Epilogue
Whitley
SCORCH HAD A VERY SPECIFIC system for putting up a Christmas tree.
Step one: remove the box from the hall closet where it had apparently lived for six years without being opened.
Step two: spread all three sections of artificial pine across the living room floor and stand back with your arms crossed.
Step three: look at the woman he'd talked into moving her whole life two hundred miles southwest and say, "You're going to want to supervise this."
"Supervise it?" I set down my cider. "You want me to supervise it."
"I'm aware of my limitations."
"You ran logistics for a three-club rally."
"Those things aren't contradictory." He picked up the stand. "The stand goes first, right?"
I crossed the room.
The house was different at Christmas. Not changed.
It was still exactly what it had been the first morning I'd walked through it, spare and clean, everything in its place.
But the early light this time of year came in low through the front windows and lay across the floor at a different angle, and it had been snowing since sometime in the night, fine and slow, laying itself across the mesquite and the limestone and the ridge.
Gran's photo was on the mantle. Now it also had a string of lights I'd found at the hardware store in Bandera.
Three weeks back I'd signed the paperwork on the bungalow. Yellow door and all, to a young couple from Katy who'd probably paint it something sensible and never think about it twice. I stood on the porch the week before I left, gave it four minutes, and then I drove west.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be. New badge in my wallet from Hill Country Regional, a commute that was fifteen minutes of limestone and sky, and the Hill Country right outside the windows.
I crouched to fit the first section into the stand and Scorch came around to hold it steady.
Twenty minutes and one disagreement about whether the middle section went in before or after the lights.
It went in before; I was correct; he accepted this with the dignity of a man who would bring it up again in March, and the tree was up.
It listed left.
"It has character," Scorch said.
"It's listing at a twelve-degree angle."
"Character with a lean to it." His expression didn't move. "I've seen worse."
I adjusted it twice. He held it. The third time it stayed, close enough, and I let it go.
Pre-lit, the label had said. All the lights still worked, which was more than I'd expected from a tree that had apparently been waiting a long time for someone to need it.
I turned them on and the room went bright and Scorch had the good sense not to say anything.
The ornaments were underneath, most of them still in the original tissue paper, untouched, which told me everything I needed to know about the last six Christmases in this house.
I unwrapped them one by one and handed them to him and he hung them, and we worked through them in an easy back-and-forth that had no reason to feel as natural as it did and felt that way regardless.
Loretta had taken up her position on the arm of the couch somewhere around the first ornament and had not moved since. Her green eyes tracked every piece from hand to branch. She was running her calculations.
By noon the tree was finished and the room smelled like artificial pine and the lights were doing their job. I stood back and took it in. It had turned out well, better than it deserved to, honestly, given that it had sat untouched through six Christmases still in the box.
Loretta stepped down off the couch arm, made her way across the room with her tail up, sat in front of the lowest branch, and made deliberate eye contact with Scorch.
Then she batted a single red ornament off the tree, watched it roll to a stop against his boot, and walked back to the couch.
"She reviewed it," Scorch said.
"She did."
"Verdict?"
"The red one needed to go."
He picked it up and set it on the mantle next to Gran's photo, like that was where it had always belonged.
We broke for lunch after that: grilled cheese on the cast iron and tomato soup on the back burner, the kind of meal that had no pretensions and was exactly right for a cold December morning. He ate two sandwiches without comment, which I took as high praise.
We put the afternoon into a green chile beef chili; he browned the beef while I handled the chiles, the two of us working the same counter without getting in each other's way, which was either domesticity or something close enough that I wasn't going to name it.
By three o'clock the Hill Country outside had gone gray and cold and the whole house smelled of roasted chiles and woodsmoke.
Scorch had spiked the cider without being asked and I had let him, and we were settled in the main room with the tree glowing between us and the day going quiet the way it went quiet out here, all the way down to the mesquite.
My phone buzzed on the end table. Faith's name on the screen.
"Did you get snow?" she said, before I got a word in.
"Still coming down. Just barely."
"We got sleet and a thirty-minute power outage," Faith said. "I want a full report on how much better yours was."
"Considerably," I said.
"That smile is in your voice."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Three years," she said, certain. "I know exactly what I'm talking about."
We talked the way we always talked—easy and real, the three years of shared shifts and everything the night floor could throw at two people still underneath all of it.
She told me about a patient who'd tried to discharge himself on Christmas Eve by hiding under a gurney.
I told her it wasn't the worst escape attempt I'd ever seen. She knew exactly what I meant.
Scorch came back from the kitchen and settled in beside me. He had something in his hand.
I stopped mid-sentence.
"Whitley?" Faith said. "Why did you stop talking?"
It was a small black box. He held it with the steadiness that had always been his. The same patience that had been there since the moment I walked into Room 407.
"Faith," I said. "Hold on a second."
"I'm not going anywhere," she said.
He opened it.
A diamond solitaire on a plain gold band. He turned toward me with those eyes steady on mine.
"I love you," he said. "Said it the first time and it was the best thing I'd ever said." The corner of his mouth went up, warm and sure. "Still is. Marry me, Whitley."
My eyes went hot and I kissed him—hard and real, both hands in his hair, nothing held back—and he pulled me in and kissed me back like the evening was entirely ours and he intended to make full use of it. From the phone came a small, wet sniff.
We both went still.
"That," Faith said, her voice thick and wrecked and completely delighted, "was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard in my entire life."
"You were supposed to hang up ten minutes ago," I said.
"I know," she said. "I'm not sorry. Now go put that ring on, and call me tomorrow; I want to hear everything." A pause, quiet and real. "I love you, Whitley."
"I love you too," I said.
She hung up.
Scorch set the phone face-down beside him and turned back to me. "So," he said. "Is that a yes?"
"You heard me," I said.
"I want to hear it again."
I drew him back down. "Yes," I said, against his mouth. "It's always been a yes."
He slid the ring onto my finger. I turned my hand in the glow from the tree and the diamond caught it, bright and clear, sitting on my hand like it had always been heading there.
Outside, the Hill Country had gone dark and still, snow falling past the window light and steady, the way it did when it meant to stay.
The tree glowed across the room. Loretta came from wherever she'd been during all of that, made her way across the floor with her tail up, settled herself across both our feet, tucked her paws under her chest, and closed her eyes.
I tipped my head against his shoulder.
He pressed his lips to my hair.
"Welcome home, sweetheart," he said.