Epilogue
Noor
Six months later. April. Tuesday evening.
Six-eighteen p.m. The light in the apartment is the specific late-spring gold I have only ever seen in this part of the country, and the windows are open, because the heat broke at noon, and the radiator I have spent all winter complaining about has finally, mercifully, fallen silent.
Bridget moved out in February. She moved into a one-bedroom four blocks away, and the move was occasioned by a conversation she had with me at the kitchen island over tea, which began, as so many of my recent life developments have begun, with Bridget saying, "Noor, do you want me to set up the spreadsheet. "
I did not, in fact, want her to set up the spreadsheet. I set it up myself.
Callum moved in three weeks after Bridget moved out.
He moved in on a Saturday morning in early March, with three duffel bags, two wooden crates of motorcycle parts that I made him store in the building's basement, a cast-iron skillet from his mother that he carried up the stairs like an heirloom, and a single framed photograph of his father — Sean Brennan in 1991, on a job site in Quincy, with a tool belt on and a smile that, when I see it, I recognize immediately.
He hung the photograph on the bookshelf in the living room.
I did not ask him to hang it on the bookshelf.
He hung it there because it is, by his calculation, the place a person walking into the apartment would see first, and his mother — who has been calling me weekly since November — has informed him, and informed me, and informed everyone in earshot, that her son is to keep his father with him in any home he ever lives in, and Callum, who is the obedient son of a willful Irish-American librarian, has done so without question.
I have reorganized to accommodate him. I will say this with the casual dignity of a woman who has made her peace with the project.
I added a second hook by the front door for his second helmet.
I cleared two shelves in the bathroom for the various motorcycle-grease cleansers he uses, which are in industrial sizes and which smell aggressively of pine.
I gave up the left side of the closet, which had been my off-season storage, and which is now full of his cuts and his black T-shirts and the one blazer he owns, which he wore to my parents' anniversary party in January and which my father — a cardiologist, a man who has never owned a motorcycle in his life — declared was acceptable for the dinner , which from my father is a standing ovation.
My mother, for her part, took one look at Callum and said, Noor, this one is going to be funny at family weddings, and then she patted his cheek and walked off to greet a cousin, and Callum has been telling me about this for four months, because his interpretation of the cheek-pat was that he had been blessed, and his interpretation is correct.
Callum is fully patched. The road name is officially retired — the brothers tried to call him Brennan for a few weeks; it did not stick — and he is now just Cal, to most of them, and Callum to me, and kid still, sometimes, to Diesel, who I think will call him kid until the day Diesel dies.
He has been promoted, in club terms, to running point on event security, which is a function that did not exist within Iron Vow until Constellation Events grew large enough to need it, and which has now grown into a small, quietly profitable arm of the club's legitimate business operations.
Constellation Events books Iron Vow Security for high-stakes events.
Iron Vow Security books me for the planning of their charity rides.
The arrangement is symbiotic. The arrangement also means that Callum and I work together in a professional capacity approximately three times a month, and the line between professional and personal is, as Bridget predicted on the kitchen island in February, a suggestion that we both cheerfully ignore.
Constellation has expanded. I now have an office downtown, on the second floor of a converted firehouse on Linden Street, two doors from a flower shop called Petal it has been my brand identity for a decade — and I open it now, and I scroll past the eleven weeks of meticulously logged interactions, past the tabs I labeled unbudgeted and under review, past the comment in the margin of Rule Three that read under review and which I have not, in five months, been able to bring myself to delete, because the comment is itself a record, and the record matters.
I scroll to the bottom. There is a row labeled Rule Four: confidentiality. It is the last row of the original document.
I add a new row beneath it.
The row is labeled Rule Five. I tab over to the description column. I type, carefully, with my thumb resting briefly on the new horseshoe at my throat.
No end date.
I save the file.
I show him.
He reads it. He reads it twice. He does not, immediately, speak. When he speaks, he speaks softly, and his voice has, in it, the unsteadiness that I gave to mine a moment ago.
"That's the best rule you've ever written."
"I know."
I close the laptop. I push it aside. He opens the takeout.
I get plates from the cabinet. We sit on the couch — he sits, I curl beside him with my legs tucked underneath, the way I have been curling beside him on this couch for four months — and we eat, and he tells me about his day, with the expansive enthusiasm of a man who is, finally, where he belongs.
He tells me about a charity ride the club is planning for June.
He tells me that Diesel asked after me at church on Sunday.
He tells me that Sienna sent leftovers along with the order, and that he is going to make us breakfast tomorrow with them, and that I am not allowed to refuse, because Sienna will personally come to the apartment and find out, and I do not want to be on Sienna's bad side.
I lean against his shoulder. I do not say much. I do not, in this evening, need to say much. The new horseshoe sits warm against my skin.
I think, as the light fades through the apartment windows and the tea goes cold beside me on the coffee table and the man I love continues to talk about his day in a voice that has, since the rally, lost its prospect-eagerness and become something steadier, something fuller, something settled — I think:
The jinx was never bad luck. The jinx was the universe clearing the path.
I think it the way I once thought I trust him on the back of a motorcycle on the road north out of Ember Falls. Quietly. With evidence. As a conclusion arrived at by experience.
The path is clear.
I am on it.
He is on it.
We are walking it together, with takeout from the Sunrise Grill and a label maker named Genevieve and a constellation at my throat and a man across town whose name I never gave him — he is, at this hour, almost certainly at the Iron Vow compound, with a beer in his hand, telling some story about his prospect — who once said, on a Tuesday at five p.m. in early October, welcome home, son.
I close my eyes for a moment.
I feel Callum shift beside me. I feel his hand find mine. His fingers thread through mine. He does not say anything. He does not need to.
I open my eyes.
The light has gone amber across the kitchen. The takeout is still warm. The horseshoes are at my throat. The spreadsheet is closed.
Rule Five is in effect.
There is no end date.
There is just the rest of it. The long, color-coded, unscheduled, beautifully ordinary rest of it.
I am — at thirty-seven, no, at twenty-six, no, at no age at all that I can measure right now — for the first time in my professional or personal life, exactly where I am supposed to be.
I am, finally, off the timeline.
I am here.