Epilogue – Mia
Eight Months Later
The mural takes up the entire east wall and I still can’t walk past it without stopping.
I finished it two months ago at eleven at night, Harper asleep on the bakery couch under a drop cloth because she’d refused to go home and I’d stopped trying to make her.
She’d been there since six, allegedly helping, but actually sitting on an upturned crate delivering color commentary and requesting I add a whale to the upper left corner between two buildings.
I added the whale. It’s small and easy to miss if you don’t know it’s there, but Harper knows. She checks for it every time she comes in, a quick upward glance before she does anything else, the same reflex she used to have with Reed’s face every morning.
The palette is mostly blues. Cerulean, cobalt, a deep navy that climbs toward the ceiling in the top corner where the city bleeds into sky. Harper picked them, which should surprise nobody at this point.
The bakery opens in thirty-five minutes.
It is not a regular Wednesday. This is the reopening, the expanded space, the new kitchen, the mural on the east wall that took me three months and one very opinionated six-year-old to finish.
Harper is already behind the counter running the sprinkle station, arranging the jars by color with her chin down and her tongue between her teeth.
It is school holidays and she was up before Reed this morning, already dressed, already asking when we were leaving.
“You can’t offer sprinkles on everything,” I tell her.
She looks at me over the jars. “Watch me,” she says, which she got from Juno and has been using since.
Knox is already in the corner booth with a coffee he did not order through any official channel, feet up, jacket slung over the back of the seat, deeply engaged in a disagreement with Celeste that has been running since Tuesday and will almost certainly outlast the morning.
“Before the first customer,” Celeste says, her tablet already open to the photographer’s arrival window. “That’s when the ribbon gets cut.”
“A ribbon cut to an empty room is a photo of a ribbon,” Knox says. “You need people. You need the noise behind it.”
“What I need,” Celeste says, “is the photographer to have something to photograph.”
“People eating croissants is something.”
“Not the something I scheduled. Besides, we can’t ask people to be here that early in the morning.”
Knox looks at the ceiling. “You can’t schedule atmosphere, Celeste.”
“I schedule everything else,” she says. “I don’t see why atmosphere gets special treatment.”
I leave them to it. This argument has no ending and everyone else in the room has accepted this.
Juno is at the espresso machine, which I am choosing to allow because she has been here since four in the morning carrying tables, arguing with the delivery driver, and pretending she wasn’t crying when she thought I was in the kitchen.
She’s at it again now, her back to the room, shoulders doing the slow hitch that means she’s losing the battle with herself.
“Juno.”
“Completely fine,” she says, to the steam wand.
“You’re crying into the portafilter.”
“Good crying.” She turns around, mascara taking a scenic route down both cheeks, chin up, entirely composed in her own estimation. “Don’t make it a thing.”
I hand her a paper towel. She takes it, blows her nose loud enough that Knox glances over from the corner booth, goes back to pulling her shot with full dignity.
“The sprinkles are free today,” Harper announces, without looking up from her jars. “Because it’s a special day.”
“Very kind,” Juno says.
“Everything’s free today,” Harper says. “Because I said so.”
“That’s not how a bakery works,” I say.
“It should be,” she says.
Reed is the last one through the door, coffee in hand, jaw doing the thing that means there was a call he didn’t plan for.
Five months back as CEO and the phone hasn’t stopped, which he claims he expected, but I don’t believe for a second.
He sets the mug in front of me, checks my face, raises his brows.
“Walsh transition,” he says. “Final sign-off. It closed.”
“Good,” I say.
He comes around the counter and puts his arms around me from behind, his hands settling where they always settle now, over the curve of my stomach.
The baby is quiet this morning, which I’ve learned means he’s saving something up.
At nearly nine months he has inherited Reed’s sense of timing, impressive and exhausting in equal measure.
“Vanessa texted,” Reed says, low enough for just me. “She said she hopes it goes well.”
“Does she mean it?”
“Yeah,” he says. “She does.”
It didn’t happen all at once. It happened in pieces, over months, with long silences in between where everyone was figuring out what they actually wanted to say.
Reed called her five days after the press conference.
There were no lawyers or hidden agendas.
It was just him on the phone in the penthouse kitchen at nine in the morning saying the things he’d said at the podium, but this time directly to her and without a camera.
She was quiet for a long time, and then she said she owed him the same.
For the affair, for the morning show, for the corridor at the engagement party, for the supplemental motion, for the contract she’d leaked.
They were on the phone for two hours. Harper was at school and I was at the bakery, and I had no idea it was happening until after.
Vanessa called me ten days later. I let it go to voicemail the first time because I was elbows-deep in a three-tier order, and also because I wasn’t ready.
I called her back that evening from the penthouse, Juno visiting and lounging on the couch with her feet up, a bottle of wine open on the table on the assumption that I’d need it even though it was for her because I was too pregnant to drink anyway.
Vanessa said she was sorry. She listed them one by one, the corridor, the text message, the morning she stood in Reed’s apartment and told me to ask about the settlement, every room she had walked into with the intention of making smaller.
I told her I accepted it. Juno raised her glass from the couch without a word.
Harper doesn’t know the details. She knows her parents can be in the same room now without everyone tensing up, and for a kid who spent the majority of her life reading the temperature of every room before she walked into it, that covers everything that matters.
Reed presses his chin to the top of my head.
We stand behind the counter and look at the bakery, at Harper’s whale in the mural, at Juno pulling herself together by the espresso machine, at Knox and Celeste still fighting a war that neither of them wants to end because it’s the most fun either of them has had in months.
“You okay?” Reed asks.
“Ask me after the first rush,” I say.
“You’ve been doing the first rush since you were twenty-five,” he says. “You’re fine.”
“I know I’m fine,” I say. “I just like you asking.”
His arms tighten once, brief, and I feel our baby shift against my ribs in response.
The door opens at six-fourteen. Juno has been watching the line outside for twenty minutes with increasing distress and has apparently decided that the schedule is someone else’s problem.
“We open at seven,” Celeste says, without turning around.
“There are forty people on the pavement,” Juno says. “One of them has a baby and it’s cold.”
“The photographer arrives at seven.”
“The photographer can photograph forty people eating croissants. That’s a better story than a ribbon.”
Celeste narrows her eyes at Knox who grins daringly.
“Open the door,” Celeste says with a roll of her eyes.
Juno gets it wide and the first customers come in, Harper immediately abandoning her color-coded jar arrangement to brief the first family on the sprinkle station.
Knox cuts the ribbon himself using the kitchen scissors he found behind the counter, holding them up like he’s accepting an award.
Celeste photographs it on her phone without a comment.
The bakery fills. The noise of it, people, coffee, the bell above the door going constantly, the croissants I pulled at six this morning, the sourdough I’ve been nursing since Wednesday, the custom birthday cake in the back that needs collecting at noon. All of it running at once, all of it mine.
Reed stays behind the counter with me through the first twenty minutes, his hand at the small of my back while I move around him, until Harper calls him over to adjudicate a sprinkle dispute between herself and a four-year-old who wants the whole jar.
He goes and I watch him crouch down to the four-year-old’s level to explain the sprinkle situation and find a compromise that makes everyone happy.
I go back to the croissants.
Just before ten the baby kicks, hard, the full heel-to-ribs he’s been practicing for three weeks, and I press my hand to my stomach and breathe through it. When I look up Reed is already watching me from across the counter.
He comes back around without being asked. His hands cover mine and we stand there while the baby settles. Harper comes to put her palms flat next to ours, and the three of us wait in the middle of the bakery on opening day while the baby makes up his mind about whether he has more to say.
He gives one last nudge, smaller, almost polite, and goes still.
“He’s tired,” Harper announces, and goes back to her sprinkle station.
Three days later our baby arrives at four in the morning, loud from the first second, with Reed’s dark hair. Reed holds him first, standing at the window while the city shows its edges in the dark, this small certain person against his shoulder, his eyes glistening.
Harper had picked the name weeks ago, the same way she picked the ring, no debate invited. "Brian," she'd announced over breakfast, pretend-scrolling on a tablet that wasn't even on. "It's a strong name. Like a knight."
Nobody argued with her. Nobody ever does.
He sits in the chair beside my bed, baby Brian sleeping against his chest, one fist curled under his chin. The room is quiet except for the monitors and the hum of the building.
I look at them for a long time.
“Reed.”
He lifts his eyes to mine.
“I’m ready,” I say. “To actually get married. For real.” I hold his gaze across the room. “If you’re still asking.”
He looks at Brian, asleep on his chest, then back at me, and the corner of his mouth lifts.
“I’ve been asking,” he says, “since a Monday morning with flour on the floor.”
THE END
If you enjoyed Faking It with the Damaged Daddy then you'll love Fake Married to My Billionaire Enemy!
I accidentally married the billionaire I hate.Now I’m trapped playing perfect wife to my nemesis.
Callum Collier is everything I despise about New York.Rich. Ruthless. Beautiful in the worst possible way.
The first time we met, I called him out onstage at a Vegas summit.The second time? We ended up drunk, furious, and married.
By morning, we agreed to annul it.One reckless mistake. Forgotten.
Except Callum’s inheritance comes with a catch:Stay married for six months or lose control of his company.
And somehow, I’m the wife he needs.
Now I’m living in his penthouse.Playing the billionaire’s wife.Hating how easily he gets under my skin.
Especially when he starts showing up for my project.Listening to me. Claiming me like I’m more than a deal.
Then there’s the way he touches me like he’s losing control.The way pretending starts to feel dangerously real.
And the terrifying moment I realize I don’t want this marriage to end…Right when I find out I’m pregnant with his baby.