Epilogue
ANNIE
One Year Later
The bell over the clinic door has never been this busy. It rings the way hope rings—bright and a little shameless.
When I signed the lease on this squat little suite wedged between a barber and a nail salon, I pictured patients trickling in because they trusted me, because they needed low-cost care, because they liked the way I explained why their body did what it did instead of just telling it to stop.
Now they pour through like we’re giving away kittens and ice cream.
Some of them are here because they have a sore throat or a cholesterol panel or a thumb that’s been numb since April.
A nontrivial number of them are here because I’m marrying Brick Wyatt, and they would like to “establish care” and also “just see if he’s here today in any capacity whatsoever. ”
The first time one of the ranch wives said it out loud—“Doctor, if it isn’t too much trouble, I wanted to ask whether your fiancé prefers pecan or apple, because my sister and I were having a debate and also, is that his hat I see back there?
”—I thought I’d misheard. The second time, I laughed and then apologized for laughing.
The third time, I started keeping a printed sign at the front desk that says in block letters:
Dr. Pearl’s fiancé does not provide medical advice.
No, you may not touch his hat.
Pecan. But he will eat any pie you put in front of him and give you a sincere speech about how it is the best pie he has ever tasted in the history of pie.
Mac designed the sign in five minutes with a rodeo font and a cartoon hat so jaunty that even Jaden grinned. It sits wedged between a hand sanitizer pump and a stack of new patient forms, and every time I look at it, my chest does that quiet ache that means I’ve drifted into ridiculous happiness.
I wanted this clinic to thrive because we offered something people needed. It’s thriving because we offer something people want to look at while they wait to have their blood drawn. The old me would have felt insulted. The current me is more mature.
If the waiting room fills because the town wants to gawk at a legend carrying a diaper bag, fine. If they stay because the test results come with respect and clarity, better.
“Doctor, there’s a family of five wanting back-to-school sports physicals,” Jaden calls from the front desk, his voice pitched to carry over the polite murmur of eager eavesdroppers. “And one of them has brought her goat.”
“Tell the goat we’re cash-pay,” I say without looking up from a throat culture that refuses to be quick.
“Goat says they have Venmo.”
“And the nurse is already billing them,” Mac says from her perch on the filing cabinet, camera in her lap, hair up, cheeks flushed.
She’s here editing a documentary on small-town medicine that she swears is not about me while she eats the lunch she forgot this morning.
It’s a miracle she still remembers to eat at all.
The door rings again. The weight changes in the room in a way I can feel more than hear. People make space the way they do for someone who saved their kid from a storm once, even if the storm was mostly a headline.
Brick is back from taking a stack of boxes to the donations closet in the hall, and the light catches the gray at his temple like the universe just found the perfect filter. The babies love him. The old men love him. The ranch wives pretend to scowl and then love him so much they make extra pie.
He doesn’t wear his hat in here. He hung a hook by the back door himself and put a little hand-lettered label above it the day after he settled in that says simply Brick.
The first time he walked in with Mae strapped to his chest in a sling and a box of tongue depressors under his arm and said, “Where do you want this, Doc?” I thought Mac was going to faint with glee.
I pretended to be annoyed so I wouldn’t cry, and then, later, when he was asleep on the couch with the baby drooling on his collarbone and Jaden had slipped a blanket over them both, I went into the bathroom and let my face break into the ugly cry it needed.
Domestic life is odd.
Now he belongs here in a way that feels old and right.
He lifts the box of patient education pamphlets onto the counter like he’s carrying something precious, and the kid with the goat says, reverent as a prayer, “Is that…him?” and his mother hisses, “Hush,” and pretends she has never shouted that name louder in the stands.
“He’s him,” Jaden says cheerfully, ushering the family toward the scale. “He’s also carrying handouts about vitamin D, so please adjust your awe accordingly.”
Brick catches my eye and lets the corner of his mouth curl, small and private.
The ring on my hand will take some getting used to.
I keep snagging the amethyst on my lab coat.
A lavender stone to remind me of the lavender ring he proposed with, and also, because it’s my favorite.
I mentioned it to him once in passing, and then he surprised me with the ring.
He keeps surprising me.
We moved him into my house the week after the festival ended. It was fast by any polite standard. It was inevitable by any standard that mattered. His duffel and his boots took up no space at all. His presence takes up exactly the space I wanted it to.
He wakes early and makes coffee, and he does dishes with a focus that makes me grin into the doorframe.
He has opinions about laundry and none about pillows.
He is always, always fifteen minutes early to pick Mae up from a nap because he likes to stand at the door and listen to her breathe before she wakes.
I’ve stopped pretending that doesn’t make me consider leaving work in the middle of a clinic day just to watch him be a perfect stay-at-home dad.
Levi is here today visiting in the way their family visits—not a formal visit, just the gravity of people you love pulling them toward the space you made.
He leans against the counter with a coffee and his eyebrows furrowed.
He looks up when Brick returns to the back office with an empty box.
“Hey,” Levi says, amused. “You hear from him?”
Brick’s face shifts. “Not yet.”
“Still in rehab,” Levi adds for me, because he knows I’m standing in the doorway of the exam room pretending I have a throat to culture. “Sticking it out. Says the right things on the group text. Unsubtle flex is that he has weak Wi-Fi.”
He thinks Reno is also weaponizing distance to avoid us as a unit, and specifically me. We all do. It doesn’t matter. The fact that he’s in the place that might fix the thing that broke him trumps the petty thought.
I can handle being avoided. I cannot handle attending a funeral. “I’m glad he’s there. I hope it works.”
“Also a spectacular excuse not to see his father and his father’s fiancée…”
“A man’s gotta live with his choices,” Brick says neutrally. I’m not sure if he means Reno or himself.
“I hope he comes to the wedding,” I say. “But I’m not going to hold the ceremony hostage to his temper. If he comes, he comes. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. I will get married either way.”
Levi tips his coffee cup at me. “Good. Also, I’m wearing a tie.”
“Your mother would be proud,” Brick says, dropping the last of the boxes into the hallway and washing his hands with that thoroughness he applies to dishes and feelings both.
“Everyone eats at our house afterward.” Then, because he listens for little noises only he can hear now, he tilts his head and squints toward the back.
“She’s awake.” He leaves to check on Mae in my office-turned-partial nursery.
Minutes melt in the low hum of clinic life. A man with a rash insists he changed nothing in his environment until Jaden asks if he’s still sleeping with his dog after firewood deliveries. Same stuff, different day in our world.
Then the back door opens with its particular hinge squeak, and the entire room tilts like a field of flowers turning toward the sun.
Brick enters in that lopsided way that means he’s carrying the world as if it’s lighter than it is.
Mae is tucked against his chest crosswise, drowsy and warm, wearing a cloud-soft onesie that says Trouble in a font Jaden designed to make me laugh.
He must have taken her for a walk when she woke up—he loves doing that.
All the shops around here know them, and they love doting on both of them.
Last week, he came in with a fresh manicure. Apparently, the nail techs took turns holding our baby and trying to teach her Mandarin. He tried to explain that she isn’t talking yet, but that didn’t stop them.
“She needs her mama for lunchtime,” Brick says as he passes her to me.
“Good thing her mama has a minute,” I say, and hold out my arms. He transfers her with the little ceremony we’ve developed—the pause, the kiss to the forehead, the soft whisper that we both pretend we can’t hear.
Her weight settles into my chest, and every part of me that holds tension lets it go in increments, like easing off a brake down a hill I didn’t know I was on.
“We’re going to go let patients be disappointed by me instead of you for ten minutes,” Brick says, already turning to steer Levi toward the hallway like a bouncer who learned his moves in a library. “Come on. Let’s let them have privacy.”
I retreat to my office chair and lower myself slowly because if there is any dignity left in my body, it deserves to be spared the indignity of falling into a squeaky swivel seat with a baby and a full heart.
Mae turns her head in that miraculous rooting way that still makes me laugh out loud because the biology is so specific.
I unclip my bra with the dexterity of a person who can put in a suture one-handed and who can also breastfeed in an exam room while ordering syringes on hold with medical supplies, if she needs to.
She latches, greedy and perfect. The first pull always makes me gasp, soft and involuntary. The ache that follows is not pain. It is relief.
My office is not much more than a closet with a window, a desk, a chair, a lamp, a crib, and the diplomas I hung too low.
There’s a plant in the corner that’s trying its best, and I talk to it more than I admit.
The blinds are crooked, and I still haven’t bought a rug because I can’t decide between “adult with taste” and “woman who spilled grape juice today.”
Mae’s hand curls around my finger as if she’s checking whether I’m still here. I am. I am here, in this chair, in this body, in this life I didn’t plan. It has been a thousand small surrenders to realities I once might have resisted on principle.
Mae sighs around a mouthful of milk and opens and closes her hand.
I brush her dark hair with my knuckles, and the softness goes straight through my skin into the hard places.
Her ears are elfin. Her eyebrows are faint and determined.
I cannot believe I get to love something this easy that also makes demands at three in the morning like a goddess bent on revenge.
I have never been happier.
The End
Dear precious reader, thank you for reading Sexting the Cowboy!
When I finished writing the book, I couldn’t put down my pen yet… not until I wrote a little something extra special just for you. If you want more of Annie and Brick, click here to get your bonus epilogue.
P.S. If you enjoyed Sexting the Cowboy, then I think you’ll enjoy Sexting the Boss! Swipe to the next page for a sneak peek…