Epilogue Part one
FIVE WEEKS LATER
Lennon
It’s the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, which Jasper informs me roughly every twenty minutes is extremely auspicious for a birthday. I have been cooking since before the sun came up, though on the solstice it isn’t actually that impressive of a flex.
The restaurant smells like everything I love.
That’s not a figure of speech. I built the menu out of it on purpose. Lemon, brown butter, rosemary, and the dark, sweet smell of the cake cooling on the rack, the one with the candied citrus on top that took me three tries because the first two weren’t good enough for them.
Tessa’s cake.
Jasper’s cake.
They share a birthday, which I think Jasper finds spiritually significant and Tessa finds mildly annoying. It’s exactly the right ratio of the two of them.
I keep running my hand along the steel counter to make sure it’s solid.
To make sure I have both of them to serve a cake later.
No breadstick fingers. Real. Mine. With yellow nails with little citrus faces on them.
When I step out of the kitchen and into the wildly decorated restaurant themed part Christmas, part birthday, Ridge is at the corner table with his laptop, typing fast, the little furrow between his brows that means the words are coming easily today.
He hasn’t stopped writing in weeks. Apparently, what’s coming out of him now is the best thing he’s ever written, and he knows it, to the point he’s unbearable about it.
I love him so much I can’t look directly at him sometimes.
Nevan is setting the long table, moving down it with stacks of plates. Mr. Muffin is propped in the center of the table as a centerpiece because Jasper insisted, and every time Nevan passes him, he turns him a quarter turn so he’s facing the party.
Jasper said he wanted to help, but instead, he’s doing a tarot spread on the windowsill for Tessa, who’s wrapped in approximately nine blankets, sitting in a wheelchair, still pale, thin, and tired, but her eyes are open. Her eyes are here.
Finally, she has stopped doing a reality check every five minutes.
Derek is hovering over her shoulder with a cup of tea she hasn’t asked for, exactly as he has been every single day for five weeks.
Nora is standing next to a nurse on Tessa’s other side, pretending not to cry, which is Nora’s resting state now.
“The Star,” Jasper announces, flipping a card with a flourish. “Healing. Renewal. The long dark turning back toward the light. On the solstice. On our birthday.” He looks up, eyes shining. “Tessa, the universe is being so heavy-handed right now it’s almost embarrassing.”
“Mm.” Tessa’s voice is still rough, but the dryness is in it. “Read me one that says I get to stop drinking this tea.”
“You don’t drink enough, then you don’t heal. You don’t open the restaurant with Lennon, you don’t get the dream.” Derek sets the cup in her hands and folds her fingers around it. “Drink the tea, angel.”
She drinks the tea.
She also, when she thinks no one is watching, leans into him a little.
I see it. I’ll never tell either of them I see it, because I know they’re going slow.
But they have time now. That’s the whole point.
It’s the thing I almost gave up everything to get her and would do again without thinking twice.
The door opens, and the cold comes in, bringing Paul in with it, Mabel on his arm, both of them stamping snow off their boots. Paul has a folder under his arm. He’s wearing the green cardigan with the elbow patches and, God help me, it’s fucking sexy.
“Can everyone sit down for a second?” he asks, making Ridge scoff, but he wheels over, and Nevan abandons the plates. Jasper bounces up, and even Tessa motions for Derek to wheel her toward Paul.
Paul smiles at me when I step up beside him, his hand gliding once down the side of my lemon dress like he can’t quite pass me without touching.
He’s the one who had my things moved from the storage unit in Boston.
He gave me a whole empty room in his house for a dressing room and filled the drawers with stockings and pretty dresses he picked out himself.
When it was done, he never once told me to keep any of it behind that door.
A cardigan started living on the back of the good armchair.
Nail polish took over a corner of his bathroom counter.
And he never asked me to put any of it away, so somewhere along the way the rest of the house started filling up too.
It’s still white and full of plants, but now yellow curtains hang on the windows, and citrus cushions sit on the couch. And all around, there are small, silly things on the shelves that are mine.
“Looking good today, darling.” He kisses my cheek, then he sets the folder down on the table in front of Nevan and opens it.
Nevan frowns down at it. “What is that?”
“Paperwork.” Paul slides it toward him. “For you to take over the inn.”
“Fucking finally,” Ridge mutters, but everyone else has gone quiet.
Nevan stares at the pages. “What?”
“It’s yours, Nevan. The deed, the license, all of it. You take it over.” Paul nods at the folder like it’s obvious, like he hasn’t dropped the floor out from under the man. “It’s done. It’s waiting on your signature.”
Nevan looks up at Mabel, and his face is doing about nine things at once.
Mabel holds up both hands. “Don’t look at me. The stars said the time was right.”
“Mabel.”
“Fine.” Her mouth twitches. “Not the stars. You. You kept this place alive when there was no reason it should have stayed alive except that you refused to let it go under.” She reaches up and pats his cheek. “You earned it twice over, boy. I’m just signing what was always true.”
“I…” Nevan’s voice cracks. “Just like that?”
“Just like that, but I have one condition.”
“Anything.” It comes out of him instantly. “Whatever it is. Anything.”
“I want Jasper to have the cottage.”
“Me?” The tarot cards almost slip out of Jasper’s hands.
“It should be yours.” Mabel’s eyes find Jasper with a grin. “Somebody who knows what to do with all those crystals and the incense in there.”
Jasper opens his mouth, and nothing comes out, which is a first.
“Yes,” Nevan breathes out. “Of course, he can have it.” He turns to look at Paul. “I have my own home.”
Paul’s eyes turn a little misty at that, and God, mine sting in return.
“And,” Mabel goes on, turning back to Nevan. “I want you to lease the restaurant to Lennon and Tessa. For whatever the two of them decide it should be.”
Nevan huffs a wet laugh and scrubs a hand down his face. “That was the plan all along.”
“Whatever you want it to be.”
“With whoever you want.”
“As long as you’re here.”
Nevan signs the paper with another watery laugh.
Tessa is crying. Jasper is crying. Nora was already crying. Derek looks like he might start. Ridge is grinning at all of us like a man who has decided to be smug about other people’s happiness, and Paul is watching me in the way he does, to see if I’m okay, and I am.
I’m so far past okay that there isn’t a word for it.
I go back to the kitchen, then bring out the food, and we eat at the long table with Mr. Muffin facing the party and the snow coming down outside. My whole strange, impossible family, loud, full, and here.
Once we’ve sung happy birthday twice and the cake is eaten, Nevan whispers to me, “I want to go tell my mom about the inn.”
I nod and stand. “I’ll come with you.”
The hospital is twenty minutes out, and the roads are bad, but we go anyway in Paul’s Mercedes, because it’s way safer than my Bumble Bitch in these conditions.
Seraphine is in a long-term room Nora Vaughn is paying for out of gratitude, with a window that faces the tree line.
Her silver hair is braided. There’s a feeding line and a monitor counting out a heartbeat, while the moonstone still rests in the hollow of her throat where it belongs, where it’s always belonged.
She looks peaceful. She looks, honestly, more peaceful than I ever saw her when she was awake.
Nevan pulls a chair up close and takes her hand before he starts to talk. He tells her about the inn. About the paperwork, the signature, how Mabel patted his cheek. He tells her it’s his now, and his voice wobbles on it.
He comes here a lot, probably more than he tells anyone, even me.
I think there’s a part of him that still feels guilty about being asked to promise to stay away from his mother by a man he didn’t understand, and keeping that promise without knowing he was keeping it, while she sat in a chair and looked through him.
I have to look at the window for a minute, because the thing I think every time I’m in this room is that my mother died a few months ago.
There is no chair, no window, no hand to hold.
There’s a shoebox of cards and a recipe I can’t make come out right.
If I could have her like this, even like this, even gone but warm, even somewhere I could only talk to and never reach, I would be here every single day. I would never leave.
So I never tell Nevan he comes too often.
I told him something else, instead. When I was elsewhere, I could hear them. All of them.
And now he believes—he needs to believe, and so do I, so I let him—that she can hear him. That somewhere under all of this, in the place she finally got to stay, Seraphine is listening to her son tell her about owning the inn he always wanted.
I hope she can. I think she can.
We agreed, all of us, that none of us would ever step into 5D again. Not even for a minute. Not for anything.
And even Jasper, who has become a genuinely frightening lucid dreamer, agreed without an argument.
He’s more at peace with this than Nevan.
“She loves me,” he told me, simple as that. “She always loved me. And she’s where she feels good now. Where she’s not sick. I’m not going to be sad that my mom finally gets to feel like herself.”
Eighteen years old when he said that. Nineteen now.
That kid is going to be fine.
Nevan is still talking when I notice the smell. It drifts in from the hallway. It doesn’t belong in a hospital at all. It’s sweet and citrus. Lemon muffins.
The same way my mom’s smelled.
“I’ll be right back,” I murmur, and Nevan nods without breaking off, and I step out into the corridor, following my nose like a cartoon, because grief makes you grateful for anything that smells like the person you miss.
I want a second of it.
Three doors down, a room stands open.
Inside, a nurse is standing by the bed with a paper bag in one hand and what looks like a still-warm lemon muffin halfway to her mouth. When she sees me in the doorway, she startles, a few crumbs of the muffin falling to the floor.
“Oh, I’m so sorry—” I start, but she cuts me off.
“I’m not stealing a patient’s food, I promise.
” She gestures with the muffin, and even more crumbs fall.
What a waste. “His son brings these. For the staff. Every week. Says it’s the least he can do for the people who sit with his dad.
” She takes a guilty little bite. “They’re really good, though. I have no self-control.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I smile. “They smell incredible. I followed my nose down the hall to ask where they are from.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I’m sorry. But I can ask him next time. Do you want one?” she offers.
“No, thank you.” I smile, feeling like an idiot. “I really don’t… I don’t know why I came to check, honestly.”
She sets the bag down on the side table beside a bunch of red roses. “He brings these too.” She sighs as her finger glides over the petals. “Some people just don’t give up on a person.”
I’m only half listening, because my eyes drift, idle, to the man in the bed, and when they do, the breath stops in my chest. He’s old, gray-haired, and at least twenty years older than the version I know.
I can’t see his eyes because they’re closed, duh. But I am fiercely glad of that, because I think if they opened right now, they would be green.
“I think,” I hear myself say, very far away. “I think I know him.”
The nurse glances over with a smile. “Oh, that’s possible! He had the flower shop in town, the little corner one, where the laundromat is now.”
It’s always plants. Trees. Pots. Whatever fell on the flower-shop guy was probably a fern.
Ridge’s voice echoes in my ears.
“Is his name Lucien?” I ask, my hands trembling on my side.
“Yeah. Lucien Laurin. Lovely man, by all accounts.”
I stand in the doorway and look at him.
The boogeyman.
The thing in the dark.
A lonely old man in a quiet room, kept alive by machines and visited by roses, his body is here and his whole self is gone.
“How long…” I start, then swallow, before I make myself ask. “How long has he been like that?”
“Twenty-two years.”