Epilogue
Aiden
Three Years Later
“Time to go, sleepyhead.”
The summer sky hid behind my closed eyes, but the warmth of Lola’s voice swelled in my chest. I loved waking up to my wife’s voice. Loved it. She sounded sweeter than honey drizzled on crumpets. Better than the pancakes she’d cooked me for breakfast. I never got tired of hearing her voice.
That didn’t mean I was opening my eyes, though.
I kept ’em shut real tight. Kept pretending I was enjoying a peaceful doze on the porch.
My back ached from sitting crooked on the outdoor lounge, but my legs were stretched out, and a book lay open on my chest. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd .
Bruce and Barb had given it to me when they’d stopped by on their latest tour around Tasmania.
“Aiden.” There was a frustrated huff in Lola’s voice. Loved that, too. Loved her bossy. “I know you’re awake.”
I cracked one eye open.
Lola’s body blocked out the sun streaming over the mountains. It didn’t matter that she glared down at me, hands on her hips. She still looked like pure heaven in her new dress. I reached out to flick the hem, but she playfully smacked my hand.
I looked up at her with my saddest puppy-dog eyes. “Do we have to go?” I grumbled.
“Yes.”
“And I have to wear…this?”
I pointed to the outfit. Colonel Cotton Paws was curled up and purring on my lap. Hopefully, his ginger fuzz had ruined the ugly pants Lola had made me wear.
Why did the women in my life insist on dressing me? And why did they always choose scratchy, wool outfits like accountants wore? I liked jeans. They looked good. Went with everything. Apparently, sometimes you had to wear something nice .
Fine. For Lola, I’d suffer, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. I was stripping those pants off and shoving them into some dark corner in the back of the wardrobe the second we got home.
When she gave me a sassy cough to get moving, I raised a brow and asked, “Are you sure this visit to the farm isn’t a surprise party you’re all springing on me?”
“A party? No, of course not.” Lola’s teeth gnawed on her bottom lip. “You hate parties.”
Yeah, she was dragging me to a surprise party.
My lip curled. “Is there going to be singing?”
“Singing?” Lola’s nose wrinkled, and she bit down harder on her lip, but a smile still broke through. “Why would there be singing?”
Great. Just great .
A surprise party with damn singing, too.
It was my birthday. Why couldn’t I choose what we did? What was wrong with spending a day at home on the couch watching TV with my beautiful wife?
I tried my luck one more time. “Is the grumpy birthday troll at least getting a cake out of this?”
Lola hid her eyes behind her hand.
“Did you bake my cake, love?”
Her smile only got bigger.
My hand captured her waist, and I dragged her closer, ignoring her protests and the grumbled meows of the Colonel. He took the hint to skedaddle back to his sunny perch in the living room. Lucky. Lola’s bottom landed in my lap a second later.
Now, that was more like it.
“Can I have a birthday kiss?” I murmured in her hair.
She playfully swatted my shoulder. “You’ve already had plenty of birthday kisses.”
“Earlier doesn’t count. That was my midnight birthday kiss.”
“After that.”
“Nah, morning birthday kisses don’t count, either.” I flashed her a lazy grin. “I need my lunchtime kisses now.” I flicked the frill of her dress. “Preferably without all this on.”
Lola’s hand cupped my cheek, her lips only a whisper away from mine, and just when I thought I’d won and we were heading back to Naked Town instead of the Hollyoak Farm, she pecked me on the lips.
“That’s barely a kiss,” I grumbled. “What type of awful birthday is this?”
She laughed and hopped off my lap. “The best you’re getting, you old grumble bum. Now, get moving, it’s party ti—” She slapped a hand over her mouth. “I didn’t say that.”
I chuckled. She’d always been rubbish at keeping secrets.
I followed her to the car without too much complaining. My hand dug into my pocket for the keys, and I tossed them to Lola. Her eyebrows popped up over her glasses.
“You can drive.” I shrugged. “The birthday boy needs a day off.”
Lola grinned at me like it was her birthday. It was a special treat for her to drive my car. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her—I still didn’t completely trust myself.
Three years of seeing the shrink, and I was light-years from where I’d started, but some things still weighed heavy on my shoulders, and no amount of talking seemed to help. Driving was the worst. I was a terrible passenger. I stressed Lola out with all my worrying.
Today, my feet were entirely on solid ground. I felt good. Relaxed. Tired and a bit blissed-out after too much sex. She could drive without me bugging her about slowing down today.
That didn’t mean I didn’t tug on her seatbelt to make sure she was strapped in safe, or that she didn’t squeeze my thigh once or twice during the drive to the farm. My sweet girl, always showing me in small ways that she was there for me. I hoped she knew how much that meant to me.
“Glad to see you smiling again, love,” I said with a smile of my own.
Lola’s eyes stayed on the winding mountain road. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been”—she waved a hand around—“out of sorts and moody.”
“Don’t apologise. You’ve had a lot on your mind. Chris applying for parole…” I shook my head like that would somehow scatter the frustration sinking deep in my bones. “I know that was hard for you.”
The car slowed. “He’s barely served his sentence!” She pushed her glasses onto her head and started to scrub furiously at frustrated tears already spilling down her cheeks.
My heart lodged in my throat, so I said something dumb. “Lola, love, your makeup—”
“Shit.” She dabbed carefully at her face.
“Shit. I know.” She huffed out a strained breath.
“I’m sorry—I just—I should get over it. That part of my life is ancient history.
But it feels like there was no justice at all.
He dragged me through hell in court and only pleaded guilty at the last second because the prosecutor gave him that bullshit plea deal.
Seven years was nothing to start with!” The strain in her voice made my heart ache.
“And then to be eligible for parole so soon…”
“They denied his parole,” I reassured her.
“We’ve got another two years before he can apply again, and when that time comes, we’ll fight that bullshit application, too.
He’s just getting desperate because he keeps landing himself in trouble with the other inmates.
You made sure he’ll never practice law again.
His money’s gone. But he needs to serve his full sentence. I’m with you. Every step of the way.”
She nodded and tossed a shaky smile in my direction before she focused back on the road.
“I know. I love that you’re on my team. I just hate that Chris can still upset me like this.
After all these years…and after everything he did…
” She sighed. “I don’t want him to keep having that power over me.
I don’t want to waste any more of my life on him. ”
“I understand. We’ll keep fighting until the day you find your peace.” I gave her knee another squeeze. “Together, right?”
She smiled and offered me a firm nod like we were sealing the deal. “Together.”
Lola turned down the driveway and parked the car. After she arched over to check her face in the rearview and was satisfied she didn’t look like a panda, we walked together hand in hand, our steps crunching on the long gravel pathway to the front porch of the Hollyoak farmhouse.
Balloons, streamers, and bunting floated everywhere the breeze could catch.
Not a surprise birthday party, huh? Sure.
Poppy waited on the top step. She was barely two, but that tiny girl was the spitting image of her mama.
Dark curls sprang up everywhere, and she was all dolled up in her sparkly tutu dress, her chubby belly jutting out.
She twisted back and forth in her party shoes and frilly white socks, her dark eyes already on me. Little devil.
She grinned a toothy smile and raised her hands.
I bent down to her. “Want something, little one?”
She punched her fists about her head. She didn’t say much—more like her daddy—but I knew she was asking me to pick her up. She loved having a front-row seat for all the action, and no one could get her higher or closer than her “Unnie Ay-Yon.”
Poppy stuffed her chubby fingers into my beard, babbling away about who-knows-what as I lumbered inside, then down the hallway.
She was like a doll in my arms, propped on my hip, and I paused with her to look at the splashes of colourful photos that Ruth had flooded all over the walls of the Hollyoak farmhouse.
Three years of new memories.
The first photo I looked at was one of the six of us when we’d won Games Night. It was a turning point in my life in so many ways. That was the night I’d finally admitted I loved the girl of my dreams and truly let other people into my life.
And it had been the six of us ever since.
My eyes glanced over the other photos. Ruth and Ryan’s shotgun wedding, once news of jellybean Poppy had shocked us all.
The six of us smiling on the beaches of Fiji for that magic week away when Harry and Brooke had eloped.
Ruth beaming a proud smile the day she’d started her pony club.
Harry and Brooke when they’d bought their first house.
Ryan and one of his dumb, hairy cows. Lola holding the keys to the clinic when she’d taken over.
And, of course, Poppy. There were truckloads of photos of our Little Miss Poppy.
A smile tugged at my lips when I looked at the newest photo at the end.
Lola and I on our wedding day.
There was nothing fancy about our wedding—just a small shindig at our place on the mountain with a few friends. The wedding was another one of those days when I was told I couldn’t wear jeans, but Harry was the one who convinced me to chuck on the suit.
One of my best friends. My best man. In a lot of ways, the better man. I still teased him about being a kid, but honestly, he was the one who’d helped me grow up in a way no one else could at one of my lowest points.
He was a big part of why that beautiful woman had come wobbling along the grass towards me in her puffy pink tea dress, holding those damn daisies and making me scrub a waterfall of tears off my face because I just felt so… blessed .
No word of a lie—Harry ribbed me so hard because I’d cried more than Yolanda.
That crafty old broad had constantly nagged me and stuck her nose where I didn’t want it.
She was convinced right from the start that the love of a good woman was what I needed.
She’d said it was the only thing that got her husband through some dark days after he’d come back from the war.
For a long time, I’d thought she was full of shit.
Turned out, she was right—I just hadn’t met the right woman yet.
Lola was the gift worth waiting for.
And God help me if the waterworks weren’t stinging my eyes all over again when I looked at that photo of us.
Ruth waddled beside me, her belly growing rounder with another Hollyoak on the way. Her head fell onto my shoulder. “That’s my favourite, you know.”
“Really? You like it even more than the one of your grinning husband and his dumb cow?”
She laughed. “Miss Bernice is actually a big deal in the farming world.”
Poppy shoved a flurry of chubby fists at my mouth. I smooched little kisses on each toddler punch. She giggled. “I’ll take your word for it,” I said to Ruth.
“How do you feel now you’re officially forty?”
“Old.”
“You already acted like a grumpy old ass.”
“Old- er .”
Ruth smirked, but it faded, and she was quiet as she glanced over the wall of photos. “Do you remember the night all those years ago when Matthew filed for divorce? The night I tore the house apart? When I chose to move down here to Tasmania?”
My chest squeezed tight, all the breath stolen from my lungs, but I nodded.
“I never thanked you for coming with me,” she said.
“You don’t need to.”
“I want to. You were always there for me when no one else was. I know I put on a brave face, but for a long time, I was angry at the world and everything that had been taken from me. My family. My dreams. But now …” She turned a wistful gaze to me, her eyes shining with tears, but her lips curved up in a smile.
“Aiden, did you ever imagine it would turn out like this?”
No. Not for a damn second.
But when the singing started, and my wife walked towards me holding a birthday cake, her face lit up with a smile even brighter than the sparklers stuck into the top, friends and family crowded behind her, I knew why everything had worked out the way it did.
It was all because of her.
The End