Epilogue
WYATT
Penny had discovered that if she sat directly on Haven's feet, Haven would stop moving.
It was a solid strategy. Haven was cross-legged on the living room floor with Ethan in her lap and Penny draped across her ankles like a very small, self-satisfied anchor. The little red heeler wasn't going anywhere, and all three of them seemed fine with this arrangement.
Ethan was three months old and already had opinions.
Right now his opinion was that the ceiling fan was the most interesting thing that had ever existed, and he was staring at it like he’d found god up there.
Haven was narrating the fan to him in a low voice, pointing at it, and he was tracking her finger with his whole face.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them.
I'd been watching them like this for three months.
Couldn't stop. Haven with our son had broken something open in me that I didn't have language for—some last locked room I hadn't known was still shut.
She was so easy with him. So confident. The same way she was certain about everything, had always been certain, from the first night she'd asked me for a kiss behind the Spur almost exactly a year ago.
Penny looked up and saw me watching and her tail thumped twice against the floor.
Haven looked up too.
"Hey, stranger,” she said.
"Hey.”
Ethan made a sound at the ceiling fan.
"He's having a whole conversation," Haven said. "Very advanced."
"He's three months old."
"He's your son," she said. "He came out advanced. I mean…we all know you’re the smartest Holt, right?”
“And he’s got a smart mama,” I smiled. “Smarter than his dad, anyway.”
I crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside her, my back against the couch, and she leaned into me automatically the way she always did now. Ethan turned his head and looked at me with the serious blue eyes he'd had since birth—Holt eyes, my mother had said, crying, when she first held him.
I reached into my shirt pocket.
The ring had been there for months. My mother had pressed it into my hand at the hospital, two hours after Ethan was born, without a word.
I'd known what she meant. I'd been carrying it ever since, waiting for the right moment, which kept not arriving, which I was starting to understand was just fear with better clothes on.
Haven was talking to our son, something low and sweet about the fan, and it hit me all at once.
February fourteenth.
I'd woken up this morning and made coffee and watched Haven nurse Ethan in the early light and felt nothing but good, and it wasn't until right now, sitting on the floor, that I realized I hadn't thought about it once today. Hadn't reached for the whiskey. Hadn't gone outside for the cigarette.
Eighteen years of keeping that appointment, and this year I'd just—forgotten.
I sat with that for a second.
Ethan, I thought. Ethan Nassar, twenty-two years old, who never got home. Who wrote four recipes in the back of a paperback and talked about food like it was the whole point of being alive.
I looked at my son.
Three months old, staring at a ceiling fan like it contained the secrets of the universe, named for a man he'd never meet.
He would've howled, I'd told Haven once. At the age gap, at all of it.
He would've. And then he would've looked at me across whatever table we were sitting at and said but she's good, right? She makes you happy?
Yeah, I would've said. She does.
Then what are you waiting for, man.
I reached into my shirt pocket and took out the ring.
Haven was still talking to Ethan. She hadn't noticed yet.
"Haven."
"Mm."
"Look at me."
She turned. Saw what was in my hand.
Her mouth opened. Closed.
Penny lifted her head.
Ethan grabbed Haven's finger and held on.
"My mother gave me this the night he was born," I said. "I've been carrying it since then, waiting for the right moment." I looked at her. "I just realized today what the right moment was."
Her eyes were bright. "Wyatt—"
"You came around that corner just about one year ago on your birthday and asked me for a kiss," I said.
"And I've been trying to talk myself out of you ever since, and I can't, and I don't want to." I stopped. "You're the best thing that's ever happened to me. You and him. And I'd like to spend whatever time I've got left being worth that."
Haven looked at the ring.
Looked at me.
"Are you asking me," she said carefully, "or are you still giving the speech?”
"Marry me, Haven."
She laughed—real and full and just for me—and took the ring out of my hand. Held it up to the light. Ethan tracked it with his whole face.
"Yes," she said. "Obviously yes." She slid it on and looked at it. "I've been waiting for you to ask. Your mother told me you had it."
"Of course she did."
"She was excited." She looked at me, eyes bright, ring on her finger, our son in her lap. "It fits perfectly."
"She knew it would."
Haven leaned up and kissed me. Soft and certain, same as everything she'd ever done.
Outside, the Hill Country was going gold in the late afternoon light. Same land, same cedar and limestone, same creek running low in February. I'd sat in a bar on this date for eighteen years with a glass of whiskey and a cigarette and kept an appointment with grief.
This year I'd forgotten.
Not because it didn't matter. Because something had finally mattered more.
If you ever get home, Ethan had said once, somewhere in the sand outside Fallujah, you gotta actually live there, man. You can't just park yourself at the edge of it.
I looked at my son.
Looked at my wife.
Penny's tail thumped against the floor.
I was home.
THE END