Epilogue
Five years later
Max
‘We have company,’ Dylan murmurs against my mouth.
I continue kissing her, pulling her closer by the waist and smiling at her little surprised huff. She laughs and presses against
me for a moment, swimsuit slick against my bare chest, before running a hand through my sodden hair as she pulls away from
my face to say, ‘I’m serious. Look.’
A sigh escapes me and I turn to find we’re being watched by a tiny brunette child with wild curls and brown eyes magnified
by pink-rimmed glasses.
‘Sorry,’ Finn says from behind us, scooping her up in his arms, a giant bag slung over one shoulder and a towel over the other.
‘She has no concept of personal space.’
‘No idea where she gets that from,’ Ava says flatly, sidestepping us and laying her towel on the sand of a very familiar beach.
‘Wait, happy birthday Dyl!’
‘Happy birthday!’ Finn calls, setting Phoebe on the ground and launching himself at Dylan to give her a hug, unbothered by
her damp swimsuit.
He releases her to help Ava set up their stuff and Dylan grins at me, a faint blush at her cheeks from the attention. All these years later and that smile still does funny things to my insides.
‘The last of us to turn thirty,’ Ava sighs, squinting in the morning sunshine. Finn hands her a pair of sunglasses before
she’s even taken another breath. ‘Well. Apart from The Accident.’
‘How many times . . .’ Finn murmurs, covering Phoebe’s unbothered ears. ‘You can’t call her that.’
‘She’s barely sentient, it’s okay.’
‘She’s almost two!’
‘Fine, The Surprise,’ Ava amends, setting the sunglasses on her nose. ‘Anyway, thirty–how does it feel? Any revelations or sudden desires to
do something drastic to your hair?’
As I grab my camera from my bag, I remember how five years ago, on her twenty-fifth birthday, up in a cabin not far from this
very spot, I asked Dylan how she felt about turning a year older. The same, she’d said back then.
Dylan squeezes my hand and leads us to our towels as she replies, ‘It feels like everything is exactly as it should be.’
She’s right, of course. We’re in the right place, doing the right things. I aim my camera to capture her sitting serenely
on the sand. It’s in my hands more often than my phone, nowadays. I’ve mostly gone back to my roots, even if it doesn’t get
the traction my other stuff used to.
I save my longer, bigger trips for when Dylan can join me, usually in the colder months when the café isn’t as busy and she’s
comfortable leaving it in the hands of her staff. I’m still doing what I love, but I move a little slower than I used to.
It’s a happy, healthy medium.
‘Sorry we couldn’t join you on your morning swim,’ Ava says in a bland tone that implies she is not sorry at all. ‘You can
blame Phoebe Monroe.’
Over the years, Dylan and I have stuck to our goal to swim wherever we go.
We’ve floated in the Med during a Greek island tour, we’ve taken rubber dinghies down the Rh?ne river, we’ve jumped into Norwegian fjords hand in hand.
And then there was the period of time Dylan lived in Toby’s flat on the coast, which eventually became my home too, and we’d do freezing morning swims just like this one, nothing but the pastel dawn to accompany us.
‘Are you going swimming, Bee?’ I ask.
Phoebe looks at me curiously, then scowls and replies in her little husky voice, ‘No swim.’
I shrug. ‘Fair enough.’
Without a single word exchanged between them, Ava and Finn get to work. Ava lathers suncream on Phoebe’s exposed skin while
Finn hands her some water and tugs a hat on to her head. They operate the same way Dylan and I move through airports and hotels,
the same way we orbit each other in the small house we share barely ten miles from here.
I shuffle closer to Dylan. Her skin is pebbled with goosebumps despite the fact she’s wrapped in a towel, so I dig around
for the spare I packed and drape the extra layer around her shoulders. Her left hand rests on my thigh, a thin silver band
on the ring finger. A promise made six months ago, in the kitchen of our little cottage by the sea.
‘When does your sister get here?’ Ava asks, snapping the lid shut on the suncream and throwing it into the bag with a yawn
she doesn’t even pretend to hide.
I’m exhausted too, but for different reasons. Last night Dylan and I stayed up far too late kicking off her birthday celebrations,
despite knowing how early we’d be waking for our swim. But I don’t mind this kind of tired. It tells me I’ve lived.
‘I told her it was fine for her to come this morning, but she insisted on coming straight from her show last night.’ She sends
a meaningful glance my way and I grin, nodding at her to continue. ‘She ended up catching a ride with Julien, actually, since
he was heading up here anyway.’
Finn stops digging a hole in the sand, a lone curl flopping across his forehead, and asks, ‘Julien, as in, my best friend
Julien?’
‘Yep.’
‘Are he and Tahlia . . . a thing?’ he asks.
‘Not as far as I know,’ Dylan says, although she falters for a second.
‘He’s a really great florist,’ I say.
‘I thought you were keeping your thirtieth small and family only?’ Ava asks, eyes flicking towards her child, who’s taken
the moment of inattention to scoop up a spadeful of sand and lick it. She half-heartedly pulls the spade away and mutters,
‘Stop that, you creature.’
‘We are,’ Dylan says nonchalantly, leaning into me. ‘But he gave us a discount, and he wanted to bring the flowers up himself
so he could set them up and make sure they were perfect.’
‘I’m not really a flowers guy,’ I add. ‘But we definitely need to save your bouquet. Or throw it to someone, maybe?’
‘Ooh,’ Dylan says. ‘Yeah, I think it’d be fun to throw.’
Ava gives up on stopping Phoebe eating sand and her gaze darts between us suspiciously. ‘A bouquet? All the way from London?
For a birthday? That’s not like you.’
‘It’s her thirtieth, Ava,’ Finn says, waving a hand. ‘When in Rome. Or Pembrokeshire, I guess.’
But Ava peers at me, and for a second I believe in twin telepathy, because her mouth drops open and I hear her thoughts clear
as day. You sneaky little shit.
She leans forward in anticipation as Finn looks between the three of us and asks, ‘What’s going on?’
‘We have a thing,’ I begin, the smile in my voice too bright to hide now. ‘Must’ve forgotten to tell you.’ I let the quiet
sit between us for a few moments before Dylan tightens her grip on my hand, and I add, ‘We’re getting married tomorrow.’
Finn gasps, and then he surges across the sand to grab me, squeezing me tight, and the four of us descend into laughter. When
we settle back on to our towels, Phoebe is watching us with a frown.
Finn wipes his eyes and turns to Phoebe to ask, ‘Don’t you just love love?’
She blinks a few times with her cartoon-character eyes and says, ‘No.’
Another laugh splutters out at me at this, and Dylan starts to explain.
‘We haven’t told anyone yet. Except Julien, obviously, and then Tahlia squeezed it out of him during the drive.
Poor man. I’m genuinely shocked she didn’t wake you–she came straight to our cabin squealing the second she arrived. ’
‘How long have you been planning this?’ Finn asks, taking the spade from Phoebe’s outstretched hand and continuing to dig
for her.
‘A few months,’ I begin. ‘We always come back here at least once a year—’
‘Even though you live, like, three seconds away,’ Ava says.
‘It’s romantic,’ Finn argues.
‘When we were talking with David and Patrick about hiring out the cliffside cabins of the resort for Dylan’s thirtieth, they
mentioned they’d just been registered as a wedding venue, and it kind of fell into place from there.’
‘Mum is going to die,’ Ava says. ‘She’s desperate for a wedding. She’s been begging me to marry Finn since the first time she met him.’
‘So have I,’ Finn mutters.
Ava shrugs. ‘I just don’t know if I can commit.’
‘We have a child together.’
‘What makes you so sure she’s yours?’
Phoebe interrupts their bickering to give her toy to Finn and ask, ‘Dinosaur swim?’
Finn’s smile is triumphant, and his eyes stay on Ava while he says to Phoebe, ‘Sure, let’s take him for a swim.’
With that, he takes Phoebe’s hand and stands, but he only makes it a few steps away before he jogs back to plant a kiss on
Ava’s head.
‘Do you want to get married, Ava?’ Dylan asks, as we watch Finn and Phoebe walk to the water’s edge.
’Kinda,’ Ava replies through another yawn. She adds, ‘But only to Finn,’ as if we needed the clarification.
‘So why do you keep saying no when he asks you to marry him?’ I ask. I’ve borne witness to at least three attempted proposals
from Finn, and there’s no way in hell the two of them aren’t stuck together forever.
‘This weekend is about your relationship, not mine,’ Ava says, sliding her sunglasses up on to her head.
Dylan and I exchange a look, and she says, ‘Appease our curiosity. Call it your wedding gift to us.’
‘My wedding gift was introducing the two of you in the first place,’ Ava points out. She pokes at the sand next to her towel
and eventually groans when she realises Dylan and I are waiting for her response. ‘Because I know Finn, and despite my better
judgement, I like him, and the man is desperately, hopelessly romantic. He deserves to know how it feels to be asked. So one
day, I’m going to propose to him instead.’
‘That’s actually adorable,’ I say.
‘Don’t call me adorable,’ she says, lip curling. ‘We’re moving on. How are you not dying at the prospect of a small wedding?
I would’ve thought you’d want a giant, attention-seeking one.’
‘I am, and I do,’ I reply, kissing Dylan on the temple. ‘I’d declare how much I love Dylan to a thousand people, if she’d
let me.’
‘We’ve had to compromise,’ Dylan says. ‘Small wedding with immediate family.’
’Immediate family, plus Jude,’ I amend. ‘Who will be officiating. We felt, considering she was the third wheel for the first
stage of our relationship, she should probably come.’