Epilogue
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“I’m on the third website design for the company in two years,” Ava said as she moved the text around the screen to give the front page more room for options.
“It’s because you’re crushing it.” Lucas leaned over her shoulder and nibbled her ear.
She giggled.
In the four years since leaving McGregor Creative, she’d not only built her mother’s handbag business into a profitable national brand, but she’d brought on another fourteen companies who wanted her to do the same for them.
Ava had opened Our Origins Creative six months after returning to Nashville, and given the demand and her reputation, she’d hit the ground running.
Lucas pulled off his dirty work boots and set them in the mud room of the farmhouse they’d been slowly renovating. He clicked on the radio, an old jazz station—the only station they could get on an antenna out there.
Lucas was still working at Vanderbilt, but he’d dropped to part-time to begin building Heaven’s Roots Farm to Table, their farm specializing in organic produce and one of Our Origins Creative’s early clients.
They supplied most organic markets in the middle Tennessee area, with projected growth in the coming year.
“Your mom said she’d be here at two,” he said.
They were celebrating her mother’s latest expansion of her handbag line to four major retailers.
Cottage Bags had a forty-five percent increase in revenue over the last year, with a sixty-two percent increase in e-commerce sales due to the optimization of a new website that Ava designed, as well as the influencer campaign she initiated to reach a younger demographic.
Ava checked the clock on her laptop. “That’s in half an hour.”
“Yep.” He walked over to her, took her hand, and kissed the finger with her wedding ring.
They’d had a simple ceremony, with the pastor from the little chapel presiding, on her mother’s deck by the lake.
Ava was sure her dad would be watching from anywhere they decided to get married, but she felt as if he were closer to them on the lake, so they’d tied the knot in the spring, surrounded by fresh flowers.
They’d released butterflies and, at the very end, in her white dress and Lucas in his tuxedo, they’d each cast a rod for her dad to the cheers of her mother, Dorothy, Cammy, some new clients-turned-friends, and a few of the churchgoers from the chapel.
Lucas took both her hands now and pulled her from her chair. “Stop working then so you can get ready.” He wrapped his arms around her.
“Oh! You’re all dirty,” she said, wriggling away from him as he pawed at her, making kissing noises .
But then, all of a sudden, her mother’s words floated back to her. If I’d known how little time we’d have, I’d have danced with him in his soiled clothes and not cared a bit.
That was the thing about life; every minute mattered because no one knew how few or how many minutes they had. Ava wrapped her arms around Lucas and kissed his lips as they danced in the kitchen, smack in the middle of their forever.