Epilogue #2
I used to spend a significant amount of time somewhere else. I know what it costs to be a man who is technically in the room but has decided the room doesn’t fully contain him. Elena didn’t fix that in me. She made me want to fix it, which is the version that actually holds.
I don’t ever have to think about enjoying myself anymore.
I just do. That’s the whole thing. That’s the sentence.
After years of treating my own happiness as a project with deliverables and a risk profile, I am sitting on a beach in the Bahamas watching my son play soccer, feeling my daughter move in my wife’s beautiful body, and I am not managing any of it. I’m just in it.
Erick turns around and walks up the sand toward us with the particular walk of a person who has concluded the session on his own terms. He drops down between us, sandy and damp, and leans into Elena’s leg without asking.
She puts her hand on his head automatically.
He looks up at her stomach. “Did she move today?”
“She moved today.”
He nods, processing. “Is she going to like soccer?”
“I think she’ll like whatever you teach her.”
He considers this. “I’ll start her on the basics,” he says, with the gravity of someone who has given this thought.
“That’s very responsible of you,” I say.
This is the dream. All of it. The whole ordinary, irreplaceable thing.
Elena
I I still write.
I write the little moments before they happen, then I sit there like a smug witch when reality catches up and proves I was right.
The old version of me calls this denial with cute stationery. The current version calls it a coping mechanism with better lighting. Erick draws when life gets too loud in his head. I write. Same impulse, different mess.
It started back when wanting a family felt like reaching for the moon with a kitchen chair. As a kid, that was my whole dream. Not fame, not applause, not proving anything to anyone. Just a home where people chose each other on purpose and kept choosing each other when things got hard.
Then life got complicated, and I got scared of wanting that out loud.
So I borrowed a new dream from Nadia. Independence. Sharp, glamorous, untouchable independence. I wore it like armor. I wore it so well I almost convinced myself I did not need softness, did not need belonging, did not need someone seeing me all the way through and still deciding to stay.
Nadia told me once, Say what you want and stop apologizing for it.
Annoying advice. Correct advice.
Wanting everything makes you feel greedy until you realize everything is basic human stuff. Love. Freedom. Respect. A body that feels safe in its own skin. A person who knows your worst timing and still brings you coffee.
I have that now. I have him.
Patrick still does that thing where he goes quiet while reading emails like he is negotiating world peace and not replying to a contractor about kitchen tiles.
Last Tuesday I stood in front of him for a full minute, beautiful and alive and clearly available for admiration, and he gave me nothing.
Not even a "morning." Not even eye contact. Criminal behavior.
In real life, I tapped his arm and said, "Hello, sir, remember me?"
In my document, I gave him a rotten egg at breakfast.
The scene is art. He cracks it, the smell hits, his face collapses in offended disbelief, and I sip coffee like a woman who has never committed a crime in her life.
This is why I keep writing. In my pages, I love him without restraint. I also hate him with precision when he deserves it. I do both in person too, to be clear, but on paper I get range.
He has no idea this file exists. If he finds it, I will deny everything and accuse him of violating my creative privacy.
The funny part is that the fantasy life I wrote to survive became my actual life, minus the parts where I make dramatic speeches in silk robes.
I wrote about us in a kitchen with loud kids and louder opinions.
Now we have dinners where Erick argues about soccer rankings like there is federal funding on the line.
I wrote about growing old with him, about his quiet becoming a language I can read.
I wrote us through fights, through tenderness, through that ugly middle where love is not cinematic but stubborn.
People think getting the thing you wanted heals every wound cleanly. It does not. It changes the questions. It gives you better battles. It hands you joy with fingerprints all over it and asks whether you can hold joy without trying to control it.
I am learning.
Some days I still feel the old panic in my body, that electric signal that says run first so you cannot be left. It passes faster now. Patrick touches my hand once and my nervous system remembers we live here, in this life, not in old rooms with old ghosts.
We are not perfect. Thank God. Perfect people are unbearable and usually lying.
We are honest. Sometimes too honest. We banter, we fight clean, we repair fast. We choose each other with open eyes.
He knows exactly where I am difficult. I know exactly where he retreats behind competence and spreadsheets and that polite billionaire face that says everything is under control while his heart is doing somersaults.
I love him there too.
Especially there.
I think about Nadia more than I admit. I keep her out of details because some stories are not mine to expose.
She would absolutely send me straight to hell if I got sentimental in her direction.
Still, I want life to surprise her in the best way.
I want her to meet a love that does not ask her to shrink.
I want her to know vulnerability is not weakness, it is expensive courage, and she can afford it.
I will never say that to her face.
I enjoy breathing.
I write the future versions where we survive bad moods, bad timing, bad haircuts, family chaos, and our own stubbornness. I write the ridiculous moments because laughter saves marriages faster than pride ever will. I write the tender ones because tenderness is the point.
Most of all, I write the truth I fought for years to say out loud.
I want this.
I want him.
I am done apologizing for that.
I know now it makes me vulnerable, but it does not make me weak. It makes me stronger.
THE END
Thank you for reading Impossible Billionaire Boss.