Epilogue
One Year Later
A crisp breeze sweeps down from the mountains and through the canyon where Life Paleontology is wrapping up its first season. The wind brings the bittersweet smells that mark the end of summer: warm wheat, cool rain, and turning leaves.
Ripley’s summer crew left a few days ago, heading back to their universities, winter excavation sites, or regular jobs.
This year, she and James hired a couple of Cara’s high-school-age cousins too.
It worked out great, especially because the main road is so much closer to this dig than it was at Yellowtail; since it’s five minutes away, not twenty, the high-schoolers could drive in from home instead of staying on-site.
“Is that everything?” Ripley calls down into the canyon.
“I think so. No sign of Matteo’s hammer, though.
I suppose it’s now consigned to history,” James says, his face coming into view at the edge of the drop.
He’s wearing one of the logoed shirts Ripley ordered for their new company.
Over his left pectoral, a fossilized bird unfurls its wings.
Below that is their slogan: Life Paleontology Finds a Way.
From under James’s right sleeve, the tail of his latest tattoo curls saucily down.
It’s the beast from The Wild Dragon—a fantasy novel displaying his very first cover commission.
Ripley asked if he was going to get a tattoo for every bestselling book’s cover, to which he tartly replied, “I’m getting one for every cover I illustrate, sales be damned.
” She wouldn’t mind if he did, although her favorite piece will always be the phoenix inked over his heart.
She framed the original watercolor, which he titled Ripley, Rising.
She loves all the pieces in his new Ripley series, especially the ones where he’s included himself, but this is the only one she’s willing to display in public.
“We should get Matteo a new hammer,” Ripley says. “He deserves a thank-you gift after working so hard this season.”
“He deserves half a thank-you gift,” James counters, setting down the last of the stray pieces of equipment he’s collected on his sweep through the dig: a chisel with a broken handle, a couple of small brushes, a roll of aluminum foil, a plaster-covered mixing stick, and a bucket handle Ripley remembers losing her mind trying to find last week.
“Cara can buy him the other half. Clever Girl found another holotype this summer, after all.”
“We had a great summer too,” she says soothingly.
The past few months were everything Ripley wanted from a summer season.
She loved the days when they uncovered exciting things and the days that felt boring and frustrating.
There were all the usual glitches that come with a new start-up, and Ripley hasn’t yet found the next missing link between Beauty and modern birds.
They did stumble over a very nice juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, though.
It’ll take another year or two to fully excavate something that big, but there’s no rush.
Matteo did a beautiful job on it this summer—that is, when he wasn’t supervising the high-schoolers or working part-time over at Clever Girl.
This fall, he’ll be starting his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley.
Ripley hopes she’ll run into him now and then while she’s getting ready to defend her PhD on the migration patterns of proto-avian theropods in ancient North America.
Her new supervisor at Berkeley—a lovely woman who was recently elected president of the APS—doesn’t mind at all if Ripley works on her dissertation in England.
Overall, the summer’s been busy. Happy. And after they spent a gray, wet winter at Oxford, she felt happy to be home—here, in this place, with the people she’s come to think of as family.
With the money from Beast’s sale, Ripley could have taken a good chunk of time off, but there’s a particular joy in knowing she wants to do this work even if she doesn’t have to.
James closes the distance between them, threads his arms under Ripley’s, and lifts her into a hug.
His hair is longer and less disciplined now.
Loose, artistically rumpled dark curls ruffle in the Montana breeze, caressing her ear when she tucks her chin against his neck.
His body has changed, too, after a rigorous second summer of digging and drawing.
She can feel the difference in the musculature across his shoulders and in the ease with which he picks her up and holds her in her favorite kind of hug, letting her back stretch out after a long day of hunching over a specimen.
He smells like sunscreen and clean sweat and a hint of the expensive English bath products she insists he keep using.
“Are you sad to be leaving, my darling?”
“A bit. But we’ll be back next summer.” After the FBI’s quick, slightly sheepish release of Beauty and Beast, the rancher next door put his property up for sale.
Ripley suspects he wasn’t doing well financially, and when it became clear he wouldn’t get a payout from Will, he found himself without many choices.
As had Will himself. Upon closer examination, his fossil was found to be a jumble of stolen bones from a total of six museums. Ironically, if he hadn’t tried to pass them off as a single specimen, he and his team could have identified four holotypes hiding in various research collections.
Well, three, after Ripley and Cara snagged a holotype for Beauty.
The former Shipman property is now owned by Daphne and Mei, a very sweet couple who run an organic farming collective. Ripley wasted no time approaching them about the fossil rights. They were thrilled to have an extra income stream during their first few precarious, mortgage-heavy years.
Which means that, for at least the next couple of summers, Life Paleontology and Clever Girl will be neighbors, separated only by the winding course of the creek. Sister businesses, as Ripley likes to think of them.
They went halves on a bigger, more efficient solar installation this summer. Cara still pulls Ripley aside at least once a week for a consultation on a tricky excavation or an ID on a weird bone, and Cara’s experienced enough now that Ripley can do the same with her.
“Oi! Love chickens!” Across the property line, Griff smirks at them from the passenger seat of Cara’s jeep. “Stop snogging and get in or I won’t be responsible for how many of the tacos perish.”
“My dear Griffin,” James says, his lips against a spot on Ripley’s shoulder where the collar of her rucked-up shirt has fallen open. “Quite bold of you to criticize, considering the time we stumbled upon you and Cara—”
“Fair, fair,” Griff says hurriedly. “I’ll respect the tacos. I make no promises for what Geraldine will do to you, though.”
“In that case,” Ripley says, unwinding her arms from James’s neck, “put me down, James. James. Respect the tacos, Professor,” she says, laughing.
“Tacos will wait.” He squeezes her extra tightly before setting her down. There’s something happening with his mouth, some hint of a suppressed recurve that has her suspicious.
“What are you up to?”
“You keep me too busy illustrating your many, many specimens for your many, many papers for me to get up to anything.”
“Ha. I’m watching you.”
“Oh, is that what it takes to get you to watch me? In that case, I could be up to any number of things. You’d better keep a very close eye on me tonight.
” His hand comes to Ripley’s lower back as they stroll across the property line to join Cara and Griff in the jeep, and she feels a flush of warmth despite the almost-September cool.
“You like it when my eyes are close.” She raises her eyebrows meaningfully.
“And all this time, I was taking the blame for being the conspiring one,” he complains.
“You are the conspiring one.”
“We’ll see,” he says enigmatically, and hands her into the jeep.
Ripley’s suspicion that something’s going on is confirmed when Cara pulls up in front of the Clever Girl Museum instead of the ranch house.
“Why is everyone in on this but me? What happened to Taco Thursday?” she asks mutinously, not unbuckling her seatbelt.
“Get your ass out of the car and into the museum, Rip. Tacos will wait.”
Ripley looks accusingly at James. “That’s what he said,” she tells Cara.
“He’s very smart. He’s going to be right a lot of the time. If you didn’t want to live with that kind of man, you shouldn’t have let him—” Cara cuts herself off abruptly.
“Let him what?” Ripley yelps.
“Come along, Ripley,” James says, climbing out. “Sooner begun is sooner done.”
Grumbling, she follows him into the museum, past the informational posters bearing his artwork and the spot along the west wall where the addition will go up next spring.
As soon as the team at Oxford finishes preparing the birds, Beauty’s bones will come home to the pedestal that’s been waiting for her since last year. The rest of her skeleton will be re-created using Beast as a model.
Beast will go to the Field Museum in Chicago, which paid handsomely for the privilege of displaying the world’s only known complete specimen of Montanopteryx ripleii.
The Natural History Museum in London badly wanted him, but Ripley felt strongly that he should be closer to home.
A replica of his fossil will join Beauty on the—
Her steps stutter, then stop. Her hand comes to her mouth.
Oxford has done a spectacular job with the reproductions. Beauty’s posed as James imagined her, her wings spread as they are in the oversize illustration spotlighted on the wall. Beast perches to one side, his wings folded, his head cocked inquisitively.
“There she is,” James says softly, his arms wrapping around Ripley from behind. She can tell from the touch of his breath on her neck that he’s not looking at anything but her.
Ripley takes James’s hand and pulls him forward, irresistibly drawn to these long-dead, unbelievably alive creatures. “Oh my God,” she keeps repeating as she walks around the installation. “How did you do this?”
“I found a way,” he says, smug. “Or, more accurately, our friends from the Field sent a preservationist to assemble them.”
“You all knew? Geraldine knew? And nobody told me?”
“There is such a thing as being able to keep a secret, Ripley, regardless of whether you personally subscribe to the theory.”
“Ha-ha,” she says, rolling her eyes at him. “This is unbelievable. Is Cara going to reopen in September so people can see them? Because I think there would be a lot of demand, if—” Air exits from her lungs in a shocked rush.
From Beast’s left wing, on the second of his three “fingers,” something shiny winks at Ripley. A pale gold circle with familiar leafy scrollwork clasping a cabochon of amber whose warm brown streaks exactly match the color of her eyes.
She turns to find James on one knee, his face wreathed in hope and joy.
“Say you’ll be my wife, Ripley,” he says softly. “You and me, for all time.” The ring is on the fossil, of course, so he has nothing to hold out but his hand. Himself.
Ripley’s heart is about to leap out of her chest. “Oh, James. My dad—”
“He and your stepmom are waiting in the ranch house with champagne,” he says, breaking out the full, brilliant, recurved smile. “I assume if you want Steve to be here, your answer is…”
He did find a way. He’ll always find a way. And so will she.
She wipes away a tear with her roughened, calloused summer hands. “Yes. It’s yes.”
The front doors burst open and Cara comes screaming in. “The ring! The ring, the ring, the ring! Put it on, put it on, put it on,” she sings, using a hidden string to ever so carefully float the gleaming circle off Beast’s wing and drop it in James’s palm.
“You were supposed to go on to the house,” James says, rising to his feet.
“As if,” Cara scoffs. “I was outside the window filming. Discreetly,” she says at James’s accusing look. “Not that the two of you would’ve noticed a T. rex storming the museum at attack speed. You can thank me at the wedding. Are we thinking of a date yet?”
Oh God. A wedding. Wedding planning. “Give me a second to process the proposal first, Cara,” Ripley says, a touch of panic creeping into her stomach.
“I have the whole year for my sabbatical,” James puts in. “We can get married anywhere you want. Montana, California, England. My stepmother has offered to have it at the family estate, if we so choose.”
“Oh, Kathryn. That’s so sweet of her. But your dad…”
James’s smile is hopeful, if strained. “He hasn’t nixed the idea outright. I think he might be coming around. At his own pace.”
“He can come here at his own pace, because you’re having your wedding at the ranch,” Cara says. “Which is where you wanted it anyway. Oh! How about over New Year’s, with me and Griff? Double wedding!”
“First things first,” Ripley says firmly, holding out her left hand.
James’s throat bobs, a shine gathering in his eyes as he slides the ring over her fourth finger. “There’s no rush, Ripley,” he murmurs, emotion roughening his voice. “We have time.”
Underneath the stone, inside the gold band, she can feel the texture of engraved letters. She doesn’t have to look to know what James would carve into something he wants to last forever.
“I know,” she replies, pulling him down for a quick promise of a kiss. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”