Epilogue
One Year Later
The coffee was perfect, which meant Sebastian had made it.
I’d been trying to replicate his method for six months — the specific ratio, the temperature, whatever dark science he applied to a French press at seven in the morning — and had produced exactly zero cups that tasted like this.
He claimed it wasn’t complicated. He was lying, and we both knew it, and neither of us had any intention of resolving the disagreement because it meant he kept making the coffee and I kept being disproportionately grateful, which was apparently a dynamic that worked for us.
“You’re doing it again,” Sebastian said without looking up from his phone.
“Doing what?”
“Staring at your coffee like it’s a source you’re trying to break.”
“I’m studying it.” I wrapped both hands around the mug and took a sip. Still perfect. Infuriating. “There has to be a trick.”
“There isn’t.”
“There absolutely is.”
He set his phone down and looked at me across the kitchen island — unhurried, the morning light catching the silver at his temples, wearing a shirt I was fairly certain he’d pulled from my side of the closet by accident.
The controlled authority he’d carried into every room for thirty-nine years had softened into something easier.
Still precise. Still him. But less armored, in the way that only happened when he’d decided somewhere was safe.
Our kitchen, apparently, had made the list.
“Happy anniversary,” he said.
“Is it already?” I set my mug down. “Seems like just yesterday you were catching me in your service corridor and threatening to have me removed.”
“I never threatened to have you removed.”
“You absolutely implied it.”
“I implied you were trespassing.” The corner of his mouth moved. “That’s different.”
“The distinction is noted and rejected.” I reached across the island and stole a piece of his toast. “One year.”
“One year.”
He said it simply, but I heard what was underneath it — the same thing I’d been sitting with all morning.
The specific, improbable weight of a year that had started with corruption and death threats and a series of spectacular decisions and had somehow produced this.
Coffee at a kitchen island. A corkboard in his library.
The easy shorthand of two people who had learned each other’s rhythms well enough to navigate them without a map.
The townhouse had settled into itself around us over the past months — his clean lines interrupted by my organized chaos, my lone plant on the windowsill that he’d started watering without being asked, the reading glasses he left on my side of the bed that I’d stopped returning to his.
Small invasions. Small decisions. The slow accumulation of a life shared rather than managed.
“Jenna texted,” I said. “She’s coming over later. Wants to celebrate with cupcakes.”
Sebastian made the expression he always made when Jenna was mentioned — somewhere between fond and slightly wary, the expression of a man who respected someone’s loyalty and their complete lack of filter in equal measure.
“How many cupcakes?”
“She said, and I quote, enough to constitute a health risk.”
“Naturally.” He picked up his coffee. “And what are we celebrating, from her perspective?”
“She’s had approximately seven different theories about us over the past year. Currently she believes we’re a case study in what she calls the enemies-to-lovers-to-functional-adults pipeline and she’s very proud of her role in it.”
“Her role being?”
“She lent me dresses.” I smiled into my mug. “Apparently that counts.”
Sebastian laughed — the real one, unhurried and warm, the one I’d been quietly cataloging since a balcony in November when a stranger who hadn’t yet told me his name had laughed at something I’d said and I’d thought, absurdly, I want to hear that again.
I’d heard it hundreds of times now. It still did the same thing to my chest.
“The show’s second season got picked up,” I said. “Officially confirmed this morning.”
“I know. You woke me up at six to tell me.”
“You pretended to be asleep.”
“I was celebrating privately.” He reached across and covered my hand with his — warm and certain, the gesture as natural now as breathing. “Em. I’m proud of you. You built that from nothing, on your terms, without anyone’s help except the help you specifically asked for.”
I turned my hand over and laced our fingers together. “I asked for your investment.”
“After presenting a forty-page business plan and making me sign a contract that would have made my own legal team flinch.”
“I wasn’t taking any chances.”
“No.” His thumb traced across my knuckles. “You never do.”
We sat with that for a moment — the morning settling around us, the city coming awake outside the windows, all the ordinary machinery of a Tuesday that happened to be the anniversary of the first time we’d agreed, in any official sense, that this was what we were.
“Do you remember what you said to me?” I asked. “That first night. In your service corridor.”
“I said approximately forty things in that service corridor.”
“The one about ambition.” I met his eyes. “You said I had ambition and a general disdain for people who could afford yacht maintenance. And that you said it like it was refreshing.”
Something moved in his expression. “I remember.”
“I thought you were insufferable.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“I also thought—” I stopped. Decided to say it anyway because that was what we’d built this on.
Saying the things instead of managing them.
“I thought you were the most interesting person I’d met in years.
Before I knew your name. Before I knew what you were going to cost me.
” I squeezed his hand. “I would do all of it again.”
Sebastian was quiet for a moment, and I watched him do the thing he still did sometimes — the brief internal reckoning of a man deciding to say the true thing rather than the safe thing.
“I left the balcony that night before you could ask my name,” he said. “Because I was rattled, and I needed to think, and control was the only language I knew.” He looked at me steadily. “I’ve spent the past year learning a different one.”
“How’s that going?”
“Ask me in another year.” The corner of his mouth curved. “I’m told I’m getting better.”
“You are,” I said. “Incrementally. At a pace consistent with someone who spent four decades doing it the wrong way.”
“High praise, Rivera.”
“I thought so.”
The doorbell rang at eleven, and I opened it to find Jenna on the doorstep holding a box that was, conservatively, twelve cupcakes deep, wearing the expression of a woman who had been waiting to do this for a long time.
“Happy anniversary,” she announced, already moving past me into the hallway. “I brought red velvet because Sebastian looks like a red velvet person and chocolate because you’re a chocolate person and don’t argue with me about this, I’ve known you for eight years and I’m right.”
“You’re right,” I confirmed.
“Obviously.” She set the box on the kitchen island, spotted Sebastian, and pointed at him with the directness that had made her both my best friend and occasionally my greatest source of secondhand anxiety. “You. You’ve been good to her this year?”
Sebastian, to his credit, didn’t flinch. “I’ve been trying.”
“Good answer.” She opened the box. “Honest. I respect honest.” She glanced between us, and something in her expression softened from mock-interrogation into something genuine.
“You two are disgustingly good together, you know that? Like, I was rooting for you before I was rooting for you, and it is genuinely satisfying to be right about people.”
“You spent six months telling me he was trouble,” I said.
“He was trouble. He was also eventually worth it, which is a different thing.” She picked up a red velvet cupcake and handed it to Sebastian with the gravity of someone presenting an award. “Congratulations on not screwing it up.”
Sebastian took the cupcake. “Thank you, Jenna. Truly.”
“Don’t make it weird.” But she was smiling.
She stayed for two hours — the conversation moving through the show’s new season and a story I was building about city planning corruption and a trip Sebastian and I were taking to Portugal in the spring and, inevitably, Jenna’s ongoing, elaborate opinions about everyone in her life.
Sebastian sat with us at the kitchen island and contributed occasionally and laughed when she was funny, which was often, and I watched him do it and thought about the man I’d met at a charity gala who had looked at me like a problem to be solved and was now sitting in our kitchen eating cupcakes with my best friend on a Tuesday morning.
Improbable. Entirely ours.
When Jenna left she hugged me at the door and then, characteristically, turned back.
“Em.”
“Yeah?”
“You look happy.” She said it simply, like a fact. “Like, genuinely, actually happy. Not just winning — happy.” She tilted her head. “It’s a good look on you.”
I felt Sebastian’s hand find the small of my back from where he’d appeared behind me. The familiar weight of it. The specific warmth.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it is.”
Later, when the afternoon had gone quiet and the cupcake box was significantly depleted and Sebastian was on the couch with his laptop and I was at my desk with my notes, I looked up and caught him watching me.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He turned back to his screen. “Just making sure you’re real.”
I set down my pen. Crossed to the couch. He made room for me without looking up, and I settled against his side with the ease of something done so many times it had stopped requiring thought.
“Still real,” I confirmed.
“Good.” He closed his laptop. His arm came around me. “That’s good.”
Outside, Chicago did what Chicago did — indifferent and relentless and entirely uninterested in the specific miracle of two people who had started as adversaries and worked their way, through considerable effort and a frankly unreasonable amount of conflict, to this couch on a Tuesday afternoon.
His heartbeat was steady under my ear.
“Sebastian.”
“Hmm.”
“Here’s to another year.”
His lips pressed to my hair. “And then some.”
“And then some,” I agreed.
The afternoon light shifted. The city moved. We stayed exactly where we were.