EPILOGUE
One Year Later
Grant’s face is contorted in terror as he lets fly a barrage of profanity and a chorus of OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.
“Aww,” I shout over the violent wind, straining to pat him on the shoulder. “If this doesn’t take me back.”
He’s not feeling very nostalgic, judging by his horrified stare.
“You don’t have to do this,” I remind him.
“No,” he says, looking queasy as he squeezes his eyes shut. “I want to.”
After we returned from London, Grant started a to-do list of adventures for us to go on together—things to remind him how to “really live.” Officially, he won’t let me call it the LARPe Diem List. (But it’s called the LARPe Diem List.) Skydiving was the first thing on it, and also the one he’s put off the longest.
With one sharp intake of breath, he twists his head stiffly to Zeke, the instructor attached to him.
“Okay,” he says, his voice strangled. “I’m ready.”
They angle into position, peering into the ocean of sky below, and Zeke starts his countdown.
“WAIT,” Grant shouts, throwing a hand onto the plane’s wall before Zeke can get to zero. He looks back at me with his worry furrow out in full force.
“I love you,” he says, like they’re the last words he’ll ever say.
“Good man,” says Zeke, thumping him on the shoulder. And before I can say it back, Zeke shouts, “Uh-oh, I think there’s something wrong with the—” and hurls them out of the plane.
The last thing I hear is Grant shouting “WHAT?!,” the sound swallowed cartoonishly as he plummets away.
My instructor, Mari, chuckles behind me. “He does that every time,” she says.
As we maneuver into place, I squint down to where Grant and Zeke are a speck against the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts.
I’m one hundred percent sure Grant can’t hear me (mainly because I can’t hear him, and I’m one hundred and ten percent sure he’s screaming right now), but I yell it back anyway: “I LOVE YOU.” Because I wanted to shout it from the hilltops long before I could even bring myself to whisper it, and that’s a lot of hilltop shouting to make up for.
A rickety plane ten thousand feet above the ground seems a good substitute.
Mari and I leap into the open air, and I marvel at how this never gets old: the rush of anticipation, the exhilaration of free fall, the total and perfect peace of drifting back to earth. There’s no better feeling.
Except, of course, what awaits me when I land.
Back on the ground, Grant stagger-jogs to me, either because he doesn’t have his land legs yet or because of how hard he’s laughing.
“I am never doing that again,” he says ecstatically, enfolding me in his arms.
I smile into the crook of his shoulder. “I am doing that one thousand more times.”
He kisses the side of my head and holds me tight. “And when you do, I’ll meet you on the ground with a balloon and a safety net, just in case.”
· · ·
HOURS LATER, WE’RE enjoying the much-awaited part two of today’s adventure: hunkering down at Grant’s place, a night of sweatpants and tea and books. A birchwood fire crackles on the TV, the couch is piled in blankets, and my surprise third-best friend, Arthur, is purring on my lap.
I reach the end of my double-spaced spiral-bound book and flip it closed with a sigh. A steaming mug appears over my shoulder, and I look up to see Grant peering expectantly at me.
“Well?” he asks, handing off the tea and leaning down to rest on the couch arm. “What’s the verdict?”
Anna sent me the manuscript of Kiss of Death months ago, along with an advance reader copy of her newest (a murderless romance about rival innkeepers) and a letter promising ARCs of all her future books, “for your trouble.”
The romance, I tore through in a weekend. The manuscript took a while longer.
It lived on my kitchen table for a while, collecting dust while I hemmed and hawed about it. And then, slowly, as real life with Grant began to eclipse our surreal beginnings, curiosity got the best of me and I started reading.
“It was … weird,” I say. “Like a glimpse into an alternate universe.”
Even where it differed from my experience, there was a certain nostalgia to it—returning to our old stomping grounds, looking back on those adventures. Meeting Lesley again and knowing that he’s only ever a few turned pages from coming back to life.
As for the lack of Grant on the page, that came as a strange relief—a reminder that he’s out here, where he belongs.
I’m glad for myself, obviously, but I’m also so glad the real world gets the privilege of having Grant Hoffman in it.
I’m glad it gets his brow furrows and his random knowledge and, someday soon, his brilliant wizard detective novel.
And I’m glad he gets to live and learn and teach and love, the way no one else can.
I smile as he kisses my shoulder and then comes to settle into the other end of the couch. “I liked our version better, though,” I say.
That version, after all, is what led to this moment, and all the others we’ve shared.
Walks along the river and sandwiches in the park.
Weekend getaways and trivia nights. My first day teaching at Combat Zone, and the churro bouquet from Grant that awaited me there.
And the time we visited Steph at the beach house, where he gave an Oscar-worthy performance as Guy Who Doesn’t Know Where the Bathroom Is Because He’s Never Killed Anyone There.
I toss the manuscript on the coffee table. “You know, looking back, I should have known you weren’t a romance hero,” I say. “You didn’t even proclaim that you’d loved me since the moment I jacked your Uber.”
That crinkle appears right between his eyebrows.
“Right, because I absolutely didn’t. You spent the first two hours of our acquaintance traumatizing me.
” He reaches over to give Arthur a scratch between the ears, and the corner of his mouth lifts as his eyes meet mine.
“I liked you a lot sooner than I should have, though.”
I settle into the couch and cross my legs over his. “Me too.”
I wouldn’t change it. Any of it. Not for all the romantic speeches or happily ever afters in the world.
Romance novels aren’t really about those things, anyway.
Sure, they may feature a lot more racing to the airport to declare one’s love than we see in the real world.
And their ratio of beds to people is, frankly, suspect.
But ultimately, they’re really just about what we’re capable of: things like love, and courage, and hope.
They offer up happily ever after not as an ending, but as an invitation to write our own beginnings.
To let life pick up where fiction leaves off.
As for me and Grant, our life together isn’t one story, but thousands: ones we’ve read, ones we’ve lived, ones we’ve told each other, and ones still to come. Ones that have happened to us, and ones we’ve chosen for ourselves. And, while some of them have been fictional, all of them have been true.
The best stories always are.