Epilogue
The sun cracks open along the horizon and bleeds into the water.
Not quietly. It goes down the way a bruise forms — slow, then all at once, purpling at the edges before the whole sky follows.
The guests have moved from the ceremony chairs to the low torchlit tables along the shoreline, barefoot in the sand, voices bright, and the warm press of the evening still sitting heavy on my chest.
I stand at Roan's side. His thumb traces the knuckle of my hand where he holds it, and I let him, which still surprises some small, careful part of me every single time.
Star and Liam are barely three feet away, and I don't think either of them has looked anywhere other than each other for more than forty-five seconds at a stretch.
She tips her head back laughing at something he murmurs against her temple, her hand resting over the round of her belly, and Liam's palm moves to cover it immediately — instinct, not performance.
His jaw softens in a way that would look impossible to anyone who'd seen him run a quarterly review.
I'd heard the stories. The Liam who proposed to someone else while his fate had been standing in a flower shop full of honeysuckle.
He looks now like a man who knows exactly how close he came to the wrong life, and is grateful enough to be frightened of it.
A server circles with a tray of champagne.
Glasses lift. Grayson lifts his without ceremony, Hunter with his attorney's precision, Lila already mid-laugh with Viv about something neither of them explains.
Jaleesa accepts a flute and I clock it in the same moment Viv does — the glass doesn't reach Jaleesa's lips.
It just stays at shoulder height. Present. Decorative. Untouched.
Viv's head tilts. Her curls bounce with the motion.
"Jaleesa." Her voice cuts cheerfully through the ambient roar of waves and voices.
"You haven't had a sip of anything all week.
" She says it like it's a gentle indictment, with the smile already stretched and knowing, and Jaleesa goes very still for exactly two seconds.
Hunter turns to look at his mate with an expression I can only describe as careful.
"I'm hydrating," Jaleesa says, her voice composed as a courtroom.
"Uh huh." Viv sets her glass in the sand. "Congratulations, you're pregnant."
The word detonates softly, pleasantly, the way a door blown open by a warm gust does.
Lila's hands go to her mouth. Star makes a sound in her throat that isn't a word.
Grayson doesn't say anything, but his shoulder drops an inch in the specific way it does when he is privately, ferociously delighted. I feel Roan tighten next to me.
Jaleesa's composure lasts exactly a breath longer before her mouth curls.
"I wanted to wait until after the week," she says.
There's a tightness to it, something pressed flat against the joy rising underneath.
"This is your celebration." She looks directly at Star when she says it.
"I wasn't going to take one inch of it."
Star crosses the three feet between them and takes both of Jaleesa's hands. Her voice is low. I can't hear exactly what she says, but Jaleesa laughs — full and sudden — and pulls her into an embrace that's careful of her bump on both sides.
Hunter permits himself exactly one look of absolute, unguarded pride before his barrister's face reassembles. The tip of his ear is red. I store that.
The congratulations cascade and tangle. Grayson squeezes Hunter's shoulder once — grip, release — which for the two of them is practically a declaration. Lila wipes her eyes and doesn't bother justifying it. Viv announces she called it three days ago and nobody argues, because she probably did.
And then everyone turns to us.
I feel it before I see it — the collective pivot, the shift in orientation, the way a tide turns. Roan tenses beside me by a degree so small it would only register to someone standing as close as I am.
"Okay." Grayson lifts his glass toward us. "Anyone else have anything they'd like to share? We're running low on secrets."
There's laughter. It isn't cruel. It's the specific, warm sort of laughter that happens when people who love each other have survived enough together that they feel entitled to tease. And they probably are.
Roan looks at them all. The grin comes up first — reflex, armor, curtain. Then it changes. Something underneath it pushes through, slower and more deliberate, and the charm drops to half-mast, and what replaces it is just him.
"I think it's fairly visible that Sharma and I are together," he says.
Easy. Direct. Then he turns his face slightly, and the easy slips.
"I played the fool for so long I nearly was one.
" He says it plainly, without the performance.
"I had — a remarkable woman in front of me for years and I didn't see her.
Not because she made herself invisible, but because I was arrogant enough to look right through her.
" His jaw tightens once, releases. "I almost let that cost me everything.
Any man who throws that away isn't charming.
He's just blind." His thumb finds my knuckle again.
"I was a fool. I was never crazy. There's a difference. "
The silence lasts long enough to mean something.
Then Viv says, at exactly the wrong volume, "You are absolutely not smart enough to deserve her." She says it with so much love it lands like a compliment.
Laughter breaks the moment open. Roan's grin finally reaches his eyes.
"Certifiably insane," he agrees, pointing at himself. "Your best friend took him on, Viv."
Viv pivots to me. "Sharma. Seriously. You're a genius and an idiot."
I open my mouth and mean to say something quick and deflective — there are seventeen options stacked up behind my teeth — but I look at Viv's face, and then at the faces around us, all of them warm and lit amber by the torches, Star with her hand on her belly and Lila half-pressed into Grayson's side and Jaleesa holding her untouched champagne like a prop she'll never need again, and the quick deflective thing dissolves.
"How could I not?" My voice comes out lower than I planned.
"I loved him before I knew what love was.
" The truth of it sits in my sternum, old and unshakeable, the way something true usually is.
"I had words for everything else. I couldn't find one for what he was to me.
I just knew that when he wasn't in the room, it was less — and when he was, and he looked through me like I wasn't there —" My throat closes around the end of the sentence.
I don't force it. "That's why it cost so much. "
No one fills the silence.
Roan lifts my hand. He turns it, palm up first, then over, and presses his mouth to my knuckles — slow, deliberate, not a performance. His lips are warm against my skin. He doesn't look away.
"I love you," he says against my hand. The words are direct and undecorated, no charm wrapped around them, nothing to diffuse the weight.
"I'm going to spend every year we have making sure you never doubt that I see you.
" He turns my hand again, holds it between both of his.
"You'll just have to forgive me for being late. "
My chest aches with something that isn't pain.
"You're forgiven," I say. "But I reserve the right to remind you."
He smiles, and it's the one I saw for the first time in that bungalow at three in the morning — the unguarded one, the one that has nothing behind it because it doesn't need anything. It isn't hiding. "Remind me daily," he says. "Hourly. I can take it."
Viv makes a sound that is equal parts touched and disgusted.
Grayson raises his glass again. "To Liam and Star," he says, and the edge in his voice is gone — just that. Just what he means. The group lifts with him.
The toast is brief and the drinking is not.
The ocean continues regardless. Waves push in at the shoreline and drag back over the sand with the patient, indifferent sound of something that was here before any of us and will be long after.
A torch near the water sputters as the sea breeze passes through it, flaring bright for a second then settling.
Roan keeps my hand. Not possessively — his thumb just rests against the inside of my wrist, over the pulse point, and stays. I can feel my own heartbeat against his hand.
Star's laughter rises above the ambient noise, and Liam's face in the torchlight is a man who has stopped trying to manage what he feels.
Jaleesa tips her head against Hunter's shoulder, and he doesn't move — just lets her.
Grayson pulls his phone out, looks at it, then pockets it with a private smile that means Lila sent something about Jas.
The sun is gone. The sky above the water has gone to deep blue at the top and a thin copper line at the seam, and the stars are starting.
Roan turns to look at me sideways. There's still something loose in his face, the aftermath of having said something real in public, the faint residue of exposure. I know that look now. I know what it costs him.
I lean my head against his shoulder. He stiffens for exactly one second — reflex — then exhales and puts his mouth against my hair.
The copper line on the horizon narrows to nothing. The ocean keeps moving.
The future feels like a door left open on purpose.