Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
Early June in Newfoundland is iceberg season. Abby has picked a wedding location on the coast near St. John’s, and she has been insisting for months that she is going to order up an iceberg to float past her ceremony, ‘in the background, for dramatic effect, like a massive white dildo.’
I arrive two days before the ceremony with Ollie and Hannah, and we rent a car to drive down the island to the hotel near where the ceremony will be held.
In the end, Brant wasn’t able to get me fired or get Ollie moved to another office.
Strangely enough, it was Ollie’s friend Katy who helped the situation.
At Vivi’s request, Katy spoke up to back up my claims about Brant’s retaliatory intentions; she was the one who told Brant about Ollie and me, not realizing there might be a problem until she saw how badly he reacted to the news.
Rather than dragging us all through the legally messy nightmare that was brewing, Brant eventually agreed to look for a job outside the company.
Ollie and I still might move to Toronto together, though, since the company is still pushing for it…
but Ollie has managed to push off the decision until this summer, after Hannah has finished her school year.
He has been staying in a rental apartment two blocks from me for the last few months, but we have discussed renting somewhere together from now on, either in New York City or wherever our jobs might send us.
In the meantime, we have been doing a lot of traveling together.
Ollie took me to New Orleans while Hannah was on tour with her dad last summer, and then at Christmas, Ollie and I flew with Hannah to London so that she could spend Christmas morning with her father while The Big Lie was on its European leg of their tour.
Then in February, Ollie and I spent three days in Paris together while Hannah visited with Nick during his show dates in France.
This trip feels different, though. This time, it feels like the three of us are becoming a family.
It hasn’t always been a smooth transition.
When I finally told Hannah that Ollie was my boyfriend, she acquired a new hobby of testing his limits.
She would be rude to him whenever I wasn’t there to stop her; if I was getting dressed for a date, she would corner Ollie with skeptical questions, or she would spill salt and sugar on the table in restaurants if I left her alone with him.
Ollie’s unflappable calm diffused the worst of her behavior, but I knew that Hannah was acting out of loyalty to her father, a problem I didn’t know how to fix.
Things took an unexpected turn once Nick got a girlfriend, though.
Hannah met Leela, Nick’s twenty-six-year-old publicist girlfriend, briefly at Christmas.
Then they spent a lot of time together during her February visit.
Hannah told me that Leela seemed ‘fake.’ Certainly parts of her were, I thought.
But after that February trip, Hannah finally warmed up to Ollie.
I suspected Leela tended to treat Hannah as a mild inconvenience, which annoyed me as a parent, but had the positive effect of making Hannah come around to appreciating Ollie’s polite, amused attention.
It is now the night of the rehearsal dinner before Abby’s wedding, and the whole guest list fits at four long tables that have been set up at a local seafood restaurant.
Faint music is playing, and I know it must be Paul’s playlist: Dire Straits, The Tragically Hip, Rush.
As Hannah nods off on my lap, I look around and think about Ben and his search for the perfect rehearsal dinner that could satisfy his would-be in-laws.
Ben is dating someone else, now, and very happy.
Jaana and Jody have moved in together, and Helen has fallen in love, too… this time with tango dancing.
Weddings are so much simpler when they are just about the people that you love the most. Abby and Paul practically glow every time they look at each other.
After the mess of our mother’s love life, I sometimes feel like Abby and I are two princesses who have broken the family curse.
The fact that we can be happily in love with kind men is a small miracle I am grateful for every day.
I slide the sleepy Hannah onto a soft bench next to the dessert table, then step out onto the balcony to look at the wide-open sky. The air is buffeted by cool gusts of wind, the sound of surf making a distant whisper.
“See an iceberg yet?” Ollie asks as he steps next to me, putting one arm around my shoulders. We stare out into the blue dusk, scanning the horizon for floating shapes. To my surprise, Hannah appears outside a moment later and wedges herself between us. Once again, she wasn’t actually asleep.
“Did you ask her yet?” Hannah says to Ollie.
“Not yet,” Ollie says, smiling. He glances at me, embarrassed.
“Ask me what?” I look between them.
“I gave him permission to ask you a question,” Hannah says.
“I was going to ask her later in the weekend,” Ollie tells her. “We don’t want to distract from your aunt’s big day.”
“Fine,” Hannah sighs, looking annoyed at the foolish rules of grown-ups, and heads back inside to approach one of the photographers.
“You asked Hannah for permission to ask me something?” I feel like my heart is so full that the whole sky can’t contain all of it. My love is going to flood out across the night like the endless stretch of stars.
“Later this weekend.” He smiles. “Unless you want me to ask you now.”
I can feel the string between my heart and his, the tension that means that we are always going to come back together. “No,” I say. “It can wait.”
Ollie smiles, the familiar mischievous look back in his eyes. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
My heart flips in my chest. “Okay?”
He waits for a long moment, his eyes sparkling, then puts out one hand as the music drifts out the doors. “Would you like to dance?”