Epilogue #2
Somewhere behind us, I hear Ivy's voice directing someone to keep the camera running, catching all of it — the kiss that follows, the laughter, the moment half the club decides the appropriate way to celebrate a wedding is to throw the bride and groom straight off the pier into the harbor, cuts and dresses and all.
It happens fast — Rhett and Maddox grabbing Barrett first, hoisting him up despite his protests, and then a dozen hands reaching for me before I can even think to run, Piper and Gemma laughing too hard to actually help me escape.
The cold hits like a shock, salt water closing over my head, my wedding dress ballooning around me before I kick back up to the surface, gasping and laughing at the same time.
Barrett surfaces beside me a second later, hair plastered to his forehead, grinning the exact same grin from that first dockside encounter twenty-five years ago.
"Some things never change," he says, treading water beside me.
"You pushed me in the first time too," I remind him, splashing water at him. "I'm starting to think this is a pattern."
"A good pattern," he says, pulling me closer despite the chaos around us, the whole club cheering from the pier above, several more people jumping in around us in various states of formal wear. "I'd push you into a hundred more harbors if it always ended like this."
It's chaos. It's joy. It's salt water soaking through my wedding dress and Barrett's laugh ringing out over the water and every person I love most in the world standing on that pier cheering us on.
Eventually we climb out, dripping and laughing, wrapped in towels someone thought to bring for exactly this eventuality — apparently a Saltwater Kings wedding tradition none of the newer members had warned us about — and the party continues late into the night, dried off and re-dressed in whatever spare clothes people can scrounge up, the formal ceremony long forgotten in favor of pure, uncomplicated celebration.
I think, standing there soaked and radiant and surrounded by every person who's shaped my life, about all twenty of the love stories this town has held over the years — Dominic and Piper, who taught this club what steady, patient devotion looks like.
Callum and Marlowe. Silas and Nadia, who proved that even the quietest hearts can find their way back to joy.
Griffin and Brynn. Jensen and Haven. Rhett and Gemma, whose teasing has somehow become the soundtrack of half my adult life.
Maddox and Tatum. Theo and Daria. Lawson and Savannah.
Ezra and Waverly. Nash and Catalina. Orion and Lucia.
Kieran and Freya. Declan and Josie. Ronan and Petra, who found their way back to each other against every odd.
Sullivan and Darcy. Holden and Ivy. Corbin and Stella.
And now, finally, Barrett and me — the last chapter in a saga that started with a handful of riders and a borrowed dock, and somehow, twenty books and twenty love stories later, ends exactly where it should: on a pier, in the harbor, surrounded by family that chose each other, generation after generation, exactly the way my father-in-law always said it should.
Late in the night, once the music has softened and most of the guests have finally started drifting home, Barrett and I sit at the edge of the pier, feet dangling over the water, wrapped in a single shared blanket someone left behind.
The harbor is quiet now, just the two of us and the gentle lap of waves against the pilings, the whole town finally settling into the particular peace that follows a celebration this big.
"Twenty books," Piper says, wandering over with baby Ford asleep against her chest, Dominic trailing behind her with two cups of coffee. "Twenty love stories. Feels strange, doesn't it? Knowing this is the last one."
"It doesn't feel like an ending," I tell her, looking out at the dark water, at the marina lights reflecting off the harbor, at everything this town fought so hard to keep.
"It feels like the whole thing was leading here the whole time.
Every book, every couple, all of it building toward this one night. "
"Dad would have loved this," Dominic says quietly, settling beside us with Piper. "All of it. The fight for the marina, the wedding, the whole family finally complete."
"He's here," Barrett says, with quiet certainty, nodding toward the harbor, toward the marina, toward everything his father built and everything the club has built since.
"He's in every board of that dock. Every boat in that marina.
Every couple standing on this pier tonight.
He built something that outlasted him, and that's the only kind of forever any of us really get. "
We sit together a while longer, the four of us and baby Ford, watching the last of the stars fade toward dawn, the harbor lights flickering steady and constant the way they have for generations, the way they'll keep doing long after tonight, long after all of us, for whoever comes next to love this town the way we all have.
Eventually Dominic and Piper head home, and it's just Barrett and me again, wrapped in our shared blanket, watching the sky slowly lighten over Anchor Bay.
"Mrs. Voss," Barrett says, testing the name out loud for the first time, grinning at me sideways.
"Dr. Calloway-Voss," I correct, laughing. "I did not spend eight years of medical school just to lose my own name."
"Fair. I'll allow it."
"Generous of you."
He pulls me closer under the blanket, and we sit there together as the first real light of morning starts spreading gold across the water, the whole harbor slowly waking up around us — a fishing boat heading out for the day, a gull crying somewhere overhead, the ordinary machinery of a town that nearly lost everything and instead got to keep exactly what mattered.
I think about the little girl who used to race this same boy down this same pier every summer, convinced she'd finally win, never once imagining that the real prize waiting at the end of that race was going to take twenty-five years to claim.
I think about all the versions of myself along the way — the teenager with an aching, secret crush, the young doctor who built a whole life around loving someone quietly, the woman who finally, after fifteen years, got to hear the words she'd been waiting for.
I turn to look at Barrett, at the man I've loved for most of my life, now truly, completely mine, and I feel the whole weight of the wait finally settle into something lighter than relief. Not an ending. A beginning, exactly as promised, braided seamlessly into everything that came before it.
It's Anchor Bay.
It's home.