Epilogue Grayson #2
Skye reaches for the dressing, though there’s barely any salad left to justify it. “Piper asked me to cover one of the Saturday art blocks last month. Then again, two weeks ago. The twins were there, plus four others.” He glances up. “They listen better than adults.”
Grayson laughs before he can stop himself. “That’s a low bar.”
“No lie.” Skye slides the dressing back to the center of the coffee table with exact precision.
“They were good. Loud. Sticky. One cried because I used the wrong shade of blue for a whale. Another one bit a crayon in half and then lied about it when the evidence was literally in his mouth.” He pauses. “I liked them.”
A plainly stated fact about himself that he has already tested and found true.
“You’d be good at that,” Grayson says.
“I know,” Skye says it matter-of-factly; not arrogant, just one hundred percent certain. “That’s not the issue.”
“Okay.” Grayson leans back in his chair. “What is the issue?”
Skye folds the napkin in half. Then half again. “I know what people think about me.”
“Meaning?”
He gives Grayson a look over the top of his glasses. He doesn’t need them, but he’s worn them like a shield since he was seven. “That I’m powerful enough to do something more useful…important.”
Grayson is quiet for a beat, not because he doesn’t know what to say, but because if he opens his mouth too quickly, he’ll say something furious about society, magical propaganda, and people who think care work is somehow lesser than prestige.
Instead, he says, “And what do you think?”
Skye’s expression barely shifts, but his grey eyes sharpen.
“I think teaching children is important. I think being good with them matters. I think there are a lot of people who decide things about kids before they’ve even had a fair shot to show who they are.
” He picks up his fork again, then sets it back down untouched.
“And I think I’d rather spend my life doing something that actually matters to me than something other people would brag about at dinner parties. ”
Grayson doesn’t realize he’s smiling until Skye notices.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He picks up his water and takes a sip to buy himself a second. “You just sound like your Dad.”
That gets him a long-suffering look. “Which one?”
“Exactly.”
Skye snorts, quiet and quick. “Pops would say children deserve competence, structure, and someone who doesn’t talk to them like idiots.”
“He would.”
“Big would say leadership is at the heart of service.”
“Also true.”
“Woo would say tiny people deserve whimsy and someone willing to get paint on the floor.” He frowns. “Though his standards for whimsy are often unachievable. No one does whimsy like Woo.”
“Very true.”
“And Ninny would tell me to stop overthinking it because I already know.”
Grayson feels something in his chest pull so hard it almost hurts. Not because Skye needs them the way he once did. He doesn’t. Not like that. But because they’re in him. All of them. Woven through the man he became.
“What about me?” Grayson asks lightly.
Skye finally looks at him head-on. “You’d ask if I love it—if it feeds my soul.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.” Not even a pause. “I like the order of it. I know they’re loud and chaotic, but I like that little kids mean what they say until they’re taught not to.
I like that if you make room for them properly, they stop trying to be whatever they think you want.
And that they’ll become who they’re meant to be.
” He reaches out and taps one finger against the edge of the sketches his first-years had left on the end of the table.
“I like watching people become more themselves.”
And there it is. The thing under the thing. It’s not just teaching, it’s recognition. It’s not just skill, it’s belonging.
Grayson’s throat tightens.
For a long time, the world had mistaken Skye’s quiet for the absence of interest. His difference for deficiency. But Skye had always been watching, cataloging, and understanding the world in his own way. He has always been building his own framework for what mattered and what didn’t.
Now he is sitting in Grayson’s classroom, fully grown and self-possessed, talking about shaping the world around children so they can arrive as themselves.
“So,” Skye says, wiping his fingers on the napkin, “I’ve been looking at programs.”
Grayson blinks. “You’ve already looked into it?”
Skye gives him a dry look. “Obviously. Rio helped me.”
“Right. Sorry. Stupid question.”
“Yes.”
Grayson laughs. “Ruthless. Okay, show me.”
Skye reaches into the basket and pulls out a slim tablet. Of course, he came prepared. Three schools are already open, side-by-side. None of them in Nashville, sadly, and every one with the best reputation.
“I wanted your opinion on faculty strength,” Skye says. “And whether I should add an art therapy track, even though I think most of them are a little too feelings-forward in the language.”
Grayson stares at the screen, then at his son.
“Don’t tell me, you have a spreadsheet?”
Skye’s mouth twitches. “Duh.”
Goddess, Grayson loves him.
They spend the next twenty minutes going over programs, accreditation, placement rates, extracurriculars, and how much nonsense exists in academic brochures.
Skye has already ranked them according to logic that Grayson can follow only because Skye has laid it out so cleanly.
It is not a child asking permission. It is a capable man inviting someone he trusts into a decision that matters.
By the time the warning bell rings for afternoon classes, Grayson feels wrung out in the best way. But his soul is overflowing.
Skye repacks the basket neatly, stacking containers smallest to largest, tablet last.
“So?” he asks.
“So,” Grayson says, standing with him, “you will be excellent at this.”
Skye rolls his eyes. “That wasn’t the question.”
“No, I know.” Grayson steps closer and straightens the collar of Skye’s overshirt, because he can and because after all these years, he still can’t quite help himself.
“My actual answer is that teaching is not too small for you. It’s big enough to build a life around.
And if it matters to you, then it matters. End of discussion.”
Skye goes still for a second, taking it in. Then he nods once. “Okay.”
It is such a simple word. Such an ordinary one. But Grayson hears everything inside it anyway: relief, resolve, the quiet settling of one path into place over all the others.
At the door, Skye pauses and looks back at the room. At the students’ work drying on the racks. At the pottery, the sketches, the mural Grayson is pouring his heart and soul into for The Plain spread in ribbons of light and pigment across fourteen feet of plaster wall.
“You really do love this place,” he says.
Grayson follows his gaze and smiles. “I do.” He hadn’t always, but now he can say it with everything he is, that all the things they’d been through had been leading him here, so he can do what he was born to do.
Skye nods, as if that confirms what he needed to hear. “Good.”
“For what?”
“For the record.” One shoulder lifts. “I think people should only teach if they love it.”
Grayson laughs. “I agree.”
Skye opens the door, letting the familiar swell of hallway noise pour in around them.
“Hei-Hei?”
“Hmm?”
“Thanks for lunch.” Skye gives him a look that says that isn’t what he means, and they both know it.
Then, because he’s twenty-three and brilliant and still occasionally kind enough to throw his old man a bone, he says, “Thanks for answering the real question.”
And then he’s gone, swallowed into the current of students with the basket in one hand and his future taking shape around him, not fragile at all.
Grayson stands in the doorway for a long moment after, a familiar ache in his chest reminding him that somewhere across the city, Nix knows he’s happy.
Once, he had thought magic would define his life. Thought power would be the thing that chained him down, or at very least narrowed his choices and decided who he got to be.
It hadn’t. It was love that had shaped his life, and just when he thought he’d experienced every gift that life could give him, he was shown there was yet something else to be grateful for—the chance to become himself, and then to help others do the same.
By the time his next class begins filtering in, noisy, and carrying all the strange, fragile things young people bring with them, Grayson is smiling.
“Alright,” he says, stepping back inside. “Let’s begin.”
The End.