Epilogue Goldie
Spring in Driftwood Pointe feels like a hibernating bear waking from a long winter’s dream.
In the mornings, the harbor glows the color of burned ocher beneath the rising sun, shifting to green-gold by noon when the light catches the water properly.
The hills surrounding the town are painted in a hundred shades of green again, and Jasper’s market has burst back into life with the new season.
Tulips spill from buckets outside the flower stalls. Early strawberries tumble across wooden crates beside batches of radishes still dusted with earth. Everywhere there is color and noise and movement—jokes cracked across the tables, gossip exchanged by visitors. The atmosphere is joyous.
And in the middle of it all is Jasper. Happy. Truly happy.
He moves through the market like a man who finally belongs somewhere, laughing with the stallholders, carrying boxes for elderly vendors before they can protest, teasing the guy from the tavern about deliveries of cider.
Even Mrs. Chalice eventually apologized to him—an event so shocking that half the town nearly held a parade in honor of it.
The market belongs to Jasper now in every possible way, and the town finally understands that.
The work on the old house continues steadily above the harbor. Jasper hired a small crew to repair the worst structural damage, but he insists on helping with as much as he can himself.
“I need to put my hands on it,” he told me once while covered in dust and plaster.
I understood exactly what he meant.
The agreement he and Maggie reached was more than fair. Maggie now lives in a small bungalow near the harbor, where everything is on one level. She’s already filled the place with herbs, tinctures, candles, embroidery silks, and enough dried lavender to scent the entire street.
Onyx occupies the warmest chair in the house with tyrannical authority.
Maggie misses her picture window overlooking the harbor, but she’s claimed the bungalow window facing Jasper’s market instead. It isn’t as beautiful, but it’s far busier, and she likes keeping an eye on everyone while pretending she doesn’t.
One afternoon, I noticed gaps in the embroidery cushion she spent years stitching people’s names into—she’d quietly unpicked everyone from it. She saw me notice and smiled sheepishly.
Some things don’t need apologizing for aloud to matter.
Jasper is renovating slowly while still living in the fisherman’s cottage, and every evening he comes to find me.
While I’m still ostensibly staying at Maggie’s, I’m with Jasper most of the time.
We cook together badly and eat surprisingly well.
I usually sit on the kitchen counter while he talks me through plans for the house—where walls will come down, which fireplaces he wants to restore, and how he intends to save as many original features as possible.
I don’t see or feel Cara anymore. Once Jasper reclaimed the house and Maggie finally faced the truth of what happened, Cara’s unfinished business was done.
Still, Maggie was right about me; I’ve always had knowledge I didn’t learn.
Small things mostly the properties of herbs, which rooms need calming, what people are about to say before they say it.
The way I walked into Jasper’s cottage that first night and somehow knew exactly how to help him.
These no longer feel like coincidences. They’re instincts I haven’t explored yet. They feel like beginnings.
“Are you going to let Maggie teach you properly?” Jasper asks one evening across the kitchen table. Architect’s drawings are spread out around him while he studies plans for the upstairs rooms.
“Maybe,” I reply. “One day.”
“You know she’s been teaching you for years already.”
I laugh softly. “Without my permission.”
Jasper is patient with me. He doesn’t make me feel foolish for being cautious. He just keeps showing up every day with those sea-green eyes and that gentle, steady way of moving through the world. Gradually, my caution is becoming something lighter. Safer.
On the first truly warm evening in May, we eat supper outside on the small terrace behind his cottage, looking up the hill toward what was Maggie’s house.
The wisteria that survived all the rebuilding has bloomed again this spring, climbing across the newly restored wall in waves of purple and green.
Jasper follows my gaze. “Cara would have loved this place.”
I think of the photograph of Clara laughing beside Maggie before everything went wrong. I think of the lonely figure in the green coat, crossing the moors. And I think of the peace that finally settled over all of us.
“I think she does,” I say softly.
Jasper reaches across the table and takes my hand. He holds it while the last light fades slowly above the harbor and the first stars appear over Driftwood Pointe.
And there is nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.