Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
Elise walked to Stephen in a flowing ivory dress of lace and silk.
And of course she wore her good boots. The aisle was a strip of mowed grass between two banks of folding chairs, and it ran down to the pond and the big live oak, clear to the patch of bank where he’d kissed her the first time and undone every plan she’d ever made.
He’d asked her for exactly one thing about the day. “Let’s have the wedding by the pond,” he’d said. She agreed because it was the perfect spot to blend their past with their future.
Her two matrons of honor, Annie and Kelly, waited for her wearing the particular smug glow of women whose scheme had paid off in a wedding. They’d earned it, Elise supposed.
Stephen stood at the end of the aisle in a dark jacket, scrubbed and nervous and so handsome. Chad stood up beside him as best man, with Maddox and Robert next to him managing to keep the jokes for later.
She reached him, and he took both her hands in his. “Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi,” he whispered back. Their wedding party and guests faded into the background as the two of them stood together to pledge their everlasting love to each other.
They kept the vows simple, the way they’d kept everything between them. Stephen had his on a card in his shirt pocket, but he didn’t even need to take it out.
“I spent a long while being a closed-up man,” he said, his voice low and level.
“You opened me up completely. I’ll spend the rest of my life being the proof.
” He stopped, and pressed his lips hard together, and when he finished the last sentence his voice was strong and clear and unwavering.
“I’ll love you till they put me under that oak, Elise. And into eternity.”
Elise had hers on three index cards, color-coded, because… of course she had color-coded notes. “Stephen Garrett,” she said, “you answer a three-paragraph email with one word. You keep it simple where another would pen a sonnet. Early on, I wasn’t sure if he had much of a vocabulary at all.”
She let the laugh roll through the rows of chairs before she went on, and her own voice went soft.
“Then I learned to read you. You only say what you mean. You showed up, and stayed, and told me the truth even when it cost you so much.” Her voice wobbled but she continued.
“I’ll take your one word responses every day with joy.
I love you with all I am and all I’ll ever be”
The preacher was three words into the pronouncement when Stephen quit waiting on the cue. He had her face in his hands and he kissed her with a dip as the whole gathering stood to cheer.
The reception spilled out across the land the way the ceremony had, no boundaries to hold it in. Lights ran branch to branch and a fiddle band sawed away on a flatbed. Everyone danced in the freshly cut grass.
Stephen danced with his bride under the string lights. He wasn’t a graceful dancer, even with all the practice, but she loved that he’d wanted to be his best for their big day.
Robert stood to toast them and got three sentences in before he steered the whole business toward himself.
“I’ll say only this,” he announced. “Not one of you would be standing in this pretty spot tonight if I hadn’t had the wisdom to hire one Elise Pollard as my office manager. You’re welcome. I accept all credit.”
“You did not make this happen, Robert Shipley,” Annie called out. “Kelly and I made this happen. You were a subcontractor.”
“A subcontractor who dreamed up the supply run,” Robert said.
“On my suggestion,” said Kelly.
The whole crowd laughed, and beside Elise, Stephen laughed too, the easy unguarded way he’d relaxed into.
Later, Annie and Kelly cornered her by the cake table, one on each side, and hugged her till her ribs creaked.
“We did good,” Annie said wetly. “We did so good.” Kelly didn’t say a single word, which for Kelly was the loudest thing she could have done, and Elise hugged the both of them close and let them have every ounce of the credit they’d been angling for since this thing started.
Near the end of it, when the band had slowed to the late songs and the little ones were asleep across laps, Elise caught Stephen’s hand and drew him away from the lights, up the rise to the old house.
They’d been working on that house all year, the two of them, evenings and Saturdays, tearing out and building new.
The new addition was almost finished. Her deep farmhouse sink sat in the kitchen at last, a window set over it for the morning sun.
She would sleep under this roof tonight.
Tomorrow her tidy white dishes would come up out of their boxes and into Ruth Garrett’s cupboards, where they belonged.
On the porch, in the glow of the porch lights, with the music drifting up faint from the party below, she dug into a hidden pocket she’d had the seamstress sew into the dress. A woman who planned ahead needed a pocket. She pulled out a folded square of paper. “I made you a list,” she said.
“Of course you did.”
She unfolded it and held it up for him. One line at the top, in her tidy slanted hand, already crossed through with a single clean stroke. Marry Stephen Garrett.
He laughed, the deep real one, and pulled her into him so her cheek lay against his lapel. “You crossed it off before the ink on the license dried.”
“It isn’t crossed off till it’s done,” she said. “And now we’re married so it’s done. You’re stuck with me and my lists for good now.”
“I love your lists,” he murmured. “You can color-code anything you want.” He kissed the top of her head.
Then he reached into his own jacket and drew out a piece of paper of his own, worn soft and creased through from a year of handling in his pocket. A yellow Post-it note, her grocery list from the worst week of both their lives, the one he’d carried through the breakup and never thrown away.
“You kept it,” she said, the words coming thick.
“Told you I did.” He smoothed it open against the porch rail beside her list, his worn old scrap and her crisp new one side by side.
“Two-by-fours, and the brushed cabinet pulls, and the deep farmhouse sink we already crossed off.” He tapped the little note.
“We let these projects slide, while we were planning the wedding. Figure we ought to get back on them.”
She leaned into him on the porch of the house that was theirs now. It had been a long road to land in this place that was truly hers. It was home. Plainly and simply and finally, home.
Stephen tipped her chin up and kissed her, unhurried, a married man with nowhere on Earth to be and the rest of his life to do it in. “I love you,” she said against his mouth.
“I love you,” he said in return. Three words tonight. From Stephen Garrett, that was a whole sonnet.
I hope you loved Elise and Stephen’s love story! It was a sweet story to write.