Epilogue
Amiyah
Two years later:
Barking fills my ears.
Not the polite kind. Not the tentative, questioning bark of a dog who’s maybe heard something and wants to check if it’s worth getting worked up about.
This is the full-body commitment kind. The kind that starts in the diaphragm and comes out with enough force to rattle the windows in their frames.
Relentless. Rhythmic. Completely without mercy, like the dog has decided that whatever’s happening downstairs requires the sonic equivalent of a fire alarm, and he is the only one qualified to pull it.
I stare at the ceiling. One beat. Two. A smile pulls at the corner of my mouth anyway, and I bury my face in the pillow to smother it, which accomplishes absolutely nothing because the pillow does not have noise-canceling properties and Atlas does not have volume control.
A crash from downstairs. The particular metallic clatter of something that was previously on a counter and is now on a floor, followed by a string of cussing that starts in Korean, switches to English somewhere around the third syllable, and ends on a note that suggests whatever fell has personally offended him on a molecular level.
“Are you okay, my love?” I call.
Jae’s laugh drifts up the stairs—deep, warm, unmistakably alive, the kind of sound that still, after two years, makes something in my chest do a slow turn that I have stopped trying to name because naming it would require acknowledging that I am the kind of person who gets soft about a laugh, and I have a reputation to maintain.
“I’m fine,” he calls back. “We’re fine.”
The “we” does not inspire confidence.
I laugh into the pillow. The sheets smell like him—cedar and clean cotton and the particular faint spice of whatever shampoo he uses that I have never asked the name of because asking would make me sound like I pay attention to things like that, and I absolutely do not pay attention to things like that, except I bought the same shampoo three weeks ago and have been using it when he’s not home, which is pathetic and I will take that information to my grave.
The bedroom door flies open. Not opens—flies. As in, the door was closed, and then it wasn’t, and in the space between those two states, Atlas has materialized on the bed like a heat-seeking missile with a brindle coat and absolutely no regard for the laws of physics.
He is, objectively speaking, a catastrophe.
A hundred pounds of rescue mutt packed into what appears to be the body of a dog who was designed by a committee that could not agree on scale.
Brindle coat in shades of brown and black that make him look like he’s been dunked in coffee and then rolled in dirt, which is not far from the truth on most days.
Oversized paws that he has not grown into and probably never will, giving him the particular ungainly grace of a teenager who hit his growth spurt six months ahead of his coordination.
His tail is a weapon. I have cataloged the damage: one broken mug, two knocked-over plants, and the time he cleared the coffee table with a single enthusiastic wag and sent my bar exam flashcards scattering across the living room like confetti, which was funny for exactly eleven seconds and then deeply, catastrophically not funny.
He shoves the tennis ball directly into my face.
Not near my face. Into it. The ball is wet.
It has been in his mouth. I can smell his breath, which is the particular concentrated essence of everything he has found interesting enough to put in his mouth in the last twenty-four hours, which is a lot of things, because Atlas’s criteria for “interesting enough to put in my mouth“ begins at “exists” and has no upper bound.
“You,” I tell him, “are a menace to society.”
He wags harder. His entire back half gets involved, the particular full-body commitment of a dog who has heard the word “menace” approximately eight thousand times and has decided it is a term of endearment.
I scratch behind his ears—the spot that makes his back leg kick in that involuntary way, like his body has a separate nervous system that operates on pure pleasure and has nothing to do with the brain that runs the rest of him—and he makes a sound that’s half sigh, half moan, the particular vocalization of a creature who has found his purpose and his purpose is being scratched.
“Your timing is terrible,” I tell him. “I was having a very nice dream about being alone.”
He drops the tennis ball on my chest. It leaves a damp circle on the sheet.
I pick it up and throw it toward the doorway, which is the equivalent of handing a toddler a loaded gun and pointing them toward a china shop, but the alternative is having a wet tennis ball on my chest for the remainder of the morning, and I have limits.
Atlas launches. The bed frame groans. He hits the floor with the particular thunderous impact of something that weighs as much as a person but has never once concerned itself with the concept of weight distribution, and then he’s gone, the tennis ball clamped in his jaws, his nails clicking against the hardwood in a staccato that fades down the hallway toward the stairs, where presumably he will attempt to take the steps three at a time and succeed at exactly none of them.
I push myself upright. The ocean is right there.
Not metaphorically right there. Actually right there, past the bedroom windows that Jae insisted on installing floor-to-ceiling because “if we’re going to live on the side of a cliff, we might as well be able to see the thing we’re living on the side of,” which is the kind of logic that makes perfect sense when he says it and then reveals itself to be completely deranged the moment you try to explain it to anyone else. But the view—god, the view.
The water is blue-green and restless, catching the morning light in strips that shift and break and reassemble with each new wave.
Palm fronds sway in the breeze off the water, their shadows tracing lazy patterns across the worn hardwood floor.
Sunlight cuts through the room in long warm strips, turning the dust motes into something that almost looks deliberate, like the room itself is performing a very slow, very patient magic trick.
Beyond the palms, the horizon line is clean—water meeting sky in a seam so precise it looks drawn, the particular aggressive perfection of a Puerto Rico morning that knows exactly how good it looks and has no interest in being modest about it.
I sit on the edge of the bed and let myself look.
Two years in this house, and the view still does this to me—the particular hollow warmth that starts behind my sternum and spreads outward until my fingers feel loose and my jaw unclenches and the part of my brain that is always running contingencies goes quiet for exactly as long as I allow it to.
The bedroom is a mess in the specific way that means people live here and are not particularly concerned with the opinion of anyone who doesn’t.
The sheets are rumpled, half-dragged onto the floor where Atlas’s exit pulled them.
My robe is draped over the chair in the corner, one sleeve hanging off the edge, the belt coiled on the floor beneath it like something that gave up.
The closet door is open because I never close it, and inside, my clothes are arranged in the particular chaotic system that makes sense to me and absolutely no one else—pinks together, then blacks, then the single navy blazer I bought for court appearances and have worn exactly twice because court appearances require me to be someone I am still learning how to be.
I push my hair back. The rose-gold band on my left hand catches the light—a thin band, no stone, just gold the color of a sunset I watched from this porch approximately eight months ago while Jae knelt on one knee and said things I have since made him repeat approximately seventeen times because I like the way his voice gets quiet when he’s nervous and I am, fundamentally, a terrible person.
The ring is heavier than it looks. Not physically—it weighs maybe three grams—but in the particular way that symbols acquire weight when they represent something you didn’t think you’d get to have.
I twist it. The metal is warm from my skin, and the weight of it still feels surreal, like my hand belongs to someone else, someone who made different choices, someone who wakes up in a house by the ocean to the sound of a dog barking and a man swearing in two languages and thinks: yes, this, exactly this, forever.
I pull on the first clothes I find—cotton shorts, a faded Blackthorn Law t-shirt that has a small hole near the hem that I have not repaired because repairing it would mean admitting I care, and I absolutely do not care, except I have worn this shirt approximately twice a week for the past year, so the evidence suggests otherwise.
My hair goes into a loose knot that will survive approximately forty-five minutes before giving up entirely.
No makeup. No bra, because it’s Tuesday and I passed the bar eight months ago and those two facts together constitute a constitutional right to comfort that I will defend in any court in the land.
Downstairs, the kitchen smells like coffee and something burning, which is Jae’s signature combination and has been since approximately the third week we lived together, when I discovered that the man who can perform complex surgery on a kitten with tremors the size of a quarter cannot, under any circumstances, operate a toaster without supervision.