Epilogue
MIA
The following spring, and the beach house doesn’t feel borrowed anymore. It feels like mine, in the way a place only starts to feel like yours once you’ve cried in every room of it and laughed in most of them twice as hard.
I transferred to a campus forty minutes up the coast for senior year — close enough to keep living here, far enough that nobody at school connects the dots between my last name and the man who drops me off some mornings on his way to a job site.
Nobody asks questions there. Nobody knows enough about my life to have opinions about it, which after last summer feels less like isolation and more like relief.
My mother hasn’t called since the day she drove away from this house.
Months of silence now, longer than any stretch we’ve gone without speaking since the divorce, and some days it aches in a way I don’t let myself examine too closely.
Other days I catch myself grateful for the quiet — no arguments to brace for, no accusations to defend against, only the absence of a fight neither of us is ready to have yet.
My aunt has called, though, quietly, carefully, a bridge nobody asked her to build but one I’m grateful for anyway.
She doesn’t lecture. She doesn’t ask me to justify anything.
She asks how I’m doing, tells me small things about my mother — that she’s fine, that she’s working too much, that she asks about me even when she pretends not to — and lets me fill in the rest at my own pace.
It’s not reconciliation. It’s not even close.
But it’s a door left open a crack, and some nights that’s enough to fall asleep on.
I’ve stopped waiting for permission that isn’t coming. It turns out that’s easier than I expected, once you actually stop.
Grant’s construction business has picked up two new contracts since summer, big enough that he’s hired on a project manager to handle the sites he can’t be at personally — which means more mornings like this one, both of us up early, him at the counter with bids spread out like a battlefield map, me making coffee in a kitchen that’s stopped feeling like his and started feeling like ours.
He’s different at home than he is on a job site, I’ve noticed — softer, less clipped, the version of him he apparently only lets a handful of people see.
His crew respects him because he’s demanding and fair in equal measure.
I love him because underneath that demanding fairness is a man who still can’t quite believe his own luck some mornings, catching himself staring at me across the kitchen like he’s checking I’m still real.
The guys still come around most weekends during football season, though nothing since draft weekend has matched the chaos of that first one.
Jax posts constantly. Brooks calls twice a week to discuss my portfolio, which is an excuse to check in disguised as financial advice.
Tate shows up unannounced with groceries he insists we needed, which we usually did.
Grant’s been traveling more for work lately, new contracts pulling him to job sites an hour up the coast some mornings, and I’ve gotten used to a quieter version of these months than the whirlwind that opened them.
It suits me. Gives me room to notice things I might have missed in the noise of that first summer — like the third morning in a row I wake up nauseous, and I know before I know.
I drive to the drugstore before Grant’s even awake, the town still quiet in the early light, buy a test with hands that won’t stay steady, and sit in my car in the parking lot afterward staring at two pink lines that don’t leave any room for interpretation.
I don’t panic. That surprises me more than the lines do. I sit there, engine off, windows cracked, and I laugh — not the nervous kind, not the kind that’s covering for something scarier underneath. Happy. Completely, uncomplicatedly happy, in a way I didn’t know I had room for until it arrived.
I think about the version of myself who sat in this same parking lot three years ago, right after the divorce blew the family apart, certain her whole life was one long series of things happening to her instead of things she chose.
That girl wouldn’t recognize this moment.
Wouldn’t recognize the woman sitting in this car doing math about due dates instead of rent, planning a life instead of just surviving one.
I drive home, windows down, radio loud, and I don’t cry once the whole way — not from fear, not from anything except the strange, overwhelming gratitude of getting exactly what I didn’t know I wanted until it found me.
Grant’s at the kitchen counter when I get there, coffee cooling beside a spread of construction bids he’s frowning at like they personally offended him, reading glasses pushed up into his hair the way he does when a number isn’t adding up the way he wants.
I set the test on top of the blueprint without a word.
He looks down. Goes still.
He sets his coffee down carefully, like his hands need a job while the rest of him catches up. Then he looks at me, and his face does something I’ve only seen once before — on the beach, the night my mother left, raw and unguarded in a way he doesn’t let many people see.
I think about the “every drop stays” he used to murmur against my throat, every claim he laid down that weekend and every weekend since, the whole patient architecture of a promise he never said out loud until this exact moment when it became real between us.
He wanted this. Maybe before I did. Maybe since the very first time he finished inside me on that first night and I felt him hold still after, like he was memorizing the possibility even then.
He picks me up before I can say anything, hands under my thighs, and I wrap my legs around him on instinct, laughing again, that same uncomplicated happiness bubbling back up.
He doesn’t say congratulations. “Marry me.”
“Obviously.” It comes out before I can dress it up into something more elegant, and he laughs — a real laugh, surprised out of him — and sets me down only long enough to pull open the nightstand drawer in the bedroom, where a ring’s been sitting for exactly a month, waiting.
“You planned this.”
“I planned the draft weekend. I planned the beach house.” He slides the ring onto my finger like he’s been rehearsing the motion for weeks, which, knowing him, he probably has. “I plan everything, Mia. You just happened to beat me to the announcement.”
“That’s on-brand for you.” “I’m aware.”
We end up on the beach at sunset, our spot, the one that’s been ours since the night everything changed here.
The gulf is flat and gold, just like it was that first night, except nothing about tonight feels like a repeat of anything — it feels like the place where the story actually started paying itself off.
His hand finds my stomach, resting there like he’s already memorizing the shape of something that hasn’t happened yet.
“Scared?” he asks.
“Not even a little.” I lean back into his chest, ring catching the last of the light. “You?”
“Terrified.” He says it plainly, no shame in the admission. “In the good way. The way that means it matters.”
“You didn’t seem terrified in the kitchen.”
“I’ve been terrified since draft weekend. I’ve only gotten better at not showing it.” His arms tighten around me, slow and certain. “The first time you sat down at that draft table and refused to leave, I
already knew I was going to end up right here. Married. A family. Everything I told myself I’d already had once and wasn’t allowed to want a second time.”
“You’re allowed.”
“I know that now.” He presses his mouth to my hair. “I didn’t always.”
We sit like that a long while, the sky sliding from gold to something deeper, stars starting to prick through overhead. A pelican cuts low across the water, hunting the last light for dinner. Somewhere
behind us, up at the house, a phone buzzes — probably Jax, probably something about next year’s draft order, already planning twelve months ahead the way he always does.
“We should tell them,” I say.
“Tomorrow.” Grant’s voice is warm against my ear. “Tonight I want this to be only ours. No audience, no group chat, no Jax turning it into a toast before either of us has even processed it.”
“Fair.”
“They’re going to be thrilled, you know. Tate’s going to cry. Brooks will pretend he isn’t but he will. Jax will make it about himself somehow within the first ten seconds.”
“Sounds about right.”
I’m twenty-one, pregnant, engaged to the man who used to be my stepfather, and I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.
If you’d told me a year ago — sitting alone in a beach house avoiding my mother’s calls, licking wounds from a relationship that never deserved the effort I gave it — that this is where I’d end up, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it.
I believe it now. Every single word.
“Hey.” Grant’s voice is quiet against my hair. “Thank you. For choosing this. All of it, even the parts that cost you.”
“I didn’t choose it because it was easy.” I turn my face up to look at him. “I chose it because it was true. Same as I told my mother.”
He kisses me, slow, the gulf rolling gold and endless in front of us, and somewhere behind that kiss I feel the ring on my finger and his hand on my stomach and the whole enormous shape of the life we’re building, one deliberate choice at a time, exactly the way he plans everything.
I think about that first Friday morning again — coffee spilled down a jersey I wasn’t supposed to still be wearing, four men walking through a door I could have locked, a version of myself who almost checked the calendar and almost said no to this entire weekend before it started.
I think about how close I came to missing all of it, and how certain I am now that I never would have, not really.
Some choices only look like accidents in the moment you’re making them.
Looking back, this one always feels inevitable.
“What are you thinking about?” Grant asks, feeling me go quiet against him. “That first morning. The coffee. How close I came to almost not being here at all.”
“You were always going to be here.” He says it with the same flat certainty he says everything, the tone that used to unsettle me and now feels like the safest sound in the world. “I only had to wait for you to catch up to it, which took a good deal longer than I expected.”
“That’s arrogant.”
“It’s accurate.” He kisses the top of my head. “Same thing, most days.”
I laugh, and the sound of it carries out over the water, and up at the house the porch light flickers on automatically the way it does every evening at this hour, marking the beginning of a life neither of us planned and both of us, somehow, ended up exactly right for.