Epilogue
* * *
Year or so later…
Sloane woke to the soft, insistent fussing coming through the baby monitor on the nightstand, and beside her the bed was already empty, sheets still warm where Draven had been moments before.
She lay still for a second, listening, smiling faintly at the low, steady murmur of his voice carrying down the hall, the particular cadence he used only for their daughter, gentler than anything she’d ever heard from him in a boardroom or even in their earliest months together.
She stayed there another moment, eyes closed, just listening to the shape of his voice through the wall, before finally pushing back the blanket and following the sound.
She padded down the hallway in her robe and found him in the nursery, shirtless in the gray predawn light, six-week-old Aaliyah Elise cradled against his bare chest, her tiny fist curled into the dark hair just below his collarbone.
He paced the room slowly, swaying in that absent, instinctive way new fathers somehow learned within days, murmuring something low about the weather forecast for the day as though she could understand a single word of it.
Sloane stood in the doorway a moment longer than she needed to, simply looking, the way she still sometimes did when she thought he wasn’t paying attention.
“She’s not going to settle for meteorology,” Sloane said softly from the doorway, watching him startle slightly before his expression melted into something unguarded.
“She likes my voice. The content is irrelevant.” He didn’t look away from the baby, adjusting his hold with a careful precision that still sometimes surprised her, this man who’d run a multibillion-dollar company with ruthless efficiency now utterly devoted to perfecting the angle of a swaddle.
“She was awake before I even heard her on the monitor. I think she knows when I leave the room.”
“She’s six weeks old, Draven. She doesn’t know anything yet except that she’s hungry or she’s not.” Sloane crossed the room and pressed a kiss to his shoulder, peering down at their daughter’s scrunched, sleepy face. “Though I’ll admit, she does seem to prefer you most mornings.”
“Smart girl.” He finally looked up at her, something soft and helplessly proud in his expression. “She has excellent taste.”
Sloane laughed, low and warm, and reached out to brush her finger along Aaliyah’s impossibly small hand, watching the tiny fingers curl reflexively around hers.
Six weeks in and she still found herself occasionally stunned by the whole of it, the fact that this particular, specific child existed because of one reckless, glittering night on a rooftop neither of them had planned for.
She thought, not for the first time, about how strange it was that the worst night of her life and the best one had ended up tied together this way.
The wedding that fell apart, and the marriage that hadn’t.
She didn’t flinch from the memory anymore the way she once had.
It was simply a closed chapter now, something that had happened to a younger version of her rather than a story she was still living inside.
She’d spent months bracing for some version of this story to collapse, for the ground to shift the way it always had before, and instead she’d ended up here, in a nursery in Orlando, watching her husband sway gently with their daughter against his chest like the rest of the world had simply stopped mattering.
Downstairs, the smell of coffee and something frying drifted up through the open staircase, and Sloane knew without checking that her mother was already awake.
Diane had moved into the guest cottage permanently within two weeks of the wedding, packing up her apartment back at the senior community with an efficiency that suggested she’d been ready to leave for months and simply hadn’t had anywhere worth going until now.
She’d taken to the main house like she’d lived there her whole life, claiming the kitchen most mornings before either of them stumbled downstairs, humming old hymns under her breath while she moved between the stove and the coffee pot, the same hymns she used to hum over a much smaller stove, back when it had just been the two of them.
“There’s my girl,” Diane said when Sloane finally appeared in the kitchen, Aaliyah now resettled against Sloane’s shoulder, finally drowsing again after a brief, fussy feeding.
Diane reached for her immediately, the transfer happening with the practiced ease of two women who’d long since stopped asking permission to hold the baby from each other.
“And there’s my other girl, sleeping like an angel for her grandmother already. ”
“She was not an angel twenty minutes ago.” Sloane settled onto a stool at the island, accepting the mug of decaf Diane slid toward her without being asked. “Draven walked her around the nursery for almost half an hour reciting the weather report.”
“Smart man.” Diane swayed gently with the baby, the same instinctive motion Draven had used upstairs, some inherited rhythm passed down through generations of women who’d rocked babies in kitchens just like this one.
“I used to do the same thing with you, baby girl. Read you the classified ads when nothing else worked. You’d settle right down every time, like you just wanted to hear a voice you trusted.
” She looked down at Aaliyah, something soft and faraway moving across her face.
“Your father used to tease me about it. Said I’d read you the obituaries if it got you to sleep faster.
I never did, but I thought about it some nights. ”
“I don’t think Aaliyah cares much about classifieds.
” Sloane wrapped both hands around her mug, watching her mother and her daughter together, something deeply settled moving through her chest at the sight.
Diane had aged into this role so naturally it sometimes startled Sloane to remember her mother had spent the last two years living three states away in a small apartment, grieving a husband and a daughter’s broken engagement at the same time.
She looked years younger now, here in this kitchen, fussing over a great-grandchild’s sleep schedule and humming while she cooked breakfast for a family that had somehow grown to include her fully again.
Sloane sometimes wondered if her mother had quietly given up on a moment like this one, somewhere in those long, solitary years, and the thought always settled heavy and grateful in her chest at once.
Draven came downstairs a few minutes later, dressed now, though he’d clearly thrown on the first clean shirt he found rather than anything resembling his usual care, and made a beeline straight for Diane and the baby rather than the coffee pot, peering over his mother-in-law’s shoulder at his sleeping daughter like he hadn’t just spent half an hour holding her himself.
“She’s out,” Diane confirmed, amused, glancing up at him. “You can stop hovering, Draven. She’s not going anywhere.”
“I’m not hovering.” He hovered anyway, his hand settling briefly against the small of Aaliyah’s back, checking the rhythm of her breathing in a habit Sloane recognized from every single night since they’d brought her home from the hospital.
“You absolutely are.” Diane shook her head, fond despite the teasing. “This man checks the baby monitor more than the stock market these days, Sloane. I caught him standing outside her door at two in the morning last week just listening.”
“She’d had a slightly rougher day with her latest round of shots.” Draven said it without a single trace of embarrassment, settling onto the stool beside Sloane and finally reaching for his own coffee. “I wanted to be certain she was resting comfortably.”
“Mm-hm.” Diane exchanged a knowing look with Sloane over the top of the baby’s head, the kind of look that needed no further translation between them.
Sloane reached over and laced her fingers through Draven’s free hand, leaning her head briefly against his shoulder.
She thought about the version of him from that first rooftop night, all calculated calm and unreadable certainty, the man who’d spent twenty minutes pretending he wasn’t watching her before finally sitting down at her table like he’d already decided something irreversible.
That man had never fully disappeared, not exactly, the same intensity still simmered under everything he did.
But it had found somewhere new to live now, redirected entirely toward the two of them, toward making absolutely certain neither his wife nor his daughter ever wanted for anything, least of all his presence.
Hugh came by that afternoon, as he often did most weekends now, the drive from Miami to Orlando having long since become routine.
Renee usually came with him, though she’d stayed back in Miami this particular weekend for a work deadline she couldn’t push, and Hugh had grumbled about the empty passenger seat the entire drive down, by his own admission.
The two of them had been thoroughly, happily inseparable since somewhere around the wedding reception, when Hugh had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out properly, and Sloane had stopped being surprised months ago by how naturally they’d folded into actual coupledom.
“Where’s my niece,” Hugh called out the moment he stepped through the front door, already toeing off his shoes, scanning the living room for any sign of the baby before he’d even greeted anyone else properly.
“Sleeping, for the moment.” Sloane laughed, rising from the couch to hug him anyway. “Try not to wake her with your enthusiasm.”
“I have never once woken a sleeping infant in my life.” Hugh said it with total, unfounded confidence, already heading toward the nursery despite Sloane’s mild protest trailing after him.