Epilogue
ANNE
Six months later
December.
I stood at the kitchen window of our Clayton house watching snow fall on the backyard and thought about how different the same season could feel depending on what you were standing inside of.
Last December I'd been in Chicago, carrying a secret that had grown so heavy I'd stopped being able to sleep through the night. Driving to St. Louis every Friday and back every weekend and telling myself soon, soon, soon.
This December I was watching my son build a lopsided snowman with the neighbor kids in the backyard of the house we owned, in the city we'd chosen, in the life we'd built from the wreckage of all the things I'd been too scared to say.
The snowman lost its head.
Finn picked it up and put it back on upside down and declared this an improvement.
That was my kid.
Elite Sports Rehab St. Louis had opened July 1st, right on schedule, in the space near Wash U Medical Center that Rachel had found.
Two additional PTs on staff now, a client list that had grown faster than I'd projected, relationships with the soccer complex and three university programs and a handful of high school teams who'd found us through word of mouth.
Rachel had flown out for the opening with champagne and the particular satisfaction of someone who'd taken a calculated risk and watched it pay off.
"I knew you'd crush it," she said.
"You took a chance on me."
"I took a chance on the work. You've always done the work." She looked around the space — the treatment tables, the equipment, the view of the medical campus outside. "This is just the work made visible."
I loved the job. I loved building something that was mine.
I loved the athletes who came through our door — the soccer player rehabbing a torn ACL, the high school swimmer who'd been told she'd never compete again, the Blaze defenseman who came in quietly on his off days and didn't want anyone to know.
But more than any of it I loved coming home.
Every night. To Liam. To Finn. To the particular noise and warmth of a house with people in it who were glad you were there.
Finn had started school in August.
First day he'd stood at the door of his classroom with his backpack and his expression of concentrated bravery and looked up at me.
"What if nobody likes me?" he said.
"Someone is going to like you," I said. "I promise."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're exactly the kind of person I would have wanted to be friends with when I was your age."
He thought about this. "You would have liked me?"
"I would have thought you were the coolest kid in the class."
He straightened up. Adjusted his backpack. Walked through the door.
Three weeks later he had four best friends and had been invited to every birthday party in his class and had strong opinions about the lunch menu that he was apparently lobbying to change.
He was going to be fine.
He was already fine.
Every night Liam sat with him at the kitchen table while he practiced his letters, the two of them bent over worksheets together, Liam taking it as seriously as game tape.
Finn's handwriting had improved dramatically since September.
I was choosing not to point out that Liam's had somehow gotten worse.
The Blaze season had started in October.
Defending champions. Every team circling them, every game carrying the weight of a target on their backs.
It was harder in some ways — the pressure constant, the margin for error smaller — and Liam was thriving in it.
His shoulder was strong. The summer rest had done what I'd promised it would.
He was playing the best hockey of his career.
And every home game, Finn and I were in the stands.
Finn now had opinions about specific players' shooting mechanics that he delivered with great authority to anyone within earshot. I had stopped correcting the parts that were wrong because watching the people around us nod along was too entertaining.
The doorbell rang.
I dried my hands and went to open it.
Jess was on the porch with Justin, both of them bundled against the December cold, a bag of wrapped presents between them.
She'd driven down from Chicago that morning — four hours with a six-year-old and a car full of luggage and what she'd described in her texts as enough snacks to survive an apocalypse.
"Merry Christmas," she said, pulling me into a hug.
"Get inside, it's freezing."
Justin had his hockey bag over one shoulder because he and Finn had been doing a junior skills clinic on Saturday mornings and he'd apparently decided the most efficient system was never unpacking it.
Justin was already past me looking for Finn, and they thundered up the stairs together with the particular energy of two boys who had been separated for six days and had a great deal to discuss.
Jess followed me to the kitchen and set the presents down.
"How was the drive?"
"Fine. Good." She unwound her scarf. "Justin talked about Finn for three and a half hours and then fell asleep for the last thirty minutes."
"Finn has been asking since Tuesday when you were getting here."
She smiled at that — warm and a little tired around the edges in the way she'd looked since September. Happy. Genuinely happy. But carrying something at the same time.
I knew what it was. We'd talked about it enough — the logistics, the distance, the question that didn't have a clean answer yet.
"Carter's still at the arena," I said. "He'll come when practice is done."
Something shifted in her expression. Not much. Just enough.
"I know," she said. "He texted."
She picked up her coffee and looked out the window at the backyard where the snowman stood with its head on upside down, and I let her have the moment without pushing. Some things you could ask about and some things you just stood next to quietly until the person was ready.
Liam came home first.
He walked through the door smelling like ice and cold air, found me in the kitchen, and kissed me with the straightforward certainty he'd brought to everything since the Finals. Like he'd decided something and was done being uncertain about it.
"How was practice?"
"Good. Sharp. Carter's distracted but in a useful way."
"Jess distracted?"
"Jess distracted. He keeps smiling at his phone and then pretending he wasn't." He glanced toward the living room where Jess was helping the boys build something architectural out of couch cushions. "She's here?"
"Since two o'clock."
He nodded, quiet for a moment. "They figure anything out?"
"Not yet."
He looked at me over his mug with that particular look — the one that had been there since August, since he'd come home one evening and asked me to sit down and then asked me something that had made me cry for twenty minutes before I could answer.
"They will," he said.
"I know."
Carter arrived with snow in his hair and the barely-contained energy of a man who was very carefully not making it obvious how glad he was to be walking through this particular door.
He greeted Liam. Said hello to me. Accepted a coffee.
And then Jess came in from the living room and the careful composure lasted approximately three seconds.
He crossed to her quietly, and she tipped her face up, and he kissed her like they'd been doing it for years and also like he was still slightly amazed that he got to. She put her hand flat against his chest — steadying herself, or him, or both.
The boys, appearing at that exact moment, made coordinated sounds of disgust.
"Ew," Finn said.
"So ew," Justin agreed.
"You'll change your minds," Carter told them.
"We won't," they said, in unison, and went back upstairs.
Liam appeared at my shoulder. "That's hereditary apparently."
"Apparently."
I looked at Jess. She was looking at Carter. He was looking back at her with an expression I recognized — the one that meant I have four days and then you're three hundred miles away again and I'm not thinking about that right now.
She'd told me once that the distance was the only problem. That everything else was easy in a way she hadn't expected, hadn't let herself expect.
I believed her.
Easy didn't mean simple. But it was a place to start.
The afternoon settled into itself.
We decorated cookies — all six of us at the kitchen island, Finn and Justin treating it as a competitive sport, Carter and Liam getting into an argument about whether a hockey-stick-shaped cookie counted as a Christmas cookie that went on longer than it had any right to.
We watched a movie. The boys fell asleep on the floor halfway through and nobody moved them.
We ate dinner. We opened one present each, the tradition Liam and I had started — just one, on Christmas Eve, to make Christmas morning last longer.
At some point in the evening I looked around the living room.
Justin and Finn asleep on the floor, cookie-decorated and entirely peaceful.
Carter and Jess on the other couch, her legs across his lap, his hand resting at her ankle like it belonged there.
Talking quietly. Not performing happiness — just existing inside it, in whatever form they'd managed to build across 300 miles and two schedules and two kids and every complicated thing that stood between Chicago and St. Louis.
The Christmas tree lights. The fire Liam had insisted on building even though the house had perfectly functional central heating.
The Stanley Cup ring on the mantel, catching the firelight.
Liam's hand in mine.
This was the family I had now. Not the one I'd imagined or planned or been careful enough to protect. The one I'd been brave enough, eventually, to build.
After Carter and Jess left — Justin asleep on Carter's shoulder, Jess's hand in his, the two of them navigating the front steps in the dark like they'd worked out the choreography — after Finn was in bed and the house was quiet, Liam poured two glasses of wine and we sat by the tree.
The fire had burned down to coals. Outside the snow was still falling, quiet and consistent, laying itself over the backyard where Finn's snowman stood with its head on upside down.
I leaned into Liam's side.
He reached into his jacket pocket.
I looked up.
He was watching me with an expression I'd learned over months of mornings and game nights and bedtime stories and all the ordinary days that turned out to be the ones that mattered — steady and certain and entirely his.
"I told you it was coming," he said.
"You did."
He held the box.
"Anne." He turned to face me fully. "I've been trying to figure out how to say this in a way that's equal to what I mean, and I've accepted that I can't. So I'm just going to say it."
He opened the box.
The ring was simple and beautiful — a single diamond that caught the firelight and threw it back in pieces.
"I love you. I love the life we're building.
I love watching you be Finn's mother and I love watching you build your business and I love you at six in the morning when you haven't had coffee yet and you're still the first thing I want to see.
" He paused. "I lost five years I didn't know I was losing.
I don't want to lose one more day that could have your name on it. "
He looked at me.
"Marry me," he said. "Please."
I looked at the ring. At his face. At the fire and the tree and the snow outside and the sounds of a house where everyone I loved was asleep upstairs.
"Yes," I said. "Absolutely yes."
He slid the ring onto my finger.
I held my hand up and looked at it — the firelight catching the stone, the house quiet around us, Liam's arm coming around me as I leaned back into him.
We sat like that for a long time.
"Finn's going to lose his mind," I said eventually.
"I know. I'm prepared."
"He's going to want to be involved in every decision."
"He already told me his opinions on wedding cake. Chocolate. Non-negotiable."
I laughed. "When did you ask him?"
"Last week. I asked his permission first." He paused. "He said yes but he wanted the chocolate cake in writing."
I turned to look at him. "You asked his permission."
"Of course I did." He said it simply, like there was no other way it could have gone.
I pressed my face to his neck and held on.
Outside the snow kept falling.
Inside the fire glowed and the tree lights blinked their slow pattern and somewhere upstairs our son slept with his Cup replica on his nightstand and his hockey stick against the wall and his whole life ahead of him.
We had missed things, Liam and I. Lost time that we wouldn't get back. Made choices that had cost us both.
But we were here.
We were choosing each other. Every day, in every ordinary way, we were choosing each other.
And that — that was how stories like ours ended.
Not with a perfect beginning.
But with a beginning, finally, that was true.
The St. Louis Blaze stories aren't done yet.
Are you ready for Carter and Jess's story?
Carter Michaels has one rule: don't fall for someone you can't have.
Jess Calloway lives three hundred miles away, has a six-year-old son, and is absolutely, completely off limits.
He's already broken the rule. Now he just has to figure out what to do about it.
Scoring the Single Mom's Heart — Book 2 of the St. Louis Blaze Hockey Series — is coming soon.