Epilogue
What happened in the wake of opening that safety deposit box still boggled Elena’s mind.
After reading Rosa’s letters—the one to Carmen and the one to her late husband—Carmen asked to go to the newsroom to talk things over with her colleagues and friends.
It was the first time she’d gone to the office since her Thanksgiving collapse.
Elena couldn’t argue with her. Carmen had a fire in her eyes.
Armed with Elena’s knowledge, as well as Rosa’s from the late fifties, Carmen spoke to the team and even discussed Sam’s pushback against her own articles about Cranberry Cove, citing Sam as one of the primary examples of corruption on a small-time level.
“They promised him something to shut me up,” Carmen said.
She asked the team of writers and journalists to do everything in their power to push back against the new country club and the corruption stitched into the town.
“It’s up to us to save what we can of our beautiful ecosystem,” Carmen said, before eventually heading to her office, closing the door, and falling asleep in her chair.
When she woke up, she’d forgotten almost everything.
But Elena had recorded it all on her phone.
It was a habit she’d come to appreciate, proof that her mother was still in the world.
After The Millbrook Gazette made it their mission to expose every act of corruption connected to the Millbrook government, Cranberry Cove, and Connersville, the mayor of Millbrook announced that there were no more plans to build the country club “for the time being.” But the newspaper knew not to stop there.
One by one, they exposed the crimes associated with the greater Cranberry Cove neighborhood—and even forced a few people to leave their homes.
Henrietta moved to Los Angeles, and Judge Drury left his position and moved his family to Baltimore.
There were plans in place to bulldoze a few of the uglier mansions to make way for more natural ecosystems, allowing the trees and flowers to bloom again.
But Elena felt that that would happen in due time, if at all.
Destruction wasn’t really her forte, not unless it involved the destruction of egomaniacs.
After news broke about Sam Ellison’s connection to the corrupt newspaper, Bethany broke up with him and tried to return to James.
But James kindly and considerately told her that he was with Elena now.
For a few days, he let Bethany stay at the house where they’d raised their son.
James remained with Elena and Carmen during that time, making them pasta and playing all kinds of music on the stereo.
When Bethany left for Florida, James returned to his home but still spent plenty of nights at Carmen and Elena’s.
By summer, incredibly, James and Elena were engaged.
But more than that, wonderfully, Carmen’s medication had begun to kick in.
Carmen’s moods were no longer so all over the place.
She could recall short-term and long-term memories, and she was her organized, whip-smart, and witty self again.
She even started working at the Gazette again, three times a week, if not four.
Elena was always chasing her, telling her to slow down a little bit.
But Carmen told her she was just getting started. Who was Elena to argue?
The day that Elena first discovered she was pregnant with James’s baby, she asked her mother to go to her father’s grave.
Together, they cleaned up the flowers, sat on the autumnal grass, and spoke gently to him, updating him on what had happened.
Elena had been to the grave several times since she’d moved back to Millbrook, but she’d never gone with her mother.
It felt intimate, the three of them back together again.
And then, Elena confessed to her pregnancy, and Carmen screamed with excitement.
That Christmas—the Christmas after the drama of the previous year—was one of the happiest of Elena’s life.
Four months pregnant, she ate everything she could find, danced, sang, and laughed with her Millbrook neighbors, and hatched plans for James to move in with Carmen full-time.
With Carmen’s health bound to decline further in the next five years, it didn’t make sense to leave her.
Besides, Elena had begun to love having her mother around.
James said he was ready to leave the home where he’d experienced his most tremendous grief. It didn’t make sense to maintain his son’s room forever. “He lives in my heart,” he said tenderly.
Now that Elena was going to become a mother herself, plenty of things had begun to make sense to her.
She felt she saw herself in the grand tapestry of mothers and children.
She understood love, pain, and sorrow through a fresh lens.
And sitting by the Christmas tree with her beloved fiancé and mother, she made a quiet promise to her child.
She’d never leave them behind, no matter what happened, no matter how tough it got.