Epilogue
CALLUM
Six months later…
The ring on my left hand catches the morning light first. I notice it before I'm fully awake—the dull gold glint against the white of the pillowcase—and the weight of it settles over me the way it does every morning, not as a reminder but as a confirmation.
We married eleven weeks after we left my father's house.
No venue, no flowers, no guest list. A justice of the peace in a municipal building three blocks from the apartment, Clara in a cream dress she'd bought off a rack the day before, me in the only suit I'd bothered to unpack.
Two witnesses from the building's administrative staff, a woman named Diane who cried anyway, and a man named Marcus who shook my hand with genuine warmth and told me I had good eyes.
Our parents didn't come. They'd been invited—I'd called my father myself, voice flat and civil, three days before.
There had been a long silence on the line, and then he'd said he needed more time, and I'd said we weren't waiting for it.
Carol had called Clara the same evening.
Clara had come out of the bedroom after twenty minutes with red eyes and a straight spine, and she'd told me they weren't coming, and I'd held her until she stopped trembling.
It had stung her more than she'd let herself show. I knew that. I'd known it every day since.
But we'd stood in that municipal office anyway, just the two of us and Diane's borrowed tears, and when Clara had looked up at me and said I do in that clear, unshaking voice, nothing else had been missing.
That was six months ago. A lot has changed.
I turn my head and find her still asleep beside me, her dark hair spread across the pillow, one hand resting against her stomach the way it always does now—instinctive, constant, as though her body understood its new purpose before her mind fully caught up.
The swell of her belly is unmistakable at four months.
Not large, not unwieldy, but undeniable—a gentle, rounded firmness that tightens something deep and permanent in my chest every single time I see it.
She's beautiful in a way that has no precedent for me. She was beautiful before. Now she is something beyond that category entirely.
I watch her sleep for a moment, one arm tucked beneath my head, cataloguing the small details of her the way I always do—the soft part of her lips, the way her lashes rest against her cheek, the rise and fall of her breathing.
When Clara gets pregnant, we move out of my apartment and into a house in the suburbs.
As nice as the apartment is, I can't imagine living there with kids. Our child.
Her eyes open.
Not slowly—Clara never wakes slowly. She blinks once, registers me watching, and the corner of her mouth curves.
"You're staring again."
"Every morning," I confirm.
She shifts toward me, pressing closer, and her lips find the line of my jaw—soft, unhurried, warm. Then my cheek. Then the corner of my mouth.
"Morning," she murmurs against my lips.
"Morning."
She kisses me properly then, her hand moving to my chest, and I feel the shift in her before she's even fully committed to it—the deliberate press of her body against mine, the way her fingers curl into my shoulder.
I pull back far enough to look at her.
"Clara."
"Don't." Her eyes hold mine, steady and dark and entirely awake. "Don't you dare say I should rest."
"You're pregnant."
"I'm aware." She tilts her head against the pillow, one eyebrow lifted. "Four months along, not four hundred. I'm not going to break, Callum." A pause, and then softer: "Love me."
Something in my chest responds to that before my mind does. The word love in her mouth has always operated that way—it bypasses every rational layer I have and lands directly.
I reach for her face, my thumb tracing her cheekbone.
"If anything feels wrong?—"
"It won't." She turns her head and presses her lips to my palm. "Stop overthinking and touch me."
She pulls me back to her mouth, and I let the argument go.
I lower myself beside her carefully, one hand curved beneath her back, the other moving to her hip—gentle, deliberate, nothing like the urgency I'm capable of.
She's right that she won't break. She's not fragile.
But she is carrying our child, and every instinct I have recalibrates around that fact until my hands move differently than they have before, slower and more careful, more aware.
She makes a soft sound when I slide her nightgown from her shoulders, and I press my mouth to the curve of her shoulder, her collarbone, the swell of her breast—fuller now, heavier, tender to the touch. I feel her breathe in sharply.
"Okay?" I ask against her skin.
"Yes." Her hand finds my hair. "Yes."
I move over her slowly, supporting my own weight, one hand resting with deliberate lightness against the round of her stomach.
She looks up at me—entirely clear-eyed, entirely certain—and I enter her with the same careful slowness, feeling her exhale beneath me, feeling her body open and adjust and hold me in that deep, particular stillness that belongs only to this.
"Callum." My name in her mouth, just that, nothing else needed.
I move in slow, full strokes, my forehead dropping to hers, her breath warm against my lips. She pulls me closer by the back of my neck, and I stay there—unhurried, present—until the morning quiet closes around us both and there is nothing left outside this room worth thinking about.
Clara meets me in the kitchen just past noon with her hair still loose, one hand at the small of her back, squinting at her phone.
She looks entirely undisturbed by the fact that we have company arriving in three hours, which means she's more nervous than she's letting on.
She only gets that calm when she's working very hard at it.
"They confirmed?" I ask.
"Two o'clock." She sets the phone face-down on the counter. "Mom texted."
I hand her the glass of water she should have already drunk this morning and wait.
She takes it without comment, which tells me everything about how her head is running right now.
I move behind her, one hand settling at her hip, and she leans back into me by reflex—one of those small, unconscious habits she's developed over six months that I have catalogued and protected with my life.
"It'll be fine," I tell her.
"You don't know that."
"I know you." I press my lips briefly to the top of her head. "It'll be fine."
She turns in my hold and looks up at me, and for a moment the careful calm slips just enough that I can see the real thing underneath it—the hope she's been trying not to protect too hard.
They arrive at two-fifteen. I open the door.
My father looks older than the last time I saw him. Six months has done something to his posture, some degree of its former authority quietly surrendered. He looks at me with an expression I don't have a clean name for—something between discomfort and relief—and then he extends his hand.
I take it. His grip is firm.
"Callum," he says.
"Edward." I step back and let them in.
Carol crosses the threshold with her eyes already finding Clara across the living room, and the moment she does, whatever composed entrance she had planned dissolves entirely. Her face crumples. She presses her hand to her mouth.
"Oh, sweetheart." Her voice breaks on it.
Clara makes a sound—small and sharp—and crosses the room in four steps, and then they are holding each other in the middle of our living room, Carol's shoulders shaking, Clara's arms tight around her.
I watch Clara's face over her mother's shoulder and I see the relief hit her—not gradual but sudden, like pressure releasing.
"I'm sorry." Carol pulls back far enough to hold Clara's face in both hands, her eyes red.
"I'm so sorry. I was wrong to say what I said—I was wrong to make you choose, and I was wrong to stay away, and I have missed you every single day.
" Her eyes drop to Clara's stomach, and a fresh wave of tears comes.
"I can't miss this. I can't. I'm sorry."
"Mom." Clara's voice is wet and wrecked. "Stop apologizing and just—" She pulls her back in, and Carol goes, holding her daughter with a grip that has six months of accumulated guilt behind it.
I look at my father.
He clears his throat, his eyes moving from the two of them to me, and I can see him working through something internal—the particular stubbornness of a man who has spent his whole life being certain, confronting the cost of it.
"I should have come to the wedding," he says. Not an apology exactly. But from my father, the acknowledgment is its own kind of concession.
"Yeah," I say. "You should have."
A pause. Then the corner of his mouth shifts. "She good for you?"
I look across the room at Clara—still holding her mother, her free hand resting against her stomach, the tension finally draining from her shoulders.
"She's my everything," I tell him.
He nods once, absorbing this with the economy of a man who doesn't traffic in sentiment, but the set of his jaw softens marginally.
The afternoon extends into early evening without any of us deciding to let it.
Carol sits beside Clara on the couch, one hand resting gently on Clara's bump while they talk, my father in the armchair across from them with a cup of coffee he keeps forgetting to drink, and the house fills up with voices in a way it hasn't since we moved in.
I stand near the kitchen doorway and watch.
Clara is laughing at something her mother said—a real laugh, unguarded, the kind that reaches her eyes and stays there—and her hand moves to cover her mother's hand where it rests against the curve of her stomach.
The late afternoon light comes through the window at the angle that makes everything in this room look deliberate, considered, chosen.
I put her here, I think. I held on when she tried to run, and I built this around her, and now she is laughing in her own home with her mother's hand over the place where our child is growing.
The primal satisfaction of it runs deep enough that I have no clean word for it. Not pride. Not victory. Something quieter and more permanent than either—the settled certainty of a man who pursued the right thing and did not let go of it, and is now standing in the proof of that.
Clara glances over at me across the room, catching me watching, and the corner of her mouth lifts—the small, private smile she saves for moments when she knows exactly what I'm thinking and wants me to know she knows.
I push off the doorframe and go to her.