Epilogue #2
“I’m not good at words,” he says. “I never have been. But I’m good at building things. Things that last.” He pulls out a small wooden box—hand-carved, I realize, with intricate patterns I recognize from his furniture. “So I built this. For you.”
He opens the box.
Inside, nestled on a bed of velvet, is a ring. Simple, elegant—a diamond flanked by two smaller stones, set in a band that looks almost like woven branches.
“I made the band,” he says quietly. “Moira helped me find the stones. I wanted it to be... you. Something beautiful and strong and completely one-of-a-kind.”
I’m crying. Of course I’m crying.
“Finn—”
“I know it’s fast. I know we’ve only been doing this for a year, and that’s nothing compared to—“
“Yes.”
He stops. Blinks. “I didn’t ask yet.”
“Then ask.”
He laughs—that same bright, unexpected sound that still catches me off guard every time. Then he drops to one knee on the porch of the ranger station, holding the ring box like it contains his heart.
Which, I suppose, it does.
“Marcella Campos. Will you marry me?”
“Yes.” I’m laughing and crying at the same time, hauling him to his feet so I can kiss him properly. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”
The ring slides onto my finger like it was always meant to be there. Because it was. Because he made it for me, with his own hands, the same way he’s made a space for me in his life and his home and his heart.
He’s holding me, both of us shaking, and I realize—this is the moment. The moment I’ve been waiting for without knowing I was waiting. The moment when the last wall finally comes down.
“Finn.”
“Yeah?”
I pull back just enough to look at him. His face is open, hopeful, still slightly disbelieving that I said yes.
This man who thought he didn’t deserve love.
Who pushed me away because he was afraid of losing me.
Who drove through a city he hates and fought through a year of therapy and learned to ask for help when he needed it.
This man who has said “I love you” a thousand times and never once demanded I say it back.
“I love you.”
The words come out steady. Sure. Nothing like the terrified whisper I always imagined.
Finn goes completely still.
“Say that again.”
“I love you.” And now I’m crying harder, but I’m also laughing, because his face—God, his face.
“I’ve wanted to say it for months. But I needed to be sure.
I needed to know this was real, that you weren’t going to leave, that I wasn’t going to wake up one day and find out I’d made the same mistake again. ”
“And now?” His voice is barely a whisper.
“Now I know.” I cup his face in my hands, this beautiful, broken, brave man who put himself back together so he could love me properly.
“I love you, Finn McGrath. All of you. The broken parts and the healing parts and everything in between. I love the way you build things and the way you burn pancakes and the way you count your breaths when the world gets too loud. I love that you came after me even when you were terrified. I love that you keep trying, every single day, even when it’s hard. ”
He kisses me—deep and desperate and tasting like tears.
“I’ve been waiting a year to hear that,” he says against my lips.
“I know. I’m sorry it took so long.”
“Don’t be.” He pulls back, and his eyes are shining. “It was worth the wait.”
Behind us, through the window, I hear Coralyn shriek with excitement. Moira is probably filming the whole thing for blackmail purposes later.
I don’t care.
I’m engaged to the love of my life, standing on the porch of a converted ranger station that I once broke into by accident, wearing a ring carved by hands that learned to build beautiful things because destruction was too painful to bear.
Wrong cabin. Wrong timing. Wrong everything.
And somehow, impossibly, perfectly right.
We get married six months later, in the clearing beside the ranger station where the summer wildflowers bloom.
It’s small—just Coralyn and Moira standing up with us, Elissa and a handful of friends from town filling the handmade benches Finn built for the occasion.
The officiant is a retired judge Moira knows from the gallery, and the reception is a potluck because I insisted on cooking at least half of it myself.
Finn cries when he sees me walking toward him in my dress. I cry when I see him crying. Coralyn cries because she’s Coralyn, and even Moira wipes her eyes when she thinks no one is looking.
The vows are simple. We wrote them together, sitting on the couch in the ranger station, arguing over word choices until we collapsed into laughter.
“I promise to try,” Finn says, holding my hands in his. “Every day. Even when it’s hard. Even when I’m scared. I promise to choose you, choose us, for the rest of my life.”
“I promise to be too much,” I say back. “Too loud, too passionate, too everything. And I promise to keep choosing you—all of you, the broken parts and the healing parts and everything in between. Forever.”
When he kisses me, our friends cheer. The mountains echo it back, like even the wilderness is celebrating.
Later, after the food is eaten and the dancing is done and our guests have said their goodbyes, Finn and I stand on the porch of our home, watching the stars come out.
“Mrs. McGrath,” he says, testing the words.
“Mr. Campos-McGrath,” I counter. “We haven’t decided yet.”
“We have time.”
We do. We have all the time in the world.
I lean into my husband—my husband—and smile at the universe that brought me to the wrong cabin and the right man.
“I love you,” I say, because I can now. Because the words come easily, finally, after a year of holding them back.
“I love you too.” He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “Even when you’re being too much.”
“Especially then?”
“Especially then.”
Sometimes the best things in life come from the worst wrong turns.
I should know.
I’m living proof.
Thank you so much for reading Wrong Cabin, Right Mountain Man. I hope you enjoyed Marcella and Finn’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it.