Epilogue
Ellie
It’s another town wedding, and I’m not across the room from him.
I’m beside him, in the corner, because eleven weeks after you have a baby the corner is where you want to be. Our daughter is asleep on Sue’s shoulder at the next table, and Sue is refusing to give her back.
“You can have her when she’s hungry,” Sue says. “Which is apparently never. She’s got her daddy’s appetite for saying nothing. Little cowboy’s daughter.”
“She’s asleep, Sue.”
“Exactly.”
Jacob has his hand on the back of my neck, his thumb moving in slow circles against my skin. A year ago that would have been the only way he knew to say what he felt. Tonight it’s just extra.
Sue brings me a coffee without being asked, and it’s real coffee, the first I’ve been allowed since the pregnancy, and she sets it down and says, “You’re allowed again, God help us all,” and goes back to the baby.
The ceremony was beautiful. The reception is loud. When the band starts playing a slow one, Jacob takes my hand.
“Dance with me.”
“I had a baby eleven weeks ago.”
“So lean on me.” He wraps his arms around me. “I’ve got you.”
We sway in front of the whole town. The same people who watched us fall apart and helped put us back together. The same people who froze him out and served him cold coffee and then went silent in a church parking lot to hear him say he loved me.
“Three years ago,” he says into my hair, “you walked up to me at one of these and told me I looked like I was at a funeral.”
“Best thing anybody ever said to you.”
“Best thing anybody ever said to me.”
Across the room Zeke lifts a glass in our direction. He’s got a woman with him from the next county over, dark hair and a bright laugh, and when he comes over between songs he shakes Jacob’s hand and tells me I look happy.
He means it. I can tell. I tell him he does too, and it’s the first time since the porch that it’s been true, and he knows I know that, and he grins the grin he’s had since we were nine and goes back to her.
We leave early because the baby wakes up. Sue hands her over reluctantly, and makes us promise to bring her back next Sunday.
We drive home with our daughter asleep in her car seat and the ranch house dark ahead of us, just the porch light on the way Jacob leaves it now, every night, whether we’re home or not.
He parks but doesn’t get out.
“I love you,” I say, because I say it whenever I want to now, and I want to.
“I know.” Then he catches himself, turns to look at me, and I watch his mouth curve into the smile I fell in love with three years ago. “No. I love you too, Ellie.”
He gets out and comes around to my door and opens it, and he lifts our daughter out of the back, careful and gentle, and he stands there in the driveway with her against his shoulder and looks at me still in the seat.
“Sunshine,” he says. “Come home.”
“I’m already here.”
THE END