced ease despite the weeks often spent apart, I felt that sense of rightness that had become increasingly familiar over the past months.
The road ahead still held challenges, logistical complications, career adjustments, the inevitable friction that arises when two independent lives merge into a shared path.
But the destination was clear, the companion chosen, the journey already underway.
In the morning, I would drive Rhett to the airport. We would say our temporary goodbyes, return to our separate cities, our established routines. But unlike our parting in Gomillion three months earlier, this separation carried no fear, no doubt, no sense of an ending.
Because it wasn’t an ending at all. It was merely a pause in a story that would continue, in two weeks at our Carolina home, in the spring at the distillery opening, in all the countless moments, big and small, that would comprise our shared future.
A future that, after twenty years of separate paths, we were finally building together, one decision, one dream, one day at a time.