EPILOGUE
Six Months Later
Pip
The wedding happened first, before either of them had quite finished believing the rest of it — a registry office affair on an ordinary Thursday morning, meant to be nothing but paperwork, the explicit understanding beforehand that this was a formality, nothing that needed the whole crew standing round in good clothes making a fuss.
Word got out anyway, the way word always got out in a town this size with a crew this close, and by the time they emerged from the registry office at half past ten, married, entirely unceremonious rings already on both their hands, the whole footpath outside was lined with the crew regardless — Jax, Sasha, Cal and Josie, Wes and Tam, Dom and Pri with the toddler already walking well enough to run at them both, Cole and Maya, even Layla, who'd closed Rivers for the morning without asking anyone's permission, having decided eleven years ago exactly whose wedding she would absolutely not be missing regardless of how quiet either of them had wanted to keep it.
"You said no fuss," Renz said, taking in the assembled crowd, something warm and slightly overwhelmed in his voice.
"I did say that," Pip agreed, laughing, already being swept into a hug by Layla that smelled faintly of cinnamon and browned butter. "Turns out our version of no fuss is apparently forty people on a footpath. I think we've simply lost the ability to do anything small anymore."
"Don't think either of us minds that, though," Renz said, and found, watching the whole loud, laughing, entirely unplanned celebration unfold around them on an ordinary Thursday footpath, that he genuinely didn't — that somewhere in the months since the coin ceremony, the specific terror of being celebrated had transformed, slowly and almost without his noticing the exact moment it happened, into something closer to simple, uncomplicated gratitude.
Jax found him in the crush, same as he always seemed to, and clasped his hand properly, the handshake of a man who didn't extend the gesture lightly.
"Welcome home," he said, echoing the coin ceremony without either of them needing to explain why the phrase still fit, "properly, this time.
Officially. Though I'd argue you've been home a good while now. "
"Reckon you're right," Renz said, and meant it entirely.
? ? ?
The frame on the kitchen table had three photographs in it now, not one, arranged by Renz with the same careful precision he brought to squaring a tablecloth — the whole crew standing at the coin ceremony, Cal's camera having caught the exact moment before anyone sat back down; a smaller one from the wedding, already faintly out of focus from someone's hurried footpath snapshot but treasured all the same; and a third, newer still, of the two of them on the back step of the house that was now properly both of theirs, the ladder Renz had finally let her hold propped against the gutter behind them.
The proposal itself had been almost aggressively unremarkable, exactly the way both of them had apparently needed it to be — no headland, no grand gesture, just Renz at her kitchen table on an ordinary Wednesday two months after the coin ceremony, turning the very same driftwood frame over in his hands the way he had that first Thursday, and saying, plainly, without any of the nerves she'd half-expected from a man who still occasionally flinched at being thanked for anything, "Reckon it's time we filled this properly.
Marry me, Pip." She'd said yes before he'd finished the sentence, laughing, and neither of them had thought to call it romantic until Layla insisted on hearing the story three separate times and cried a little more with each retelling.
Pip stood at the counter on a Tuesday morning in early spring, coffee in hand, the same green mug that had never gone back to belonging to anyone but Renz, and watched him move around the kitchen with the particular unhurried competence that had once made her ache with a longing she hadn't known how to name and now simply made her warm, ordinary, entirely at home.
"You're doing the face," he said, without looking up from the eggs.
"What face?"
"The one where you're deciding whether to say something soft or make a joke instead.
" He plated the eggs, set one in front of her, sat down across the small kitchen table — her table, still, though it had absorbed six months of ordinary shared dinners since the lease had quietly become something they'd need to renegotiate together rather than something either of them managed alone.
"Go on. Say the soft thing. I can take it these days. "
"I was just thinking it's your birthday in three weeks."
Something crossed his face, the old reflexive flinch not quite gone but considerably smaller than it had been a year ago, worn down by months of ordinary practice at being celebrated rather than only celebrating. "Don't need a fuss."
"I know you don't need one. That's rather the point of doing it anyway.
" Pip reached across and took his hand, the same grip from the fire pit, from the fence line, from a hundred ordinary mornings since, worn now into something so familiar it barely registered as a gesture anymore, simply the natural resting place her hand found whenever his was near.
"Thirty-five years old this year, Renz Kowalski, and I happen to know for a fact that nobody's organised you a proper birthday since you were about nine. I've got a list."
"You've got a list."
"Learned from the best." She grinned, and he huffed something that was almost a laugh, and didn't argue further, because arguing with her about this particular thing had stopped, somewhere in the last few months, feeling like a fight worth having.
? ? ?
The gathering that Saturday — an ordinary one, not a coin ceremony, just the crew catching up over a barbecue at Wes and Tam's place — carried the easy loose rhythm of people who'd long since stopped needing a formal occasion to want each other's company.
Cal and Josie had news of their own, quiet and careful the way they did most things, Josie's hand resting unconsciously on her stomach in a way that had every woman at the table exchanging glances within about four minutes of arrival.
Dom's daughter was walking properly now, a fast unsteady toddle that kept the whole crew on high alert and delighted in roughly equal measure.
Arjun and Mia had a wedding date set for the following autumn, Broome-adjacent, apparently, something about wanting the ceremony somewhere that split the difference between the red country and the reef.
Renz found Jax near the barbecue, tending sausages with the same flat competence he brought to everything, and stood beside him a while in companionable quiet before either of them said much.
"Heard your birthday's coming," Jax said, not looking up from the grill.
"Pip's got a list."
"Good." Jax flipped a sausage, unhurried. "About time someone did."
"Feels strange, still. Being on the receiving end of it." Renz took the tongs Jax handed him, an old wordless handoff neither of them needed to comment on. "Half of me still wants to disappear into the kitchen the second anyone starts singing."
"Half of you's allowed to feel that. Doesn't mean you get to act on it.
" Jax's mouth curved, the particular dry warmth he reserved for his oldest crew.
"Told you a long time ago you'd left a gap in a row of chairs, remember.
Reckon it's about time somebody left a gap for you at your own birthday table, don't you think. Not before time, either."
Renz didn't have a ready answer for that, same as he rarely did anymore when someone handed him a true thing plainly, but he found, standing there at the barbecue with the whole ordinary golden afternoon rolling out around him, that he didn't need one.
He just tended the sausages, and let the sentence sit, warm and accepted, the way he was slowly, steadily, learning to let most things sit these days.
Pip, meanwhile, had ended up on the back steps with Josie, watching Dom's daughter attempt to chase a butterfly across the lawn with the particular fierce determination only a toddler could bring to an entirely unwinnable pursuit.
"Still carry the coin?" Josie asked, nodding at the small leather pouch Pip still kept on her at most gatherings, an old habit picked up in the months since the ceremony.
"Every time. Feels strange, still, having proof I belong somewhere instead of just hoping I do.
" Pip turned the pouch over in her hand, the familiar heptagonal shape distinct even through the leather.
"Four years of coming to these things feeling like I was borrowing a family rather than actually part of one.
Funny, how much difference one coin makes, even though logically I know it's just metal. "
"It was never really about the metal." Josie watched Dom's daughter finally catch the butterfly, briefly, delightedly, before it escaped again to her theatrical outrage.
"It's about someone standing up in front of everyone who matters and saying the thing out loud.
Half of healing, I reckon, is just having someone witness it properly instead of you carrying it alone in your own head. "
"You'd know." Pip nudged her gently. "How's the flying going, these days? Heard you've cut back the long-haul rotations."
"Trying to. Doctor's orders, given certain upcoming circumstances." Josie's hand drifted, unconsciously, to her stomach, and Pip's eyes went wide with delighted understanding before Josie had said another word. "Don't you dare say anything yet. We're telling everyone properly next month."
"My lips are sealed," Pip said, grinning, already fighting the urge to hug her, and the two of them sat together on the back steps a while longer, the ordinary golden afternoon rolling out around them, two women who'd each spent years learning, in their own separate ways, exactly how much safer it was to let a thing be witnessed rather than carried alone.