26. Epilogue
Epilogue
Darius
Claire starts fading around nine-thirty these days, which the pregnancy books assure me is completely normal and I find endlessly entertaining for a woman who used to answer crisis emails at midnight, sleep four hours, and somehow show up looking more prepared than everyone else in the room.
Tonight she's still awake. Barely.
Her feet are in my lap, and a bowl of mint chip is balanced on her stomach like the baby installed a shelf up there for convenience.
I've been carrying a thought around for two weeks. It sits in my chest the way a play sits in my legs before the snap, and I know from experience that if I hold it any longer, I'm going to jump early.
"I want to marry you before the baby comes."
Claire's spoon stops halfway to her mouth.
Okay… what’s going on in that head of yours?"
I try to play it cool.
Fail.
She snorts. "Yeah, that’s what I thought."
I rub my thumb along her ankle, steadying myself.
“It’s not some big dramatic thing,” I say.
“I just… didn’t have my father around growing up.
And I want our son to know he was wanted from the jump.
Wanted enough that his parents made it official before he even got here.
I want him born into a family that’s already real on paper. With my name. With us.”
Her whole face softens.
Then she scoots closer, throws her arms around my neck, and kisses me — a quick, proud little peck that hits harder than anything else could.
“Absolutely,” she murmurs against my mouth. “God, Darius… yeah.”
When she pulls back, she’s a little breathless.
“Wow. I wasn’t expecting that tonight.”
She clears her throat, like she needs something to hold onto, and reaches for the pack of cinnamon gum on the coffee table.
“Which brings me to my next question,” she says, waving it at me. “Why do you keep giving me these?”
"The gum?"
"Yes, the gum." She holds up the pack. "You've been carrying this stuff around for months. You hand it to me after games. Before interviews. Randomly. At one point I genuinely thought you were trying to fix my breath."
I laugh.
"No."
"Then what is it?"
I don't have a line ready. That's new.
I shrug.
"You’re not ready for this but…my coach used to give me a piece before every game."
She blinks.
"What?"
"When I was a kid." I pick at a loose thread on the couch cushion. "Big game, bad game, didn't matter. He'd hand me a piece and tell me to go win."
Her voice goes soft. "And now?"
My eyes find hers.
"Now I give it to somebody when I wanna win."
The room goes quiet.
She stares at the pack in her hand like she's recounting every piece I ever left on her desk, her notebook, the dashboard of my car.
"So that's what this is?" she asks softly.
A smile pulls at the corner of my mouth.
"My good luck charm."
She looks down at the gum again. Then back at me.
"You know, for someone planning a surprise, you're getting surprisingly sentimental."
My grin comes back.
And just like that, the interrogation is over. She knows she's not getting another word out of me.
***
The Wells backyard on the Fourth of July looks like Grace and Hannah robbed a craft store and a flower stand on the same afternoon.
String lights run between the oak trees.
Folding chairs sit in four short rows on the grass, fifteen of them, which is the entire guest list. There's an arch at the end of the yard made of wildflowers that Hannah and Grace built themselves, and it leans a little to the left, and nobody is allowed to mention it.
No press. No drones. No media pass within ten miles.
Just Ricky moving around the yard with his camera, here as a friend this time instead of a hire, a Polaroid on a card table by the sweet tea, and a twelve-year-old who has appointed himself head of media.
"Darius!" Jacob sprints across the grass in a clip-on tie, camera swinging from his neck. "I already took eleven pictures. Four of them are of my thumb."
"That's a sixty-four percent completion rate. We'll work on it."
He grins and tears off toward Malik and Jordan, who were leaning on a pier railing the night I proposed and apparently decided that earned them lifetime invitations.
They're not wrong. One of them has already clocked Katie by the sweet tea table and keeps inventing reasons to drift in her direction.
I give him til the reception until he tries to take her out.
Jaylen straightens my collar for the fourth time. He's wearing the best man title like it comes with a championship belt.
"You good?" he asks.
"I'm good."
"You're sweating."
"It's July in Texas, Jaylen."
"It's nerves, Hollywood." He grips my shoulder and his voice drops out of joke range. "Took you long enough to get here, man. Proud of you."
Before I can answer, Grace appears at my elbow, quiet and exactly on time. She takes my hand and presses a small velvet pouch into it.
"It was my mother's," she says. "Claire's grandmother wore it for fifty-one years. We'd like it to keep going."
I open the pouch. A thin gold band, soft at the edges from half a century of someone's hands.
"Grace, I can't."
"You can." She pats my hand like I'm Jacob's age. "Now stop crying before the ceremony or my daughter never lets you live it down."
Samuel watches the exchange from his lawn chair, dressed in his good suit with a blanket folded over the armrest he refuses to use.
Samuel waves me over.
I crouch beside his chair.
"You take care of her."
"I will."
His gaze flicks toward the house, then back to me.
"I know you will."
He reaches up and fixes my tie.
"Now quit stallin’. She's waited long enough."
I laugh and look away before anyone notices my eyes burning.
In my jacket pocket is a letter from Monica, folded soft from being read too many times.
She gets out in the spring.
The last page is mostly instructions about the wedding. Tell Claire congratulations. Don't let Jacob near anything flammable. Send me some pictures if you can..
The part I've read the most is only one sentence.
I'm proud of the man you've become.
A few feet away, Ricky lifts his camera and snaps another photo.
For the first time in a long time, I think she might be, too.
***
The screen door opens and the whole backyard goes quiet.
I've played in front of seventy thousand people. I've caught balls with three hundred pounds of angry man bearing down on me. I've stood at podiums while reporters carved me up for sport.
None of it prepared me for this.
Claire Wells is walking across her parents' grass in a white dress, and my brain just... stops.
The dress is simple. She's not. Six months pregnant, hair pinned up, moving like she's not nervous at all, even though I know her well enough to know she absolutely is. She looks beautiful. That's it. That's all I've got.
Then I see who's beside her.
Samuel.
His steps are slower than they used to be, careful and deliberate, but he's standing. Walking. Here. A few weeks ago, there was a very real chance he wouldn't be.
Claire has one hand looped through his arm. He says something that makes her laugh, and the sound carries across the yard.
Grace is already crying. Hannah isn't far behind, and Katie is trying to film the entire thing for social media and narrating it like a Love Island confessional.
I barely notice.
Because Samuel reaches the end of the aisle and stops in front of me.
For a moment, nobody speaks.
Then he takes Claire's hand and places it in mine.
It lasts maybe ten seconds. But I know what it cost him to be standing here to do it.
Claire's eyes are already shining.
Mine probably aren't doing much better.
Samuel gives a small nod and steps back. No speech. No grand declaration. Just a father trusting me with the most important thing in his life.
That means more than anything he could have said.
Claire's fingers tighten around mine.
I squeeze back.
Then Pastor Ellison clears his throat and begins.
***
The vows come next, and we wrote our own, and mine are on a note card I don't look at once.
"I wanted to do this before the baby came," I tell her, "because I never want there to be a question about what this family means to me."
My fingers tighten around hers.
"You believed in me when I hadn't given anyone a reason to. You loved me before I finished becoming the man I wanted to be."
My throat tightens. I push through it.
"So my promise is simple. I'll keep choosing you. On the easy days, on the hard days, and on any given Sunday in between."
"I'll show up."
Claire's hands are shaking in mine as I smile. Her voice isn't, but she starts with a laugh, which is so perfectly her that half the backyard smiles before she's said a word.
"I never thought I'd fall in love like this." She glances at me. "Honestly? I didn't think I'd fall in love with you at all."
The backyard laughs.
I do too.
"I had a whole plan. A spreadsheet, actually." She squeezes my hands. "You were not on it."
More laughter.
Her smile softens.
"But you showed up anyway. And you kept showing up. Even when I made it difficult. Even when I told you it was just business and we both knew that was a lie."
Her eyes find mine and stay.
"So here's the thing. I don't have a perfect speech. I just know that the scariest moment of my life was realizing I'd stopped caring whether any of this was pretend."
Her voice catches, just barely.
"You don't have to be perfect for me, Darius. You never did. You just have to keep showing up."
She smiles through it.
"I think you can handle that."
Grace hands over the rings. The gold band slides onto Claire's finger and settles against the oval pavé like they were always supposed to sit together — the ring that started as a lie, next to the one that's been true for fifty-one years.
"You may kiss your bride," Pastor Ellison says.
I do.
Jacob's Polaroid flashes at the exact second our lips meet, and somewhere past the fence line, the fireworks start.
Real ones, big ones, the whole sky cracking gold and red over the oak trees.
Jaylen is clapping so hard you'd think we just scored a game-winning touchdown.
I laugh against Claire's mouth.
Claire pulls back just enough to narrow her eyes at me.
"Oh, come on. You expect me to believe this wasn't you?"
I look at the fireworks. Then back at her.
She groans.
"Of course."
I tug her back in by the waist. "Come on, Mrs. Webb. You know me better than that."
***
The reception is Grace's cooking on folding tables and Hannah's playlist of old love songs coming out of a speaker on the porch rail.
Malik and Jordan raise sweet tea like it's champagne and toast to "the best hands in the league finally holding onto the right thing," which is corny, and which I will be stealing.
Near the dessert table, Samuel catches my arm.
"About those stretches," he says. "Doctor says I need to move more."
"You do."
He nods.
"And maybe, somewhere down the line, I might look into a used motorcycle."
I look at him.
"A used motorcycle?"
His shoulders lift.
"Grace would probably object to a new one."
"You know your son-in-law plays in the NFL, right?"
Samuel tries not to smile.
"Unless...?"
I laugh.
"We'll discuss it."
***
Across the yard, Jacob is hanging Polaroids on a string with clothespins.
Most of them are crooked.
A few are blurry.
One somehow contains more of his thumb than the wedding.
Claire leans into my side as we stop in front of them.
The kiss. The vows.
Her father walking her down the aisle.
The first dance.
Every one of them wholesome enough to frame.
She snorts.
"What?"
She points at the pictures.
"These are significantly less embarrassing than the last set."
I groan before she finishes the sentence.
The photo strip in my wallet tells a different story. One that was never meant for an audience.
And I wouldn't change a single frame.
The End
***