Epilogue
Nash
The gate is fixed.
I've been at it for forty minutes in the February cold. The original wrought-iron hinge moving true and quiet, the way it was built to move a hundred years ago, before weather and time and neglect got into it. I wipe my hands on my work rag and swing it once to check. Perfect.
Wrench has been lying on my feet the entire time providing no assistance whatsoever, except for maybe keeping my toes warm. He lifts his head.
"I know," I tell him. "I've been out here too long."
He agrees, apparently, because he gets up, goes to the front door and looks back at me. I gather my tools. I look up at the kitchen window.
She's there. She waves.
I do the thing. The acknowledgment that means I see you, and I'm coming, and the gate is done.
She smiles and disappears from the window, and something in my chest does what it always does when she smiles and disappears from a window.
Same thing it did in October when she was a client and I was a tradesperson and I was very thoroughly lying to myself about what was happening.
I'm not lying to myself about anything anymore.
I go inside.
The kitchen smells like coffee and whatever she's been baking and the particular warmth of a room that has been lived in properly.
Her project files are spread across the kitchen table.
The hotel is booked three months out. There's a heritage garden tour in June that somehow grew from a single afternoon into three days with a waiting list and journalists calling from Vancouver.
The BC Heritage Society award is in the reception hall.
She had to look at the ceiling when they gave it to her to keep her composure.
The write-up in the provincial tourism magazine called Brooks Boutique Hotel a love letter to a vanishing era of craftsmanship.
She read it out loud to me in bed and then put it face-down on the nightstand and didn't say anything for a full minute.
Ruth would have pretended not to understand what the fuss was about. She would have been quietly, fiercely pleased.
Maple is at the counter with two mugs ready.
Rivet is in the velvet window seat in the front parlour.
That's Rivet's permanent post and has been since the first morning I brought the dogs over properly.
Eleven thousand people follow this hotel on the internet, and a meaningful portion of them are there because of Rivet, which is the least surprising thing I have ever learned.
Penny is asleep in the kitchen on her folded towel.
That's Penny's primary contribution to hotel operations and she makes it with great dedication.
Wrench goes directly to his spot below the breakfast sideboard, where Maple slips him things she categorically denies slipping him.
The box has been in my jacket pocket for three weeks.
I've been waiting for the right moment. I've been telling myself there isn't one. I've been carrying it around like a piece of equipment I don't know how to install, which is not a feeling I'm familiar with. I know how to install everything.
She hands me my coffee. She's in her dress, deep blue today, vintage cut, completely impractical for a February morning. Her hair is loose. She has a pencil behind her ear and flour on her wrist from this morning's baking and she looks like the best thing I've ever walked into.
"Gate's done," I say.
"I saw." She looks up at me. "You were out there a long time."
"Original hardware," I say. "You have to be patient."
She smiles at that. She knows I'm quoting myself back at myself. She turns to get her own coffee, and that's when Rivet appears.
She has gotten down from the window seat, which she does approximately never during business hours, and trotted into the kitchen with the focused intention of a dog who has a plan. She sits in the middle of the kitchen floor and looks at me. Then at Maple. Then back at me.
Then she looks pointedly at my jacket pocket.
I look at Rivet.
Rivet looks at my pocket.
Wrench lifts his head from below the sideboard.
Penny opens one eye.
"What is happening?" Maple says, watching the dogs.
"I don't know," I say. This is a lie. Rivet has known about the box since the night I brought it home. She sniffed my jacket for thirty seconds and then sat on my foot and looked at me in a way that could only mean get on with it. Apparently, she has decided that today is the day.
She is not wrong.
I put my coffee down.
Maple turns around and looks at me. Something in my face must be different because she goes still in that particular way of hers. Fully present. Fully paying attention. The way she was in the back parlour the first time. The way she's been every time it mattered.
I get the box out of my jacket pocket.
It's not a big box. It doesn't need to be.
The ring inside is a narrow gold band with a single oval stone, deep green, the colour of the library wallpaper she had a conservator come up from the coast to assess.
I found it at an estate sale in November and I knew immediately.
I have been carrying it for three weeks because I am, as she has noted on multiple occasions, stubborn.
She looks at the box. She looks at me.
"Nash," she says.
"I fixed a pipe," I say. "At midnight. In October. And everything after that was consequence." I open the box. "I want the rest of the consequences. All of them. For as long as this house stands."
She puts her hand over her mouth.
Rivet makes a small sound from the middle of the kitchen floor. Unmistakably smug.
Wrench gets up from below the sideboard and comes and leans his entire weight against my leg. I brace.
Penny gets up from her towel and walks to Maple and sits on her foot. She has not voluntarily approached a human being in six months. She looks up at Maple with her ancient, deaf, utterly certain eyes and does not move.
Maple looks down at Penny. Then at the ring.
Then at me. Her eyes are bright and her hand is still over her mouth.
The pearl earrings are in. The flour is still on her wrist. The hotel she built out of nothing but stubbornness and her great-aunt's letters is full of guests and awards and people who drove three hours to stay one night in a room she made with her own hands.
She did all of that. I just kept the pipes running.
"Yes," she says. "Obviously yes. Nash, obviously."
I put the ring on her finger. She throws both arms around my neck and I pick her up off the floor because I can and because she's mine. She laughs, that real low surprised laugh I have been collecting since October, and I feel it against my jaw.
Rivet barks once. Sharp and satisfied. The bark of a dog whose long-running project has reached its correct conclusion.
Wrench sits down on both our feet. Penny has not moved from her spot and shows no intention of moving.
We are, all five of us, exactly where we're supposed to be.
"The kettle," Maple says, into my neck.
"It can wait," I say.
"Yes," she says. "It can."
Through the kitchen window, the gate sits open on its hinge, true and quiet, exactly as it should.