Epilogue
JACE
Ford turned from the mirror and held his arms out. “Peyton did the ties. Fourteen years old and she’s already got opinions on my wardrobe. Verdict?”
“You’ll do.” Rios reached over and freed the knot a quarter inch. “There. Now you can breathe when Bree says her vows.”
“If I can find the air at all.” Ford dropped his hands and paced to the window and back again. The old church radiator ticked in the corner and lost its fight with January. “Bree walks through that door, and I forget how lungs work. Watch.”
“You’ve had twenty-five years to practice breathing around her.” Sawyer leaned against the sill, arms crossed with a married man’s ease.
“You’ve been throwing hands for that woman since before you could spell her name,” I pointed out.
“And those two days of detention in third grade were worth it.” Ford’s hands clenched, as if he could go back and deck that little shit, Zack Pickering, all over again for making Bree feel unwanted.
I crossed the room and set his collar straight. “Took you long enough to marry her.”
“Took me long enough to deserve her.” He said it plainly. “Different thing.”
“Y’all got there in the end. That’s what matters,” Sawyer insisted.
The organ sounded its first notes through the wall.
Rios gripped Ford’s shoulders, and the four of us stood close in that cramped room the way we’d stood close since we’d run the beach as boys with skinned shins and terrible plans.
Sawyer, married. Rios, who managed to carry the air of the badge even out of uniform.
Me. And Ford, thirty seconds from the thing he’d wanted his whole life.
I gripped the back of his neck. “Go marry her. We’re right on your six.”
We filed out the side door into the packed sanctuary, where it seemed like every soul on the island had been crammed inside its four walls. I took my mark at the front and turned to the pews, my eyes immediately finding Layla.
Easy to do since she sat in the third row on the aisle, in a green dress that inspired thoughts wholly indecent for our location.
Her hair fell loose down her back, the way she wore it in rooms she trusted.
She’d started wearing it down a little more often these days.
Koa sat at her knee, wearing a bowtie cut from the same green, ears up, chest out.
A hundred pounds of dog who understood the day called for such accessories and allowed the indignity.
She wasn’t scanning the exits.
The bad nights still came. She surfaced out of dreams with her breath sawing raw, and I threaded my fingers through hers and held the dark back with her until the shaking wore off.
Rough country stretched out ahead of her, and I’d walk every mile at her shoulder for as long as she allowed me the post.
This afternoon, her shoulders rode low and loose, and her hands lay open in her lap.
Her eyes stayed forward, on Ford, on me as the bridesmaids processed in.
Our eyes met across the nave, and she smiled as the organ shifted music and swelled.
The entire congregation rose and turned as one.
Bree filled the doorway on her grandfather’s arm.
Beside me Ford dragged in a breath down to what sounded like his toes.
We watched her come. No train for a bridesmaid to fight.
A hem cut to the calf, heels she’d dance in, and her whole face aimed up the aisle at the man beside me.
Ed kept the pace slow. Bree pushed it. Halfway to us she gave up, took the old man by the elbow, and towed him the rest of the way.
The church broke into a burble of laughter as Ford made a wrecked sound low in his chest.
Ed folded her hand into Ford’s and stepped back. Two kids from a third-grade classroom, who’d spent a lifetime and a war of wrong turns, crossing the room to each other. They looked at each other now like the pews stood empty.
The minister cleared his throat and began, the old words rolling out over the room. Dearly beloved, we are gathered…
I registered them with half a brain.
The other half stayed three rows back, tangled with the thing sinking roots under my ribs while the minister talked two lives into one.
A couple of days ago, I’d sent the papers up the chain.
Twelve years, and I’d called the end of my Naval career.
Ford had gone Reserves to put down roots for Peyton, and I understood the pull of it now in a way I hadn’t before.
Months of grinding waited on the far side, the Navy’s way of milling a man to powder before it opened its fist, but the process was in motion.
For years I’d sworn the work was the sum of me, with no corner of my life left for a home, a woman, or an absurd dog in a bowtie.
I’d read it wrong. Most of it.
“Repeat after me.” The minister raised his book. Ford closed both hands around Bree’s, and his voice broke on the first word. He let it break in front of God and half the county. Damn, if that didn’t get me in the feels.
“I, Ford, take you, Bree.” He forced the next breath up from somewhere south of his lungs. “To have and to hold from this day forward.”
Bree’s chin trembled. She caught it and gave the words back to him, steadier than he’d handed them over. Their two voices braided down the length of the vows, and the church stilled so much that I caught the whisper of candles.
Layla watched the bride and groom. I watched Layla.
Tears gathered along her lower lashes and caught the light.
She flattened her lips and blinked them back.
Koa silently pressed his weight against her shin, and her hand dropped to his ruff without her eyes leaving the front.
A woman who’d lived with the certainty that wanting fell to other people, fixed on two of them who stood up in front of God and this island to claim each other out loud.
I want that.
The thought echoed through my head with the gravity of a gong. I wanted the ritual and the declarations, and the life. Making her coffee, watching her back, seeing her slowly reclaim the joy that circumstances had stolen. I wanted years, with her the beating heart at their center.
She turned her head, as if my stare pressed a palm to her cheek, and caught me watching her instead of the couple. One brow rose in question.
I held her eyes and let the answer surface in mine. The one I’d fold into her hands when the proper time rolled around. Out on the deck at Sutter House, water washing the sand below the rail, the island asleep at our backs.
Not today. Today ran on Ford and Bree’s clock.
But soon.
Whatever crossed my face pinned her to the pew. Her mouth curved. Color climbed her throat, and she faced front with her fingers buried in Koa’s fur.
“By the power vested in me, I pronounce you husband and wife. Ford, you may kiss your bride.”
The pastor barely got the words out before Ford swept Bree back over his arm and kissed her the way a man kisses permission he’s chased the whole of his life.
Sawyer threw his head back and whooped. Rios drove two fingers between his teeth and split the air with a whistle.
Ford’s mothers beamed bright enough to rival the lighthouse, and Peyton pumped her fist as the congregation surged up, spending its joy in one throw.
I grinned as Ford broke for air.
There’d be celebration to come. For this new life our friends had started together. And for the quiet truth none of us could share about the fate of an island daughter.
I found Layla’s eyes again and watched as the future I’d spent years refusing to picture swung wide in front of the two of us. Door open. Road clear to the vanishing point.
Ours to walk, one mile laid down after the last.
I hope you enjoyed this conclusion to the Wayward Sons series. I know there’s one more reunion you don’t want to miss, so be sure to nab the bonus epilogue for this one right here:
I promise, it’s not bovine related. :D
I’m still working on what series is coming next in the world of heart-pounding romantic suspense for romance lovers, but keep an eye on my newsletter to be the first in the know when I make up my mind!
In the meantime, I’ve got a standalone romantic thriller next on the docket. Don’t miss Inheritance of Darkness.
Auden Lockwood paints things she doesn't remember seeing.
The critics call it genius — the strange, luminous canvases that made her famous overnight, compositions that feel less imagined than remembered.
Auden only knows the work pours out of her from someplace she can't name, and that after the brutal attack that ended her triumphant tour, that place went dark.
So she runs. To Sawgrass Key — a speck of an island off the Georgia coast, a wreck of a house, and a quiet that finally lets her breathe.
To Hale Conley, the ex-military carpenter who rebuilds her ruin of a home one board at a time and asks nothing of her but the truth — a man with a guarded past of his own, who wants her to want things again and won't push her an inch faster than she's ready.
Slowly, with him, the work comes back. So does she.
Then a detective arrives from the mainland with a photograph and an impossible question: how did she render, stroke for stroke, a murder scene staged before she could speak?
Auden has been certain of two things her whole life: that her childhood was happy, and that her art belongs to her alone.
Now, with the tide cutting her off from everyone who swore they'd keep her safe and the only man she's ever trusted keeping secrets of his own, she's about to learn that both were lies — and that the life she built to save herself may be the thing that gets her killed.