Epilogue Part Two
FIVE YEARS LATER
Lennon
The bread is soaking in the custard when I realize what I’m making.
I knew, obviously. I cracked the eggs. I whisked in the cinnamon, vanilla, and the little bit of orange zest because I can’t leave anything without citrus.
It’s a compulsion at this point. I laid the thick slices in the dish to soak.
I did all of it with my hands while the rest of me was somewhere else, running the day’s list, and it’s only now, standing at the stove in the kitchen with the butter going gold in the pan, that the front of my brain catches up to my hands.
French toast.
I haven’t made French toast since my dad died.
I stopped making it that day. I never decided to. It quietly fell off the list of things I do, how a song you loved becomes one you skip, and I never once questioned it. Some absences are shaped like a person, and you learn to walk around them.
I stand at the stove and look at the butter, feeling my eyes go hot.
“We don’t wait for reasons to make something good, Lenny. We just make it.”
My mother said that to me a hundred times in this voice she used when I was overthinking, when I was waiting for permission to want something.
We don’t wait for reasons. We just make it.
So I lay the first slice into the butter, and it hisses, the kitchen filling with the smell of my whole childhood, the good part, the part before, and I let it sting.
I’ve earned that.
“You good?”
Nevan is in the doorway, sleeves shoved up, an apron already on because he was hauling chairs. He clocks the pan, the custard dish, the look on my face, all in about a second, because he’s spent five years learning to read me from across rooms.
“French toast,” I say, as if that explains it. With him, it does. I told him about my dad years ago, on a bad night, how you tell people things at two in the morning.
He crosses the kitchen, lets his thumb glide over my nose before he turns me and wraps me up from behind, chin on the top of my head, holding on while the slice cooks.
“She’d be eating it straight out of the pan,” he says into my hair. “Your mom. She’d be standing right here stealing it before it hit the plate.”
A wet laugh punches out of me. “She absolutely would.”
“Want me to steal one? For authenticity?”
“Don’t you dare.”
He steals one. Of course, he does. He’s grinning around it when I turn to swat him, and I’m laughing. The sting is still there, but it’s sitting next to the laughing now, both of them at once, which is the only way grief ever really works.
Rule three. Bad days don’t go alone.
Even the good-bad ones.
He steals one more on his way out with a “Structural support, I’m hauling chairs, I need my strength,” and ducks under the doorframe, gone to go set up. The kitchen is quiet for about as long as it takes me to flip the next slice.
Then the door bangs back open.
“Okay. Who’s frying butter at this hour, and why am I the last to know?”
Tessa.
She breezes in how she breezes into everything, like the room ought to be grateful, hair twisted up, apron strings double-looped around a waist that finally has weight on it again, with ballet-pink nails because she will not let me paint anything else on her, not since she woke up.
She heads directly for the pan.
“That’s for the guests,” I say.
“I’m a guest.” She plucks a slice straight out of the butter with her bare fingers, hisses, juggles it hand to hand, but eats it anyway.
Exactly how my mother would have.
The echo goes through me, warm and aching at the same time, and I don’t say a word, because that one is mine to keep now. All of it. The kitchen, the morning, the woman stealing food out of my pan like she’s got every right to.
She chews, then her chewing slows when she looks at the custard dish, then the bread, then me, and her face falls because Tessa knows me. She knows the very short list of things I don’t make.
“French toast,” she says quietly.
“Dad got loud this morning.” I flip a slice. “Figured I’d let him boss me around one more time.”
Tessa doesn’t do soft. She never has. She bumps her shoulder into mine, hard enough to rock me, steals a second piece, and says, “He had great taste, recipes, and daughters.”
That’s the whole eulogy, and it’s perfect.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” I tell her. “Derek’s going to have a stroke.”
“Derek thinks I’m overseeing the table arrangements.” She does air quotes with a greasy hand. “I delegated. Mom has the baby, Derek has Melanie, and I have…” she gestures at the pan, “… quality control. Can’t have Ridge’s adoring public dropping dead in our restaurant.”
Our restaurant.
It still does something to me, every single time. The notebook we filled, stupid with hope, the little place with both our names on it, and now it’s real. The sign down the hall says Maes & Vaughn’s.
I catch her hand before it can reach slice number three and turn it over. The polish is flawless. “I keep meaning to change these to French tips.”
“Don’t you dare.” She snatches her hand back, curls it to her chest. “I’m keeping the pink. It’s sentimental. Drop it.”
My throat does something stupid.
I have my best friend back.
She’s standing in my kitchen at nine in the morning, getting butter on the counter, bullying me about nail polish, and there’s no beach, no doors, no mask. No dimension between us. No reason to check if she’s real.
My hand twitches anyway. Old habit. I almost check my fingers.
I don’t have to.
She catches me looking. “What?”
“Nothing.” I clear my throat. “You’ve got powdered sugar on your face.”
“I do not.” She swipes and misses. “Do I?”
“Other side.”
She gets it, then looks at me again. For one second, the breeze drops clean off her, and it’s us, the way it’s been since a too-small dorm and a two-in-the-morning tray of cookie dough, and she says, “I love you.”
“I love you more.”
“I fucking hope so.” And the breezy snaps right back into place as she steals another buttery piece and heads for the door. “Plate those before they’re cold. We’ve got a famous author to make look good.”
“Out of my kitchen, Vaughn.”
“It’s half my kitchen, Maes.” She’s already gone, back toward the door, the arrangements, and the long day ahead.
I plate the French toast, and I let myself have the ache and the warmth at the same time, because that’s the only way it ever works.
By noon, the restaurant is full of people who came to watch a man sign books.
Our restaurant, sitting inside the inn that Nevan made cozy, warm, and full, a place people drive an hour for.
There’s no dinner service today. Today the tables are pushed back, there’s a line out the door, and a banner over the bar.
At a table at the front, under the banner, sits Ridge Bonnell Wells, signing his name in book after book with that crooked, unbothered half smile, like he can’t believe these people drove here for him, but also like he always knew they would.
The book is insane. I want that on the record.
It’s a sci-fi romance about a woman who can’t let go of the things she’s lost, except Ridge being Ridge, he couldn’t keep the horror out.
Somewhere around chapter ten, it becomes a story about plushies that come back wrong and muffins that fall out of the sky.
It shouldn’t work. It should be the strangest thing anyone has ever published, and yet, it went to number one in nine days.
His agent, Miller, is hovering at his elbow, vibrating with joy, telling anyone who’ll listen that he knew, he always knew, he never doubted for a second, which is a lie, but a happy one.
I catch Ridge’s eye over the crowd. He looks at me, and his mouth does the thing. He holds up the book he’s signing and taps the cover, where a small embroidered plushie with button eyes is screaming silently into a void.
I mouth, Mr. Muffin is going to sue you.
He mouths back, Mr. Muffin signed a release, and goes back to signing.
The acoustic version of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” is playing over the speakers.
Tessa’s and my song, the one I scream-sang across three thousand miles of highway five years ago with tears running down my face.
Now it’s playing in our restaurant at a signing, and the difference between those two versions of this song is the difference between everything.
Paul is working the coffee station because he has decided that handing strangers warm drinks is his idea of a good time, and honestly, watching him do it, all controlled grace and quiet here you are, I get it.
There’s a woman a few feet from me who just got her coffee from him, telling her friend that “Dr. Bennett does dream therapy, like, actually meets his patients in their dreams.”
Her friend gasps. “Really?”
“Some people say he’s a crank, but the waitlist is eighteen months long.”
“Eighteen months?”
“I know,” she answers, almost reverently.
He is, for the record, having the time of his life. Mad scientist of sleep. He found the one thing on earth that lets him use everything he is at once, and he glows with it.
I load a tray with muffins and French toast, cut into little gold squares with a dusting of powdered sugar and a spear through each one, because today, apparently, I make French toast, then I start my rounds.
Paul first, because of course, Paul first.
I come up beside him at the coffee station and hold out the plate I made just for him.
The muffin with the exact right crumb, no surprises in the texture, beige and gold, and safe all the way through.
It took me a year to get it right, but then it became one of his safe foods.
One of the small handful of things this careful man can eat without bracing.
“Found you.” I smile at him.
He looks up, and his whole face lights up the way it has every single time for five years.
“You did.” He takes the muffin, then takes my chin in his other hand and kisses me softly in front of everyone, completely unbothered. “Thank you, darling.”
“It’s only a muffin.”
“It’s never only a muffin,” he says against my mouth.