Epilogue
BECK
SIX MONTHS LATER
Snow covers the mountain. Two feet of it on the ground, more coming down in fat, lazy flakes that Duke chases across the porch like he's personally offended by each one.
The cabin looks different now.
Kitchen table, hand built, black walnut, seats four.
Bed frame, also hand built, reclaimed fir from a barn that collapsed on the far edge of my property.
Bookshelves, plural, lining the wall where the single warped one used to be.
Stocked with her paperbacks, my poetry, a growing collection of cookbooks she keeps buying from Chapter & Curse even though she doesn't follow recipes.
A real dog bed sits by the fireplace. Duke has never once slept on it. He sleeps on Jada's side of the bed, curled against her legs, snoring loud enough to rattle the windows.
My side. Her side. Our bed.
Six months. She stayed. Not because I asked her to, because I did ask, badly, on a sidewalk in town. She stayed because she chose to. Drove back up the mountain in her dusty blue Subaru, parked it next to my truck, walked inside, set her bag down, and said "I'm going to need a dresser."
Built her one that weekend. Cherry wood. Dovetail joints. Three drawers. She cried when she saw it, then told me the knobs were ugly. Went to town the next day and came back with ceramic pulls from a shop on Main Street.
That's how it works with us. She pushes. I build. She fills every space I make with color, noise, warmth, and the kind of laughter that sounds like it belongs in this cabin even though nothing laughed here before she arrived.
Crimson Hollow adopted her immediately. Sage at Bean & Bloom saves her a blueberry lemon muffin every Saturday.
Venus at Tangled Roots does her braids now, fresh every three weeks, and they spend the entire appointment talking about me.
Jada reports back. Apparently I'm "the grumpiest man on the mountain" according to everyone in town. She agrees with them enthusiastically.
The event planning thing came back naturally.
Wasn't my idea. Wasn't hers, exactly. A woman named Jordyn Kane McCrae stopped by Bean & Bloom one Saturday, heard Jada talking about the charity gala she'd organized in Atlanta, and asked if she'd consider helping with a local fundraiser.
Jada said no. Then she said maybe. Then she organized the entire Crimson Hollow autumn harvest fair in three weeks flat, raised twelve thousand dollars for the volunteer fire department, and had Sage's Jamaican patties featured in a regional food magazine.
She's freelancing now. Small events. Mountain weddings.
Corporate retreats at a lodge outside town run by a man named Cash who apparently knows everyone.
She works from the kitchen table on a laptop she bought in Nelson, Duke at her feet, coffee going cold because she forgets to drink it when she's deep in a spreadsheet.
Happy. She's happy. And the thing about watching someone you love be happy is that it rewires the parts of you that forgot happiness was possible.
I turned my phone on permanently in August. Called my mother.
Two hour conversation. She cried. I cried.
Duke stared at me. Jada sat on the porch and pretended she couldn't hear everything through the open window.
When I hung up, she came inside, kissed my cheek, and said "Your mama sounds like good people. "
My brother visited in September. Drove up from Calgary with his wife and their two kids who spent the entire weekend chasing Duke through the trees. My brother looked at the cabin, at Jada, at the table I built, at the bookshelves full of our books, and said "You're back." Simple. True.
Theo called in October. "Beck, listen." Naturally.
He's designing a community center in Revelstoke.
Sustainable materials. Low profile. Mountain appropriate.
He wanted my opinion on the foundation specs.
I gave it. Spent three hours on the phone talking about load bearing walls, soil composition, and drainage systems while Jada cooked dinner with her phone propped on a jar of wildflowers, video chatting Tasha.
When I hung up, my hands were shaking. Good shaking. The kind that comes from wanting something you thought you'd buried.
Last week, I drew something. First time in fourteen months.
Sat at the kitchen table after Jada fell asleep.
Pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper.
Drew the cabin. Not as it is. As it could be.
An extension off the back. A proper studio.
Tall windows for natural light. A drafting table. Room to work.
Room to build again.
Jada found the drawing in the morning. Held it up. Studied it with those brown eyes that see everything.
"This is an extension."
"Maybe."
"With a studio."
"Possibly."
"Beckett Hale, are you building again?"
The smile cracked open before I could stop it. Wide. Stupid. The kind that hurts your face because it's been dormant so long.
"Maybe."
She set the drawing down. Walked around the table. Sat in my lap. Wrapped her arms around my neck. Duke, sensing a moment, jumped onto the chair beside us, which groaned under his weight.
"I love you." She says it easily now. Every morning.
Every night. After arguments about whether the toilet paper goes over or under.
During sex, breathless, her forehead against mine while I move inside her.
While cooking, thrown casually over her shoulder.
In the truck on the way to town, her hand on my thigh.
But this morning, sitting in my lap with snow falling outside and a sketch of our future on the table, she says it differently. Slowly. Like she's placing each word with care.
"I love you. All of you. The parts that build and the parts that broke. The three a.m. parts. The poetry parts. The parts that are still scared. I love all of it, Beck. I'm not going anywhere."
My arms tighten around her. Face buried in her neck. The tightness in my chest that lived there for fourteen months has loosened into something I can breathe around. Still present. Probably always will be. But quieter. Smaller. Making room for everything she brought with her.
"I love you." Pulling back, I hold her face. Thumbs on her cheekbones. The face I wake up to. The face that showed up on my porch in an orange dress and told me my steps needed sanding. "I love you, Jada Williams. Thank you for not listening when I told you to leave."
"Baby, I'm a Black woman from Atlanta. You think some grumpy white man on a mountain was gonna scare me off?"
Laughing, I kiss her. Duke barks. Snow falls. The fire crackles in the stove.
Outside, eighty acres of pine trees, granite, and silence. The good kind of silence now. The kind that holds two people, one dog, and the beginning of something neither of us planned.
On the kitchen counter, between the coffee maker and the jar of wildflowers that she replaces every week even in winter with whatever she can find, sits the Rilke book. Dog eared. Spine cracked. A leaf still marking the page she was reading when this started.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
I acted. She stayed.
The mountain did the rest.
Beck and Jada continue on to have such a heart-warming HEA, and I bet you’d love a sneak peek. Don’t worry I’ve got you.
Thank you so much for reading Consumed By The Grumpy Mountain Man.