Epilogue #2
He’s at the counter, barefoot, sleep-rumpled in a way that should be illegal before nine AM.
Dark hair falling across his face, one hand braced against the granite while the other pours water into the Chemex with the focused calm of someone who has decided that this—this specific task, this precise measurement of water to grounds—is the most important thing happening in the universe right now, and everything else can wait.
He’s wearing sweatpants and nothing else, and the particular geometry of his shoulders catches the morning light in a way that makes my chest do that thing again, the slow turn, the warm collapse, the particular involuntary softening that happens when you’ve been looking at someone for two years and your body still hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s supposed to be bored by now.
“Morning,” he says, not looking up.
“Morning,” I say.
I cross the kitchen. His hand finds the small of my back before I reach him—warm, familiar, the particular casual certainty of a man who has decided that touching me is a thing he gets to do and is doing it with the unhurried confidence of someone who knows the mortgage is paid.
I kiss him. Slow. Easy. The kind of kiss that has no agenda beyond the fact that I want to, and he is here, and those two facts together are enough.
Atlas wedges his entire body between us with the precision of a dog who has been practicing this maneuver in his head for months and has finally found the perfect moment to execute it.
His brindle flank presses against my legs, his head shoves upward into the space between our stomachs, and the tennis ball, still clamped in his jaws, makes a damp indentation in the front of Jae’s sweatpants that will probably leave a mark.
Jae sighs. The particular long-suffering exhale of a man who has accepted that his life now contains a third entity with opposable thumbs and the emotional regulation of a loaded spring.
“Your son,” he says, “is jealous.”
“Our son,” I correct, scratching Atlas behind the ears where the fur is softest, “is a criminal. He has a criminal mind. I can see it in his eyes.”
Atlas barks. Loud. Proud. The particular declarative bark of a dog who has absolutely no idea what’s being said about him but is certain, based on tone alone, that he is being praised.
“See?” Jae says, reaching for two mugs from the cabinet. “Definitely your genetics.”
I flip him off. He grins—the real one, the one that starts at the left corner of his mouth and takes its time reaching the right, the one that makes the crease at the corner of his eye deepen in a way that turns my chest into something that feels dangerously close to liquid.
The coffee pours. Dark and rich, the steam rising in lazy coils that catch the light from the windows.
I lean against the counter and watch him work—the particular economy of his movements, the way his hands know the choreography of this kitchen better than they know the choreography of a stage he hasn’t stood on in two years.
Atlas orbits us both, the tennis ball still in his mouth, his nails clicking against the tile in a rhythm that has no pattern and no end.
In the corner of the kitchen, curled on the chair with the particular imperious stillness of a creature who has never once questioned her right to be exactly where she is, Sheba watches us with half-lidded eyes, her gray fur catching the light in stripes, her tail twitching once, twice, then going still, as if the effort of acknowledging our existence has exhausted her daily quota of fucks to give.
The ceiling fan turns overhead, pushing the coffee smell in slow circles around the room.
Jae nudges Atlas aside with one foot without breaking the pour, a move so practiced it’s almost ballet, and Atlas goes with it, shuffling two steps to the left before resuming his orbit, because the rules of physics are suggestions and Atlas is not a dog who takes suggestions seriously.
“My nine-thirty canceled,” I say, accepting the mug he hands me. The ceramic is warm against my palms. “Client decided to settle. Which means I have approximately”—I check the clock on the microwave—“two hours of doing absolutely nothing before I have to be a person who wears shoes.”
“Terrible way to start a Tuesday,” Jae says, deadpan. “Having free time. Awful. I’m devastated for you.”
“I’m thinking of napping on the porch swing. As a protest against capitalism.”
“Very brave.”
“The bravest.”
He leans against the counter beside me, his shoulder touching mine, and we stand there drinking coffee in the kind of silence that doesn’t feel like silence because it’s full of things—the click of Atlas’s nails, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of the ocean through the open patio doors, the particular white noise of a morning that belongs entirely to us and no one else.
The law practice is small. One room above a bookstore in town, with windows that look out over the water and a door that has my name on it—Amiyah Choi, Attorney at Law—in letters that are maybe half an inch too small because the signmaker misheard me over the phone and I was too embarrassed to correct him, and now every time I look at it I think about calling to have it fixed, and then I don’t, because there’s something almost charming about the modesty of it, like the office itself is trying not to take up too much space.
I passed the bar eight months ago. The call to my father happened first—collect, because he’s still inside, and collect calls are the particular bureaucratic purgatory of a system that has decided that people in prison don’t deserve clear phone lines.
He cried. Actually cried, which is not a thing Marcus Dawson does, ever, under any circumstances, and the sound of it coming through that scratchy connection did something to my chest that I am still not fully recovered from.
The call to Jae happened second. He was in the middle of a spay, his voice muffled through a surgical mask, and he said “I knew you would” with the particular bone-deep certainty of a man who has never once doubted a single thing about me, which is objectively insane and also the reason I married him.
The call to Penelope happened third. She cried for approximately eleven seconds, then said “I have something in my eye, don’t be weird about it,” and then changed the subject so aggressively that I could hear her keyboard clacking in the background, the particular staccato of someone who is emotionally compromised and is dealing with it by doing something useful instead of feeling it.
Jae’s hospital is ten minutes down the coast. Second Chance Animal Hospital and Rescue.
The building is pale stucco with a red tile roof and a sign hand-painted by a local artist who charged us approximately twice what the sign was worth and then threw in a portrait of Atlas as a “bonus,” which now hangs in the waiting room and makes every new client ask if that’s really our dog, to which the answer is always yes, and yes, he is exactly that dramatic in person, and no, we cannot explain it, we’re just living with it.
He described it to me over half-eaten pizza in my apartment, back when my apartment was a place I lived and not a place I used to live.
His voice low, the city glow turning everything blue through the windows, his hands moving while he talked the way they always do when he’s describing something he cares about—building the space in the air between us, room by room, the bay windows, the waiting area that smells like cedar, the particular warm weight of a cat in his lap while he explains to a nervous owner that the lump is benign and the bill is manageable and the animal in question is going to be fine.
I listened with my chin in my hand and told him it sounded exactly right, and I meant it, and he knew I meant it, and the look on his face in that moment is something I carry in my chest like a photograph I can take out and look at when the world gets loud.
Jae appears at the patio doors with both our mugs refilled.
The morning light catches the line of his jaw, turns the shadow beneath it something warmer than shadow has any right to be.
I take my mug from him, and the rose-gold band on my left hand catches the light again—a flash, brief and bright, like the ring itself is reminding me it’s there, which is ridiculous, rings don’t have consciousness, and yet.
“Thank you, Mr. Choi,” I say.
“You are most welcome, Mrs. Choi,” he says, and the name still sends a flutter through my chest that I have no defense against, none whatsoever, and he knows it, and the particular smug set of his mouth tells me he is enjoying this fact immensely, which is why I married him and also why I occasionally want to push him into the ocean.
The ring is thin. Delicate, almost, though delicate is not a word that belongs anywhere near the life I’ve lived, and yet here it is, on my finger, a band of rose gold that weighs almost nothing and means approximately everything.
Jae designed it himself. Drew it on a napkin during lunch at a food truck in San Juan, the lines shaky because his hands were shaking, and then took the napkin to a jeweler who looked at it and said “I can work with this” in the particular diplomatic tone of someone who has been handed worse and made it beautiful anyway.
It’s simple. No stone. Just gold, shaped into something that sits flush against my skin and doesn’t catch on things, because I use my hands, and he knows I use my hands, and the fact that he thought about that—the particular mundane practicality of a ring that won’t interfere with the grip on a steering wheel or the turn of a page—is the kind of detail that undoes me completely, and he knows that too, and I am surrounded by people who know me too well and love me anyway, which is its own particular kind of miracle.