Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER, I'M standing on a red carpet in a dress that fits like it was scared not to, and my husband is trying very hard not to strangle a photographer.
"He's four feet away," I murmur, waving at a wall of light. "That's a legal distance."
"It's a rude distance."
"You think every distance under a mile is rude."
"Only where you're concerned." His hand finds the small of my back, exactly where it went the first time we ever danced, and steers me down the line like a man escorting the crown jewels through a bad neighborhood.
The film is the biggest thing I've ever done. My name is above the title. There's a version of me, a broke girl on a diner floor with somebody else's heart and two small suitcases, who wouldn't believe a single second of this night, and I carry her down the carpet with me because she earned it too.
Later, we come home to a place that doesn't have a single locked door left in it.
And he takes his time with me. That's the part that's only ours, the one I'll never tell anyone.
The most controlled man I have ever known, the one who used to ration his own smiles like they cost him blood, is the one who comes undone the slowest, on purpose, like he has decided we have the whole rest of our lives and he means to spend every last minute of them.
He undoes the dress one clasp at a time and lets it fall and doesn't hurry after it.
He kisses the hollow under my jaw where my pulse always gives me away.
He kisses the scar down the center of my chest, the one he used to look at like it hurt him to stand near, and kisses it now like it's the reason he gets to have any of this at all.
My hands are in his hair. His name is the only word I have left in me.
"Maximo," I breathe, the name that is only ever his now, and I feel what it still does to him, reaching some room in him that stayed bricked up for years and isn't anymore.
He says my name back into my skin like a vow he can't quite believe he's allowed to make.
And when there's nothing left between us, no wall, no rule, no page number, no careful arm's length he used to keep like a religion, he moves in me slow and sure and shaking just a little, a man holding the one thing he was certain he'd never once be allowed to keep.
I come apart in his arms with my whole loud heart.
He follows me with my name in his mouth.
And for once in his careful, rationed life, he lets himself be loud about being happy, too.
Afterward, with the dress a puddle on the floor and the city humming far below the windows, I lie against him in the dark and put my ear over the strong, sure sound of his heart.
He rests his hand over mine.
Over the one that isn't mine. That was never mine.
"I used to think I was guarding Mary's heart," he tells me, into my hair, his hand warm over the beat of it. "I was wrong. Mary's gift brought you to me. But every beat I love now is yours."
I have to breathe through that one. Two years of grief and a lifetime of getting it wrong, and the man puts it into a single sentence in the dark.
So I do the only thing big enough to answer it.
I tap his chest, right over his own heart, the one that took the longest of all of us to start beating.
"Still jealous?"
He laughs, low and real, and presses a kiss to my forehead, and pulls me in like he's got no intention of ever letting the distance get rude again.
"Always," Mr. H says. "But now I don't have to pretend I'm not."
And I lie there in the dark with my head on the chest of the most honorable man I know, wearing a dead girl's gift and a living man's love, and I finally understand what the H stood for all along.
Hot. Honorable.
Hers.
Still. Always. Hers.
The End
Romans 8:28 NLT And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.