Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
“Laurie is too dated,” I insisted as I sat with my back against Nathan’s chest, his hands on my expanding belly.
“I think she’s a great final girl, but I don’t like that name for a baby.
Maybe it could be a middle name.” I tried to picture that then shook my head.
“No, I don’t like it as a middle name either. ”
Nathan let loose a dramatic sigh. We’d been playing this game nightly for two weeks, ever since the doctor had confirmed our baby’s sex.
We were having a girl. Since Bree and Brody were gearing up to welcome one of their own—the Bates and Cooper babies were going to be the best of friends, I just knew it—things had turned exciting in our little circle of the world.
“You’re being difficult,” he complained, his fingers playing with the rings on my finger. His mother’s ring was back where it had started, after taking a vacation for a grand total of three months after we’d left the camping retreat. That was how long it took Nathan to propose for real.
He’d done it in fantastic fashion, forcing all of our friends—and the other authors who attended the events on a regular basis—to dress up as various horror movie figures.
Bree had jumped at the chance to be Pennywise.
Hayley, of course, had been more reserved, so she was forced into the Michael Myers jumpsuit.
Brody had declared he wouldn’t play the game, but he’d eventually deigned to let Nathan turn him into Freddy Krueger.
Okay, Nathan hadn’t done it himself. He’d hired a movie-level makeup artist to do it for him. Then he’d positioned them all in Columbia Square, one of our favorite places to drink coffee and people-watch, and gone all out when he asked me to be his forever valentine.
Obviously, I’d said yes.
The wedding happened weeks later—we didn’t see the need to drag things out—in Salem. Our friends made the trip, more than happy to hang out in the place of my birth, and Mom and her friends threw an amazing party that stretched well into the wee hours of the night.
Our home was Savannah, but we returned to Salem once a season to spend two weeks with my mother. Nathan was as in love with the city as I was.
True to his word, Preston II kept a tight leash on his son.
I hadn’t seen or heard from the third Preston since that day at the cabin.
I had no doubt that he was still plotting, but his father wasn’t going to allow him to play that game.
No, Preston II had reined in his son to the point that there were almost no sightings of him on the Boston social media radar. He’d completely disappeared.
Rumor had it his father had forced him to move his real estate business to Tucson, which would be a fate worse than death to Preston. The guy hated anything that wasn’t East Coast snobby. Tucson would have been a kick in the pants to the junior Preston.
I hoped he was choking on the heat.
As for Nathan’s father, he was currently dating a lovely woman named Minnie.
I refused to let Nathan make fun of her name.
She was sweet, and she forced Andrew out of his comfort zone regularly.
He’d been on a cruise with her and a trip to the Galapagos.
He seemed to be living his best life, with regular visits to Savannah mixed in.
I’d never met the father Nathan had been so scarred by, the one he’d grown up with. I absolutely adored the one he’d ended up with.
My mother still wasn’t dating—she said it wasn’t a priority—but I had hope she would find someone before it was all said and done.
Not anybody who wanted to tame her, because Taffy Oakley couldn’t be tamed.
The world wouldn’t be a better place if that happened.
Somebody who embraced her, though, eccentricities and all.
Just like Nathan had embraced me.
Speaking of my husband, as with everything in our relationship, the addition of a new soul had been fast. We hadn’t even been married a year, and we’d both agreed we wanted time together to enjoy being newlyweds.
We hadn’t waited, though. Missing my period had been a surprise.
Confirmation from the doctor had been a bigger surprise—it hadn’t been just the stress of a new deadline after all.
I’d been nervous when I told Nathan. Not afraid or anything—I knew he would go with the flow—but nervous because we weren’t prepared. He’d sold his house, and we were living together in my rental as we searched for the perfect place. We weren’t ready for a baby.
That didn’t stop him from whooping it up when I told him. He pumped his fist and proclaimed himself the most virile man in the world to get past all the birth control.
I just laughed. He was always funny, even when he was a moron, which was quite often.
He told me things would work out. We had time to find a house.
Then, miracle of miracles, the right house had appeared out of nowhere.
It wasn’t quite downtown, but it was only two blocks away.
The house was big, with space enough for a guest room, a joint office, two baby rooms—you know, just in case we wanted a second one—and a huge porch that wrapped around the entire main floor.
The best thing, though, was the backyard, which would allow Nathan to play whatever games he wanted to play with our future children, the first of which was a girl.
I thought telling him I was pregnant way before we were ready would be the worst part. I was wrong. Arguing about names was turning into a tempestuous cycle.
We were going through names of the final girls of our favorite movies to find inspiration. It wasn’t going well.
“What sucks is that the majority of the final girls were named decades ago, and all the names are dated,” he complained, his fingers dancing over my stomach.
I was just easing out of the first trimester—thankfully, the morning puking was gone—and we were preparing to throw a party to tell all our friends. They were still in the dark.
We wanted to have a name to attach to the announcement. So far, that wasn’t going well.
“That is a problem,” I agreed. “I’m not screaming for a full twenty-four hours to push out a Nancy.” I cringed just thinking about it. “I want something cool and hip.”
“You do realize that people who use the word ‘hip’ aren’t actually hip, right?”
I ignored him. “What about Sally?”
“From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?” He cocked his head, considering. “Sally Cooper.” He tried the name on for size. “That doesn’t feel right.”
“No,” I agreed, making a growling noise deep in my throat. “What about Erin, from the remake?”
“Pass. What about Alice?”
“From the fourth A Nightmare on Elm Street?”
He nodded.
“Pass. She’ll get teased about Wonderland too much.”
“Good point.” His fingers danced across my belly, which was mostly still flat. I’d tried forcing him to tell me he could see the bulge a few times, but he refused. He said he’d been trained never to comment on a woman’s weight, and it was one rule he followed religiously.
“What about Ginny?”
That was from the second Friday the 13th, the one Jason made his first appearance in. “Absolutely not.” I vehemently shook my head. “What about Lila?”
“Ooh. From Psycho.” He considered it for several seconds. “Let’s put that on the maybe list.”
I nodded.
“What about Sue? Or Susan, I guess.”
I made a face. “What’s that from?”
“Carrie.”
“No. I don’t really consider that a horror movie as much as a traumatic coming-of-age story.”
“That’s fair.” He combed his fingers through my hair. “Wendy is out, right?”
“I love The Shining, but Wendy’s character is… very loud.”
“And you think we’ll be dooming ourselves if we name our baby after a loud character?”
“I do think that.”
“Fair enough.” He tightened his arms around me. “Wait,” he said after almost a full moment of silence. I’d been coasting on the beat of his heart and almost close to dozing.
“Hmm?” I forced myself awake.
“I have it,” he insisted.
He didn’t have it. There was no way. We’d been playing this game for far too long.
“Sidney,” he insisted.
I stilled. I didn’t hate that name. “You’re not going to want to name her something like Sidney Ellen Ripley Cooper, are you?”
“As fantastic of a name as that is, I have the middle name too.”
Now I was doubly suspicious. “What’s the middle name?”
He held up his hand, as if reading the name off a marquee. “Sidney Abigail Oakley Cooper.”
That was quite the mouthful, and yet it had a certain ring to it.
“Maybe she’ll like to play with her food too,” he teased, tickling my sides.
I gasped, caught between amusement and eternal happiness. “I kind of like it,” I admitted. “What if she hates horror movies, though?” The thought hadn’t even occurred to me, and now I was panicked at the thought.
“She won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Even if she does, it will be okay.” His voice was soft.
“How do you know that?”
“Because, from the moment I met you, I knew everything was going to be okay.”
There was no stopping my smile. “Are we going to dress her up as a bloody ballerina vampire for her first Halloween?”
“Absolutely.” There was no hesitation when he bobbed his head. “Then we’ll turn her into the teeniest Ghostface killer ever when she’s a toddler and can carry her own fake knife.”
I smiled at the image he was painting. “That sounds unbelievably perfect.”
“Yeah. Just like you and me, right?”
He was joking, but he was perfect for me. “Okay, but we’re going to have to design some really cool announcements to share our big news.”
“Oh, that’s the easy part.”
“What’s the hard part?”
“Not being able to fall in love with you all over again.”
I slapped his hand. “That was schmaltzy.”
“That’s how you make me feel.” He nuzzled in close. “Schmaltzy forever.”
Weirdly, I was right there with him.