Epilogue
Sophie Swann stared up at the seatbelt sign with dismay. ‘I hate this so much.’
‘I know,’ Mike said. ‘Flying is unnatural. I’ve read your book. But you’re going to do it anyway because you’re a good mum and you love your family.’
‘I know.’ Even though her palms were sweating, Mike was still holding her hand. She loved him for that alone.
‘We could do the boat again,’ Mike offered with an evil grin. ‘There’s still time to leave the plane. They haven’t shut the cockpit door.’
‘No, god , no.’ Sophie had taken a ship when she’d first moved back home to London. It turned out that, while she wasn’t afraid of ships, she hated cruises.
Mike cupped her face in his hands. ‘Don’t think about the plane. Just keep doing your grounding exercises and know that I’m going to be sitting right here the entire time.’
‘Okay,’ she said with a nod.
‘If it helps, focus on what happens after we land.’
‘We go to Tom and Marisa’s?’
‘Well, I was thinking of the hotel where we’re going to take nice, hot showers, and then I was going to see if we could get hotel security called on us in this hotel, too.’
Sophie blushed. ‘Never again. I couldn’t look that security guard in the face.’
Mike stared at her innocently. ‘They just wanted to see if you were okay. There’d been all this moaning and for so long, too.’
She slapped his chest with her palm. ‘I’m serious. We can never go back there.’
‘I don’t know,’ Mike said. ‘I thought they were nice. The guard even brought me that ice bucket with the Gatorade in it as an apology for the interruption.’
Sophie groaned, thumping her head against his chest.
‘And I did need the electrolytes.’
‘I really hate you right now.’
‘Maybe,’ Mike said. ‘But you weren’t thinking about the plane, were you?’
She blinked in surprise. ‘No, I guess I wasn’t.’
He grinned at her. ‘Don’t worry. I plan on distracting you the entire flight.’
‘What else could you possibly distract me with?’
He leaned back against his seat, taking her hand and absently playing with her fingers. ‘I was going to remind you of the fun things you have to look forward to – lunch with Kenzie. It will be nice to see your editor again, right? And talk about the new project?’
‘Right,’ Sophie said, closing her eyes. Her book, Swan Dive , hadn’t been a runaway bestseller, but it had sold, and enough that her publisher wanted another book. Sophie was happy with that, and it would be nice to see Kenzie in person. ‘What else?’
‘Dinner tonight with your family, Manny and Stanley Poochie.’
‘I can’t wait.’
‘Wednesday, I’m taking you salsa dancing and to the carousel.’
She smiled at him. ‘Are you recreating our first date?’
‘Yes. I’m trying to redeem myself.’
‘Pretty sure you did that last time we went.’ The third time Mike had taken her to the carousel, he’d proposed. Sophie hadn’t thought she’d marry again, but with Mike . . . it felt right with Mike. ‘You didn’t panic and shove me into a car that time.’
‘No, but I did sit in someone’s dropped ice cream cone.’
‘I forgot about that.’ She hadn’t. The ice cream had been chocolate. The placement on his trousers had been . . . unfortunate.
‘Oh no you didn’t. You took a photo. It’s favourited on your phone. I’ve seen it.’ He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. ‘But I appreciate the lie.’
‘I wanted to document our engagement. Is that so wrong?’ She batted her eyes at him and he smiled.
‘Brat.’
‘You love me,’ she said, before bringing them back on-topic. ‘Okay, so Wednesday we go to the carousel, and you try to leave with your dignity intact.’
‘What’s left of it.’ Mike sighed. He leaned back into the seat and closed his eyes. ‘I swear, any time I go out with you, something like that happens. I’m a little shocked you married me.’
She nudged him with her shoulder. ‘I like adventure and comic relief.’
He grinned.
Sophie waited for a few seconds before she lost patience and poked him.
He laughed. ‘Do you want me to tell you about Thursday?’
‘Yes.’
‘On Thursday , after I feed you and keep you in bed as long as I can . . .’
She glared at him, which only earned her another laugh. ‘Get to the best part.’
‘I happen to think that last part was pretty good.’
She continued (mock) glaring.
‘Fine. On Thursday, we go over to Tom and Marisa’s flat where you’re going to bask in the joy of holding our granddaughter for a little while, and then we’re going to help them pack up their flat.’
‘That’s good, but it’s not the best part.’
The plane started to move then, all of the machinery making noise that made her shoulders want to hitch around her ears.
Mike leaned in close to her so she could hear him over the noise. ‘The best part is that on Monday, we ship off their stuff and they come back to the hotel with us and then on Tuesday we get back on this plane and take your family home. What do you think of that, Sophie Tremblay?’
‘Our family,’ she corrected automatically.
He smiled his crooked smile. ‘Our family.’
It was weird having a new name after all these years. She hadn’t wanted to keep Swann, though she still had it as her pen name. For a bit, she’d considered taking her maiden name again. Mike had told her he didn’t care what name she used as long as she came home to him at night.
In the end, she’d gone with Tremblay. Much like marrying Mike, it had felt like the right move for her.
‘That’s not the best part,’ Sophie said.
Mike pulled back, confused. ‘It’s not?’
She shook her head. ‘No, the best part is that on Friday, Edie has invited us all to dinner, and your family will be there, and my family will be there, and then all of my absolutely favourite people will be in one place. That’s the best part.’
‘You’re right,’ Mike said. ‘My mistake.’ He kissed her then, soft and sweet. ‘You know what the best part is right now?’
‘No.’
‘It’s that we’re in the air and you didn’t notice,’ Mike said. ‘It’s that we get to spend the rest of this flight talking about all the good things in our lives right now, and even though it’s a long flight, we’ll still have things left over when we step off this plane. Our happiness will be so apparent and disgusting that people will want to throw things at us.’
Sophie tilted her head to the side. ‘How long do you think it would take us to list all the good things?’
Mike frowned, thinking. ‘Forever, probably.’
‘That’s a long time.’
‘The thing is,’ Mike said, ‘is that we’ll keep making new ones as we go, so the list is sort of regenerative.’
‘We’ll probably have a lot of bad things as well,’ Sophie said. ‘Just because that’s how life works.’
‘We don’t need to list those, though.’
‘We don’t?’
‘Why would we want to waste our time on the bad things? They’ll happen, we’ll deal with them and move on.’ Mike shook his head. ‘We only have this one life, and I don’t intend to waste it. I’ve already spent too many years closed off.’
Sophie thought about that as she watched him. She didn’t think she’d ever get tired of his face – the blue-green of his eyes, the curve of his lip. ‘Do you count those years as wasted, then?’
‘No,’ Mike said. ‘Not any more. Because now I know I was waiting for you.’
She snuggled into him and Mike put an arm around her, tugging her close as they tried their best to get comfortable on the plane.
‘You know,’ Sophie said after a minute, ‘I think I’m going to have to slightly revise my position on planes.’
Mike peered down at her. ‘Are you feeling well? Have you been replaced by some sort of pod person?’ He held up two fingers. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
She poked one of his ticklish spots. ‘I was saying that if I hadn’t got on that first, horrible flight to New York, none of this would ever have happened. I never would have met you. I wouldn’t have my book deal. My kids might not be moving home. None of it would have happened without that first plane trip.’
‘I don’t think that’s entirely true,’ Mike said.
‘You don’t?’
‘I think the popularity of your blog would have brought you to someone’s attention at some point, and with Marisa not having much family besides us, the odds were high that they would end up moving closer to you at some point.’
Sophie scrunched up her face. ‘But what about us?’
Mike didn’t hesitate. ‘We would have found each other.’
Sophie was surprised at how confidently he said that. ‘You think so?’
‘I don’t believe much in fate,’ Mike said, ‘but I do believe that some things are inevitable, and for me, you, Sophie Tremblay, are inevitable .’
She laughed. ‘I thought I was a choice?’
He looked at her, his expression perplexed. ‘It’s not really a choice when it’s always the same answer. The answer is always you.’ He shrugged. ‘In light of that, what choice is there?’
Sophie wasn’t sure how to respond to that except to give him another kiss, tell him she loved him, and to spend the rest of the flight discussing their inevitable future.
Together. Always together.