Epilogue Part Two #2
I move on before I forget I have a tray, and after a few hours, the signing is starting to thin out. The line is down to a handful, the crowd loosening into the after-party where people linger with coffee.
I’m crossing the floor with my half-empty tray when I catch a man standing inside the door, neither in the line nor holding a book.
He’s holding a flyer.
Ridge’s signing flyer, the one with a photo of Tessa and me in our whites under the words hosted by Maes & Vaughn’s.
He’s broad in the shoulders, in worn flannel, looking around the room like he’s not sure he should have come.
I know him instantly.
The silent man who let a sobbing stranger ramble her whole broken life at him over a bad burger, who paid my check, walked me to my car, made me lock the door, and watched me drive off chasing a dream.
I set my tray down on the nearest table and walk up to him.
“Scruffy!” I’m grinning like an idiot. “Oh my God, it’s you.”
He frowns at the nickname, but then a smile tugs at his lips as he lifts the flyer, a little sheepish, and shrugs one shoulder.
My throat closes up. “You remembered me?”
He gives me a look like, “How could I forget?” but says nothing, which is so exactly him that I laugh out loud.
“Come here. Come on. I have to show you something.” I grab his sleeve and tow him along the edge of the room. “I rambled an entire tragedy at you last time, and you sat there and let me, so you’ve earned the sequel.”
He walks with me without protest.
“Okay. So.” I sweep a hand at the room, at the banner, at all of it.
“Last time we talked, I had two suitcases and a voicemail that ruined me and nobody on my favorites list who was still alive or still speaking to me. Do you remember that? You remember the voicemail.” His jaw tightens, just slightly, and yeah, he remembers the voicemail. “So. Updates.”
I don’t know where to start, so I start everywhere at once.
“That’s Ridge.” I point at the front table.
“He’s an author. That’s his book. It’s a romance about alien killer plushies, and it’s a bestseller.
Don’t ask. You have to read it. He’s also…
” I stop, start again, because how do you say one of the three men I love to a stranger in a sentence?
“He’s mine. One of mine. It’s a whole thing. I’ll get to it.”
Scruffy’s eyebrows go up a fraction.
“Yeah. We’ll circle back.” I wave a hand toward the coffee station without really pointing this time. “That’s Paul. Also mine. He’s a psychologist. He meets people in their dreams and fixes them. I know how that sounds. It’s real, I promise. I’d know.”
My eyes catch on Nevan before I mean them to, and something in my chest goes soft on its own. “And that’s Nevan. Also… yep, mine. He owns this whole inn.”
The trucker looks at the three of them, then at me, and there’s a question in his face he’s too polite to ask.
“Three,” I confirm anyway. “I have three. I’m aware it’s unusual. They all knew what they were getting into, and they chose it anyway. So did I, and we’re…” I have to stop, because my eyes are stinging again. “We’re really happy. I didn’t know you were allowed to be this happy. Nobody tells you.”
He doesn’t say anything. He slowly nods, filing it away the same way he filed away my disaster five years ago.
“That table.” I don’t even point this time but tip my chin at the loud one.
“That’s my best friend, Tessa, the one I drove out here for.
The one who told me to come find her. She was…
” asleep for twelve years, stuck in a dream.
I went into the dark to drag her out. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
“She was really sick for a long time. She’s better now.
We run the restaurant together. It was our dream since we were in culinary school. ”
I point to the man at her side, the one hovering with a glass of water she didn’t ask for.
“That’s Derek. He let her go a long time ago because he thought he was doing the right thing, the idiot, and then he spent a whole year groveling to earn her back, on his knees, in public.
It was magnificent. I have never enjoyed anything more.
” My gaze catches on the baby on Nora’s lap.
“That’s Tessa’s mom, Nora. And that little troublemaker is Tessa’s and Derek’s.
She has no teeth but bites. We adore her, just like Melanie, Derek’s oldest, who is very serious about her job as big sister. ”
The trucker looks at the baby, and something in his weathered face goes gentle.
“Mabel. She gave Nevan the inn. She lives with Marcus and Renée now. That’s them, so she’s not on her own, because…” Because she lost the best friend she had for sixty years, because I got mine back. “Because that’s what family does.”
I steer him toward the corner, where a young man in black eyeliner and silver rings is laying tarot cards out on a little draped table for a delighted line of readers.
“And that’s Jasper. Nevan’s little brother.
He does tarot. It’s his whole business, mostly online.
He’s got this internet following. People drive out just for a reading.
He lives in the cottage out back with his boyfriend.
He’s the one who told me, way at the beginning, that we were all supposed to be family.
He was right. He’s annoyingly right about most things. ”
I run out of people to point at and words at the same time, which has genuinely never happened to me before.
“That’s the update,” I say, quieter, feeling my cheeks heat. “Last time you got the tragedy. This is the happy part. The part I didn’t know was coming when I was crying into a burger at the gas station.”
He looks at all of it. The banner, the family, the men, the baby, the song still playing low over the speakers. Then he glances back at me, this guy who never once needed words to be kind to me, and he says, “Good.”
I have to press my lips together so I don’t cry in front of him for the second time in five years.
Good.
“Yeah,” I manage. “Yeah, it is.”
He folds the flyer carefully, tucks it into his flannel pocket, and tips his head toward the door, getting ready to go back out onto whatever long road he’s on.
“Hey,” I catch his sleeve one more time.
“There’s no service today. But you remember what I said?
At the diner? That if you were ever in town, you should come by for a better burger?
” I jab a thumb at my chest. “I’m the chef now so that offer stands, and it’s a much better burger.
Next time you’re close, you come here, and you let me make it for you. Deal?”
He looks at me. The corner of his mouth moves, the same fraction it moved five years ago when I made him try my emergency sauce.
He raps his knuckles twice against the doorframe, and then he’s gone, out into the gray afternoon, and I stand in the doorway, watching until I can’t see him anymore, the way I once watched him cross a dark parking lot to make sure he got there safe.
With him, the crowd thins to family, and the family eventually thins to just us, the way it always ends up.
Tessa and Derek have taken the kids home, and Jasper has packed up his cards with the smug glow of a man who booked out his next three months in one afternoon.
Ridge is exhausted and pretending he isn’t.
Paul is washing the last of the cups by hand because the dishwasher is apparently not doing a good enough job.
Nevan is stacking chairs, and Pudding is asleep under table four.
Pudding is Nevan’s and my dog. A Maltipoo.
An unbelievably cute, apricot-colored, eight-pound dog that Ridge campaigned against for a solid month.
“We are not getting a small dog, Lenny. I have a reputation. I write horror,” and who now sleeps on Ridge’s chest every single night, rides in his lap through the house, and answers only to Ridge, the traitor, who insists he tolerates her and who I have personally heard, through a door, calling her the best girl in the entire world.
“Come on, monster.” Ridge scoops her up off the floor, and she doesn’t even wake, just melts over his arm. “Time to go home.”
Home.
When everyone is out, I take one last look at the room in the restaurant that was a notebook dream, inside the inn that turned into a home, the empty cake stand, the banner, the tarot cards Jasper left behind, and I flip the light.
The car ride home is quiet at first, a comfortable silence that only comes after a day that feels too full.
Ridge is in the passenger seat, Pudding a snoring weight in his lap, her apricot fluff spilling over his black jeans as if she were poured there.
Paul drives with one hand on the wheel, the other reaching back and resting on my knee where my skirt has ridden up, thumb tracing absent circles against bare skin.
Nevan is beside me behind Ridge, his long legs crammed in front of him.
I’m still tasting butter and cinnamon on my tongue. My body feels loose and buzzing, like the French toast, the laughter, and the sheer rightness of today have rewired something in me.
Ridge shifts, glancing over his shoulder with that half smirk that always means trouble. “You gonna tell us why you went full domestic goddess on French toast today, or are we supposed to guess?”
I scrunch my nose at him. “It just happened. My hands knew before the brain caught up.”
“Mm.” Paul’s thumb presses a little firmer, sliding higher under the hem of my skirt. “That so?”
“What can I say, my hands have good instincts.”
Nevan leans over, his breath warm against my ear when he says, “Yeah? Anything else those hands are good at?”
Heat races up my neck.
I twist enough to smack his shoulder, but he catches my wrist before I can escape and presses a kiss against the inside of it.
“Behave,” I say, but it comes out breathy, not commanding.
“That’s adorable.” Ridge chuckles.
“What?”
“You always tell us to behave after you’ve started it.”
“I did not start…”