Epilogue
Ivy
I find the note at six-fifteen when I get up to use the bathroom for the second time since midnight, which is my life now.
Gone to the quarry. Coffee's on.
Four words. A year together, and he still writes notes like he's billing by the letter.
I've started saving them in the drawer of my desk — thirty-two of them, ranging from back by noon to the serviceberries are in to, memorably, don't move the level, which I had absolutely moved and which we have agreed to never discuss again.
I pour the coffee and pull on his canvas jacket over my pajamas and take my mug outside.
The foundation is nearly done. He's at it every morning before the crew arrives, an hour at a time.
The walls go up in the fall. We've decided not to rush it.
We have the quarry property, we have the converted office, and — as Flint said when I tried to set a completion date — stone doesn't care about your timeline.
I told him that was the most romantic thing he'd ever said to me.
He looked at me for a long moment. "It wasn't meant to be romantic."
"I know," I said. "That's why it was."
He's at the far edge of the foundation when I cross the yard, crouched over the east wall, and he doesn't look up, but his hand comes out automatically.
I put the second mug into it without breaking stride.
We've learned each other's mornings. I stand beside him and look at what he's built since yesterday — three more courses, gray-green granite from the quarry's east face, the same vein as the memorial path, the same stone as the piece on my desk that says Daniel on it.
Everything from the same ground. He decided that without telling me.I understood.
"How's the east wall?" I ask.
"Plumb."
"The west?"
"Plumb."
"You're very good at this."
He drinks his coffee. "I know."
I bite down on a smile. Fourteen months ago, I stood on this hill for the first time and watched this man stand completely still for two full minutes reading the ground and thought: serviceable. I have since revised this assessment considerably.
I put my free hand on my stomach. Fourteen weeks. The nausea is finally backing off, the reality of it solidifying the way things solidify when you stop bracing against them and just let them be true.
He sets his mug down now and crouches to read the base course with his hands, running his thumb along the mortar joint the way he runs his thumb along everything he's made — checking, confirming.
I watch his hands. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time this past year watching his hands, and I have zero regrets about this.
"Come here," he says, without looking up.
I crouch beside him. He takes my hand and puts it flat against the stone — the same way I put my hand on the Jamie stone that first night in his workshop, the gesture that started everything, the first thing we said to each other that neither of us had to translate.
The stone is cold and solid under my palm.
The valley spreads below us, the river catching the early light, the memorial garden visible on the slope above Ridgeline Road — the kinnikinnick in its third season, the wild grasses dense and settled, the Jamie stone at its heart holding the morning the way good stone always does.
"It's going to be good," I say. I mean the house.
He looks at me. "I know," he says. He means more than that.
I lean into him, and he puts his arm around me. We stay there in the early morning with our hands on the stone, and the foundation rising around us and the life we're building is already more than I knew how to want.