Epilogue Cass #2
The wind comes through the maple boughs again, and I swear—I swear —I hear something in it. A laugh, to be specific. Her laugh, to be even more specific. The laugh that filled a room, scratchy at the bottom and bright at the top, the one I would do terrible things to hear one more time.
Maybe I’m imagining it. Probably. But I’ll still take that for the blessing it is.
“There’s something else,” I tell her while I wipe my face with the inside of my sleeve.
“There’s a man. He’s waiting for me down at the gate.
He’s been pretty important to this whole business.
His name is Matvei, and he’s— I mean, nice probably isn’t the right word.
Actually, on paper, he’s, like, really terrible.
He’s a born killer with criminal ties, a billion tattoos, and some very old-fashioned ideas about chivalry and etiquette.
I think you’d like him—eventually. There’d be some head-butting along the way, for sure.
You’re both so damn stubborn. But I can just see your smile once you came around.
You’d give me that little pinch in the ribs and say, Cassie, you little skank, well-done. You picked a good one. ”
More wind. More imagined laughter.
“The important part is that he’s good , Gi. He’s so good to me. I didn’t know what that was supposed to feel like. I thought I did, but I didn’t. He showed me how good it could be to let yourself be loved.”
I let my hand drift, finally, to my stomach.
“Oh. Yeah. Almost forgot. There’s a baby, too. His, I should clarify. I think it’s a girl, for no real reason at all. Just, like, womanly intuition or whatever.” I hesitate for a minute. “And if she is, I’d like to name her in your honor. Is that okay? Could you sign off on that for me?”
The wind wafts again. The maples shush each other.
I take that as a yes.
I sit there a while longer. I tell her about Dani’s fireman, who just proposed, and about moving in with Matvei, and all the thousand other little things that have changed in the last few weeks. I promise her I’ll be back soon, with more flowers.
When I finally push up off the grass, my knees ache, my eyes are swollen and my nose is running, but I feel lighter than I have in five years.
I press two fingers to my lips, then to the top of the stone.
“Bye, Gi. Love you, dummy.”
The walk back down the hill is slower. I’m not in a hurry; nobody is rushing me. Halfway down, near a little stone bench under a maple, I stop walking.
It isn’t gas I’m feeling. It isn’t the weird flippy thing my stomach has been doing when I think about Mat’s mouth, either. It’s small and distinct, somewhere below my navel and just a little to the left, and it goes bump-bump, like a tiny knuckle rapping politely on a door.
I press my hand flat to my belly. I wait.
It happens again.
“Oh,” I breathe. “Oh, hi. Hi, you. Hi. ”
Not many people smile like this in cemeteries, but who cares, who could stop me? No one. I’m grinning and I don’t even register the confident footsteps coming up the path until a strong arm slips around my shoulders and I am all of a sudden completely gathered up.
He turns me toward his chest and wraps both arms around me and rests his chin on top of my head.
“She moved,” I whisper into his coat. “Mat, I swear to you, she just moved.”
I sense his smile overhead, even with my face pressed against his chest. One hand drifts down between us, splayed wide, and he rests his palm to my belly over mine.
We stand there on the path under the maples, the three of us—or is it four?—waiting for a future that’s never looked so bright.
One Year Later
The fairy lights came from the hardware store, not some fancy pants wedding accessories shop. Several of them blink. One whole strand has gone dark over the bar. But nobody, including the bride, gives a damn.
This, I have decided, is the correct way to get married.
I’m standing at the edge of what used to be a loading dock in Red Hook, balancing a paper plate of cornbread on my forearm, watching my cousin sway in a tea-length ivory dress that she absolutely refused to call a gown.
Fireman Chad—yes, that is his proper title—has both his enormous hands at the small of her back, and Dani has one of hers fisted in the collar of his shirt like she’s worried, even now, that he might evaporate into thin air.
She’d never let him get that far. I mean, look at her face. Whatever ghost of an ex-fiancé used to live in Dani’s eyes, that’s gone now. It’s been smoked out and replaced by a square-jawed, six-foot-two redhead who calls her Bunny without irony and cooks a mean rack of ribs.
I take a bite of cornbread and have to bite back a quasi-orgasmic moan. Chad’s grandma made it, apparently, though I refuse to believe that the whip-sharp, refuses-to-use-a-cane woman I met on the dance floor is anywhere near the ninety-seven years old she claims to be.
Beer cans are cooling in galvanized tubs of melting ice along the wall. Unlike the DeMaris wedding, there is no Etta James here. There is a guy named Sal with a Bluetooth speaker and a wacko playlist that just transitioned from Stevie Wonder into something I’m half-sure is by Lizzo?
Whatever the case, the party is absolutely rockin’.
What a wedding. I can’t stop smiling.
It doesn’t hurt that there are precious little joys everywhere I look. For example, as soon as I tear my eyes off Dani Banany and Fireman Chad bumpin’ and grindin’ on the dance floor, I see Afon settled back comfortably in a lawn chair, holding my daughter against his chest.
Galina Satyrin is three months old and has made the leap from fruit-shaped size comparisons to those of the breadloaf variety. Her name means “calm serenity” in Russian, which is hilarious to me as someone who grew up with the loudest-laughing sister on the planet.
But Galina honors her namesake well, because she giggles nonstop, especially when her daddy blows raspberries on her tummy when he’s changing her diaper.
Right this second, she’s not laughing, but that’s only because she’s dead asleep. She’s slumped in Afon’s arms in a manner that suggests she was knocked out by a tranquilizer dart rather than a lullaby.
Her great uncle has one massive hand cupped around the back of her head and the other curled under her swaddled bottom. His face is scrunched up almost painfully, like he’s trying so hard not to be cracked in two by the force of love that it actually, physically hurts him.
He scooped her out of my arms the second we got here and has not put her down since.
Afon, it turns out, is a softie . Just don’t say it to his face.
“Never thought I’d see the day,” Matvei remarks as he joins me at my side and smirks over at his uncle. He nuzzles the side of my neck until I giggle and squirm away.
“He’s a real cupcake, isn’t he?”
“The biggest I’ve ever met.”
“You give him a run for his money, though.” I grin and look up at him.
He cocks an eyebrow at me, and oh, God, that eyebrow hasn’t lost an ounce of its power over the last fifteen months.
He’s got Galina’s spit-up drying on the lapel of his linen blazer and the top two buttons of his white shirt are undone enough to expose the very top of one of his tattoos, that dagger aiming up over his collarbone like it’s reaching for his throat.
His dark hair, a little overgrown lately because new dads don’t have time for barbers, falls across his forehead in a way that makes me want to drag him into the coat closet of this loading dock and see what’s what.
And then there are the eyes. The Blue-eyed Bastard is alive and well. The exact shade of the gas flame on my stovetop when I’m browning butter for Galina’s bedtime bottle. Hot at the center. Cool at the edges. Always, always, always watching me like I’m the only thing in any room worth looking at.
I’ll never get used to it.
I never, ever want to.
“What?” he asks.
“It pisses me off sometimes how good-looking you are,” I inform him.
His grin widens and he reaches out to grab an absolutely scandalous handful of my ass. “Just trying to keep up with you, baby.”
I shriek and smack him away playfully, but the fire in my cheeks is lit and it’s not going anywhere now. I get the feeling it’ll be there for the rest of my life.
I’m wearing a slip dress in deep red, on purpose, because Susan Oglethorpe once told me it was brave, brave, brave , and I have decided that one of the small ways I will carry her with me is to wear red, in winter, in summer, in alleys, in cemeteries, at weddings.
I hope, wherever Susan is, that she’s resting well.
Speaking of the Oglethorpes, Caroline is somewhere in this crowd, too.
I look around and clock her near the cake table, in a lilac green jumpsuit, talking politely with one of Chad’s firehouse buddies who is, by the looks of it, trying to flirt and failing spectacularly.
Caroline has a knack for being very kind and very far away at the same time.
She’s become a good friend over the last year, but I get the feeling that she’s still keeping me at arm’s length. That makes sense. We all have our walls and our heartbreaks, and we all heal at different speeds from the things that have hurt us.
I just hope, for her sake, that she learns to let someone love her soon. She deserves it.
Matvei follows my gaze and a lightbulb goes off in his eyes. “Ah. Almost forgot. Stay here—I need to go do something quickly.”
“Mysterious.”
“Until the day I die.” He kisses my knuckles. “I’ll be right back.”
He cuts a clean line through the crowd, exchanging nods and handshakes with the other wedding guests as he goes.
I watch as he approaches Caroline, touches her elbow lightly, and turns her slightly away from the crowd.
He pulls something from the inside of his jacket—a cream-colored envelope—and passes it to her.
Just before she tucks it inside her clutch, I manage to decipher handwriting on the back that says For Carrie .