Epilogue One Year Later
The coffee is perfect this morning. Not too hot. Not too strong. Just right. I sit on the garden bench on my back patio with my legs pulled up underneath me and my mug in both hands and I watch the morning come alive around me.
It's June. The garden is in full bloom. The tomato plants along the fence are taller than they've ever been.
The marigolds by the front steps are bright orange and yellow.
The herb bed by the back door is thick with rosemary and basil and thyme and a new addition this year.
Lavender. Ross planted it for me last month because he remembered the dried lavender I bought at the history festival almost a year ago and he thought I should have the real thing growing in my own garden.
The patio looks nothing like it did a year ago.
The cracked concrete is gone. The wobbly plastic chairs are long gone.
In their place is the flagstone extension I laid last summer and the bistro set that Maxwell restored for me and the string lights overhead and the oak garden bench where I'm sitting right now.
This bench. The one I found at a yard sale for twenty dollars and rebuilt with my own hands and finished with three coats of polyurethane and placed right here on this patio where I drink my coffee every morning.
A year ago I was sitting in this exact spot in a plastic chair that wobbled.
I was drinking coffee and thinking about Kirk and believing that my life was on track.
I was wrong about all of it. But I'm grateful for the wrongness now.
Because being wrong about Kirk forced me to figure out what being right feels like.
And being right feels exactly this. Coffee on the patio.
A garden in full bloom. A career I'm proud of.
People I trust. A man inside my house right now making breakfast because it's Saturday and Saturdays are for cooking together.
I hear the screen door open behind me. Ross comes out carrying two plates. Scrambled eggs and toast and sliced strawberries. He sets them on the bistro table and sits across from me.
"Breakfast is served," he says.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome. Your eggs have cheese in them because I know you won't admit that you prefer them that way but you do."
"I never said I prefer them that way."
"You eat twice as much when they have cheese."
"That's circumstantial evidence."
"It's data. I've been tracking it."
"You've been tracking my egg preferences?"
"I track everything. Occupational hazard."
I shake my head and eat my eggs. They're better with cheese. He's right. I'll never tell him.
We eat breakfast together on the patio in the early morning light. The neighborhood is quiet. A dog barks somewhere down the street. A car starts up in a driveway. Mrs. Peterson walks past the front of my house on her morning constitutional and waves.
"Morning, Brook. Morning, Ross."
"Good morning, Mrs. Peterson."
She's been waving to Ross since January when he started spending enough nights here that the neighbors noticed. Nobody said anything about it directly. That's not how Wildhorse works. People just adjust their greetings to include the new person and that's that.
After breakfast we do the dishes together.
He washes. I dry. We've developed a system that works so efficiently we rarely speak during it.
He knows I'll stack the plates on the left side of the rack.
I know he'll leave the sponge in the sink instead of on the holder.
Some habits don't change and some aren't worth changing.
The morning stretches out ahead of us. We have plans today.
A trip to Morgan's Antique Store to look for a side table for Ross's apartment.
Then lunch at Barlow's. Then an afternoon at Maxwell's workshop where we're finishing the last of the library toy sets.
Then dinner at my mother's house. Miranda has invited Maxwell.
It will be the fourth time the four of us have eaten together and each time the evening runs longer because Maxwell and my mother have developed a friendship that is warm and genuine and independent of their children's relationship.
"Ready to go?" Ross asks.
"Let me grab my jacket."
We drive to Morgan's in his truck. The route takes us out of town on Route 4 past the fields and the farms and the old church where we catalogued the parish records.
The church project is finished now. Every birth certificate and marriage record and baptism log from the 1880s to the present has been catalogued and preserved.
Reverend Kemp dedicated a shelf in the vestry to display some of the restored documents.
Ross built the shelf himself from reclaimed oak that Maxwell salvaged from a barn demolition.
At Morgan's we spend an hour browsing. Frank Morgan is behind the counter the same way he has been every Saturday for thirty years.
He greets us by name and asks about the library toy project because we told him about it the last time we were in.
His wife Dorothy is in the back room pricing new acquisitions.
She comes out to say hello and shows me a set of antique bookends that she thinks I'd appreciate.
Brass. Shaped like owls. Heavy and beautifully made.
"Those belonged to a retired professor in the next county," Dorothy says. "He donated his whole collection when he moved into assisted living. His family didn't want any of it. Can you imagine? A lifetime of collecting and nobody wanted to keep it."
I buy the bookends. Not because I need them. Because they deserve a home where someone appreciates what they are. I'll put them in my office at City Hall on the shelf next to the framed Archer family land grant.
Ross finds a side table made of walnut with a single drawer and turned legs. The finish is worn but the structure is solid. He examines it carefully. Tests the joints. Opens and closes the drawer.
"This is a nice piece," he says to Frank. "How much?"
"For you? Thirty-five."
"Sold."
We load the table into the truck and drive to Barlow's for lunch. Sandwiches and coffee at our usual table near the window. The barista knows our order before we say it. Black for both of us. She adds a cookie to Ross's plate because she says he looks like he needs one. He doesn't argue.
"I want to ask you something," Ross says over lunch. He sets his sandwich down and wipes his hands on his napkin. His expression is different than usual. More focused. More intent.
"Okay."
"Not here. Later. Tonight maybe. When we're home."
"That's mysterious."
"It's not mysterious. It's just something I want to say in the right place."
"Which is?"
"Your patio. On the bench."
I look at him. He looks back. There's something in his eyes that I recognize but that I'm not quite ready to name. Something certain. Settled. Decided.
"Okay," I say. "Tonight. On the bench."
We spend the afternoon at Maxwell's workshop.
The library toy sets are almost complete.
Stacking blocks. Letter tiles. A small wooden puzzle in the shape of a horse.
Maxwell carved each piece by hand and Ross and I sanded and finished them.
The librarian came by last week to preview the collection and she was so moved she hugged Maxwell which made him turn red and stammer something about it being no trouble at all.
At dinner my mother serves pot roast and Maxwell brings a pie that he baked himself using a recipe Helen wrote on an index card forty years ago.
The four of us sit around my mother's dining table and eat and talk and laugh.
Maxwell tells a story about the time Ross tried to build a birdhouse when he was ten and accidentally nailed it to the side of the barn instead of the tree.
Ross denies the barn part. Maxwell insists.
My mother laughs until she has to set her fork down.
After dinner my mother and Maxwell go for a walk around the block because the evening is warm and because they enjoy each other's company in a way that makes me happy for reasons I can't fully articulate.
Watching my mother laugh with someone again.
Watching Maxwell's face soften when she talks.
They're not dating. At least I don't think they are.
But they're something. Friends. Companions.
Two people who lost their partners and found in each other someone who understands what that loss means without needing it explained.
Ross and I drive home. The evening is warm and clear. He parks in my driveway and we go inside and I make two cups of coffee and we carry them to the back patio.
The string lights are on. The garden is green and lush in the fading daylight. The oak bench sits on the flagstone exactly where I placed it almost a year ago. Solid. Beautiful. Unchanged.
We sit down together. Side by side. Our shoulders touching. The coffee is warm in my hands.
"This is the right place," Ross says.
"For what?"
He sets his coffee on the flagstone and turns to face me. He takes my hands. Both of them. His grip is steady and his eyes are clear behind his glasses.
"Brook. I have loved you since the day you walked into the archives with a cart full of old records and told me that those documents tell the history of this town.
I knew right then. Not because of how you looked or what you said.
Because of how much you cared. About the records.
About the work. About preserving something that most people would throw away without a second thought. "
My heart is beating fast. My hands are steady in his.
"I love your garden and your patio and your house and your bench.
I love your mother. I love the way you hold your coffee mug with both hands.
I love that you buy bookends because you think they deserve a home.
I love that you restored a garden bench from a yard sale because you saw something worth saving that nobody else noticed. "
He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small box. Cherry wood. Hand-carved. I recognize it immediately. It's the box he bought at the history festival. The one made by Arthur Hensley's granddaughter.
He opens it. Inside is a ring. Simple. Elegant. A single stone on a gold band.
"Will you marry me?"
I look at the ring. I look at his face. I look at the garden behind him and the bench beneath us and the string lights overhead and the house that I built into a home over the course of the hardest and best year of my life.
"Yes," I say. "Yes. Of course yes."
He slides the ring onto my finger. It fits perfectly. He cups my face in both hands and kisses me and I can feel him smiling against my mouth and I'm smiling too. We sit on the bench and hold each other and the evening settles warm and quiet around us.
Later we call our families. My mother cries.
Maxwell's voice breaks when he congratulates us.
Amanda screams so loudly that Ross can hear her through my phone from across the patio.
Roger sends a text that says "Congratulations.
The 1963 chicken ban council minutes will make an excellent wedding reading.
" I send back a laughing emoji which is the first emoji I've sent in months.
After the calls are made and the congratulations received and the excitement has settled into something calmer and deeper we sit on the bench again. Just the two of us. Coffee in hand. Garden at our feet. Ring on my finger.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
"Okay."
"A year ago I sat on this patio in a plastic chair that wobbled and I believed my life was coming together. I was wrong. My life was falling apart. I just didn't know it yet."
"And now?"
"Now I know what coming together actually feels like. It feels like this."
He puts his arm around me and I lean into his shoulder and we sit there on our bench. Our bench. The one we built together from a discarded piece of furniture that nobody else wanted.
The evening goes dark. The string lights glow. The garden is quiet.
A few days later I'm at the grocery store on Pine Street picking up ingredients for dinner.
I'm in the produce section choosing tomatoes when I look up and see Kirk.
He's standing near the entrance with a shopping basket over his arm.
He looks different. Thinner. Tired. His hair is longer than he used to wear it and he's dressed in clothes I don't recognize.
He sees me at the same moment I see him.
Our eyes meet across the produce section. We hold each other's gaze for about three seconds. No words. No nod. No wave. Just a brief moment of recognition between two people who used to know each other and don't anymore.
I feel nothing. Not anger. Not resentment. Not satisfaction. Not pity. Nothing at all. Just a neutral acknowledgment that this person exists in the same town as me and that our paths will occasionally cross and that's fine. He's not my problem. He's not my concern. He's not my anything.
I pick up my tomatoes and walk to the checkout. I pay for my groceries and carry them to Ross's truck. He's in the driver's seat listening to the radio. I get in and set the bags on the back seat.
"Got everything?" he asks.
"Everything."
He starts the truck and we pull out of the parking lot. I glance in the side mirror and see the entrance to the grocery store getting smaller behind us. Kirk is nowhere in sight. He's inside. Shopping. Living his life. Whatever that life looks like now.
I turn back to the road ahead. Ross reaches over and takes my hand.
We drive home together through the streets of Wildhorse past the library and the bakery and Barlow's and City Hall and the County Archives.
Past the places that make up my daily life.
The life I chose. The life I built. The life I earned.
I never truly took everything from Kirk. I didn't ruin him. I didn't destroy him. I didn't seek revenge or demand punishment or wish suffering upon him.
I simply stopped giving him the very best parts of myself.
And in reclaiming them I found the life I was always meant to have.