Epilogue
"Betty's recipe says a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg, but that's a suggestion, not a rule."
I add another pinch of nutmeg. Lily leans across the counter on her elbows, counting pinches.
"That's three pinches." She holds up fingers. "Three. A quarter teaspoon isn't three pinches."
"Betty puts in more than the recipe card says. I've watched her."
"Then her recipe card needs updating."
"I'll let you tell her that."
Lily narrows her eyes. She's considering it. Betty will no doubt hear about this by Monday. The kitchen smells like cinnamon and butter. Flour covers the counter, the mixing bowl, both my forearms, and the front of my shirt where I wiped my hands before I remembered I own a towel.
Colt's contentment moves through the bond, warm and unhurried. The pulse that means he's in the other room with his coffee, watching us through the doorway and pretending he's not.
"Dad's staring again," Lily says without looking up from the dough.
"He's supervising." I fold butter into the mixture.
"He's not helping. That's just staring. It's weird."
"I live here." Colt's voice comes from the doorway.
His mug lands on the counter beside me. He drops a kiss on Lily's head, which she tolerates, and his hand finds the small of my back before he reaches past me for the cinnamon. His fingers brush the claiming mark through my collar.
I've had six months of this.
My books arrived in fourteen boxes. Colt built shelves along the hallway and the living room and Lily's bedroom.
Lily organized them by genre, rearranged twice, then made labels with the label maker she talked Colt into buying because, her words, the spines aren't enough context.
Most evenings go the same way: Lily doing homework at the kitchen table, Colt across from her with the club's financials spread in front of him, me in the window seat with whatever I pulled from the library that week.
The quiet in this house holds three people now.
The bond works the same way—not dramatic, not overwhelming. His heartbeat runs beneath mine when I roll toward him at four a.m. Dry amusement flickers when he reads a passage he likes and tries not to react. Protectiveness flares, orc and ancient, when Lily's voice carries from another room.
On the mantle, Maren's photo hasn't moved.
I didn't touch it. I wouldn't. Two months ago, Lily set a second frame beside it without saying a word: the three of us at the farmer's market, me squinting into the sun, Colt with his arm around my shoulders and Lily in front, mid-laugh, holding a bag of peaches she refused to share.
Lily's phone buzzes. Six weeks ago, Colt handed it to her for her thirteenth birthday and told her it came with conditions. She of course agreed to them all and has followed them to the letter since.
She reads the screen and holds it up.
"Betty says a quarter teaspoon is what she writes for people who don't know better." She looks at me. "She also says hi."
"Told you."
"Betty's not a peer-reviewed source."
"She's been doing this longer than we've been alive. That counts."
Lily considers this and folds the phone into her back pocket. I slide the pan into the oven and set the timer.
Through the window above the sink, October has turned Nightfall Cove gold and copper, the trees along the ridge going rusty in the morning light. The Harvest Festival starts in two hours, and Lily mapped our route through every booth on a piece of graph paper she taped to the fridge.
The library held steady through summer. The photography workshop runs monthly now. Holly teaches, I organize, Lily assists, which in practice means Lily corrects Holly's filing system and Holly pretends she doesn't notice.
Lily comes to the library after school most days now.
She claimed the back table near the reference section—her backpack on the left chair, her water bottle on the right, and anyone who moves either gets corrected.
Last Tuesday she walked a patron to the biography section before I could get off the phone.
Correct shelf, correct row. She sat back down without looking at me, but her chin lifted the way Colt's does when he's pleased with himself and won't say so.
I filed the police report in April. The letters stopped. No more envelopes in the mail slot, no more unsigned notes tucked under my windshield wipers or men standing in the parking lot. And the library board hasn't fielded anymore complaints about my personal life since spring.
The Harvest Festival fills the parking lot behind Main Street every October: hay bales, string lights, pumpkins stacked in pyramids that Reeve keeps trying to dismantle with his bare hands.
Knox parks himself on a bale near the cider stand, watching Reeve plow through gourds twice his size.
Sarah hands a cup of cider to a customer and catches Knox's eye across the lot, the look she gives him, hands on her hips, flour still on her apron, says the toddler better not come back covered in mud again.
Knox grins. Reeve face-plants into a pumpkin.
Knox scoops him up one-handed and brushes dirt off his overalls without missing a beat.
Finn and Jess stand near the pie table. Their son rides Jess's hip: four months old, born in June, with Finn's jaw and Jess's stare and a tiny leather vest Rex bought him with PROSPECT stitched across the back.
Finn keeps one hand on the baby's head, his palm covering it, and the other on Jess's waist. Jess eats a slice of pecan pie with her free hand and tells Finn to stop hovering, Finn says he's not hovering, he's providing structural support, and Jess shoves him hard enough that he has to catch his pie plate.
Garrett's carved bookends sell out before noon.
He works the craft booth in his usual silence, nodding at customers, his hands folded on the table.
Nina next to him with her palm resting on the curve of her belly, the horn pendant at her throat—a piece of Garrett she carries everywhere. Her free hand covers both of his.
Rex and Holly run a photography station near the entrance. Holly elbows Rex until he stops scanning the crowd and puts his arm around her. She snaps a self-timer shot of the two of them with the grin Rex will spend the rest of the afternoon pretending embarrasses him.
Betty and Gerald share a bench near the pie judging table, her hand on his arm, his hat off for once.
Colt brings me a cider and I lean against his side.
Lily breaks away to help Holly, and for a minute I stand in the middle of it—the club, the town, autumn light cutting low across the lot and turning the hay bales gold.
People I've known for six months alongside people I've known for years, and the orc beside me whose heartbeat runs steady beneath mine.
A woman I don't recognize cuts through the crowd, recorder in one hand and notebook in the other.
She's working, not browsing. She stops at Garrett's booth and asks a question that makes Nina's hand tighten on Garrett's arm.
She moves to the cider stand and pulls Sarah aside, and whatever she asks earns Sarah's polite smile, the measured one that gives nothing beyond what's offered.
Bruiser stands at the far end of the lot with his arms folded, horns throwing long shadows across the gravel. He watches the woman without moving.
Through the bond, Colt's focus tightens.
"Who's that?" I ask.
Colt watches Bruiser watching the woman. His cider pauses halfway to his mouth.
"Trouble."
Lily negotiates bedtime from nine-thirty to nine-forty-five, which becomes ten because Colt reads to her and neither of them keeps an eye on the time.
The tradition started with Maren. Colt kept it going, nine years and counting.
Tonight it's The Secret Garden. I lean in the doorway and listen to his voice, low and unhurried, giving every character its own cadence because the former English lit professor can't help it.
Lily curls under her quilt with her back against the headboard and her eyes half-closed.
She'll say she's too old for this if anyone asks, but she'll never give it up.
He reaches the part where Mary finds the door in the wall. The garden sat locked for ten years, everything dormant underneath. And Mary pushes through. The green waits there, alive the whole time.
Colt closes the book and Lily rolls toward the wall without opening her eyes. He switches off the lamp.
He steps into the hallway and pulls the door half-closed behind him. He leans against the wall next to me.
"She's out."
"Before or after the garden opened?"
"After." His mouth pulls to one side. "She fights sleep past the good parts."
We drift down the hallway. I pick up my book from the arm of the couch—Colt's copy of Persuasion, the one he pressed into my hands in spring with an inscription on the title page in his tight, careful handwriting: You are not a second choice. You are the next chapter.
A coffee ring marks the back cover, and I refuse to feel guilty about it.
Colt drops onto the couch beside me. His arm goes around my shoulders, and I lean into him. His heartbeat picks up in my chest, slow and steady.
I close the book and get up to set it on the shelf Colt built, between the Le Guin and the Austen.
Three coats on the hooks by the door. Two photos on the mantle. One family.