Epilogue #2
He appointed himself her protector before she was an hour old, scowling at anyone who held her wrong, narrating the entire harbor to her through the side of her bassinet as though she were taking notes.
He taught her, the moment she could hold anything, how to grip a bit of rope.
He informed her, solemnly and often, that the dinghy was technically half hers but that he would be captaining it until she was bigger.
And on a soft evening near the end of that first summer, the four of them walked out to The Point.
Josiah running ahead and circling back, Ronan with the baby strapped warm against his chest, Solange's hand in his free one.
The light was going down glowing over the water.
They settled on the warm granite slab at the very end of the Breakwater, the same rock, the exact rock.
The lighthouse woke and began its slow turning, and Solange looked at where she was sitting and remembered, without it hurting anymore, the girl who had once sat in this exact spot until full dark, alone and pregnant and certain she had been left.
That girl had been so sure the story ended at this rock, in the cold, by herself.
She had only got to the middle of it.
Josiah climbed up beside his father, peered down at his sleeping sister, and announced that she was being boring.
Ronan laughed and pulled him in against his side, the baby on his chest, his wife under his arm, the whole impossible ordinary life he had been robbed of and had clawed all the way back, gathered against him on a rock at nightfall.
He pressed his lips to the crown of her curls, holding everything he had ever wanted close against him while the lighthouse swept its patient gold across the dark water, keeping its old promise to everyone still trying to find their way home.
He had missed so much, once.
He would not miss anything ever again.
The end…