Epilogue
DAEMON
Six months ago, I'd stood in a parking lot and listened to Nadia's engine fade and thought I'd lost everything.
Tonight, she was running the catering for Lindsey Hunter's latest book launch, her new staff moving through the venue with the same focus I'd seen her model for three years.
The difference was that I was carrying a small velvet box in the inside pocket of my jacket. One I'd been carrying for three weeks.
Lucky Break had done the setup. Tables, lighting, and the AV for Lindsey's reading. But the kitchen was entirely Nadia's operation now. Six staff, all trained, all good, and a business that had survived.
Survived was the accurate word, and Nadia used it deliberately. The complaints had been withdrawn five weeks after the community hall meeting, no explanation offered, which was as close to a confession as Elevate's lawyers would ever sign.
Their office on the highway stayed open. They still quoted against her on the corporate work, still sent associates to smile at chamber mixers. Nobody had packed up and fled town in the night. They'd gone patient instead, the way money does when daylight gets expensive.
The win had a price tag, and Nadia could quote it to the cent. There was a year left to finish paying off Patricia Holt's fees. The second van, postponed twice. Maryanne Law's account, gone for good, because the new partners never circled back and Nadia had stopped waiting.
Jen, working at a bakery counter two towns over, because some things can be forgiven and still never be the same.
What balanced the ledger was the collective.
Fourteen businesses sharing clients and equipment and a lawyer on retainer split fourteen ways, with corporate work coming through the group that none of them would have landed alone.
It was a smaller business than the one she'd planned, and she'd told me once, sitting on my kitchen counter with her coffee, that she rated it higher for what it had cost to keep.
I watched her move through the room from across the venue and thought about the morning she'd stood in my apartment and looked around at Sofia's decor and laughed. About how certain I'd been, even then, and how long it had taken me to catch up with myself.
Not making that mistake twice.
"You're staring," said Malakai, appearing at my elbow with two drinks.
"I'm allowed. She's mine."
He handed me a glass. "Amelia thinks you're going to propose tonight."
"Amelia thinks a lot of things."
"She's usually right." He looked across the room to where Amelia was talking to Lindsey, both of them laughing at something. "You've got the ring."
It wasn't a question. I'd told him three weeks ago when I'd picked it up, because Malakai noticed everything anyway and it was easier to tell him than to wait for him to work it out. "I've had it for a while."
"What are you waiting for?"
I didn't have an answer. I wasn't scared. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Six months ago, the idea of this would have sent me to a bar in Millbrook. Tonight it felt like the most straightforward thing I'd ever done.
I wanted it to be right.
"I'll know when," I said.
Malakai gave me a look that suggested he had thoughts about that, then moved off to find Amelia.
Sofia found me twenty minutes later.
She was wearing her best dress, the burgundy one with the gold buttons, her expression warning me she was about to say something I'd remember for a long time.
"You look happy," she said, as if surprised.
"I am happy."
"Good." She patted my arm. "It took you long enough."
"Sofia—"
"I know, I know." She waved a hand. "You don't want the lecture.
But I'm eighty-six, bambino. I give the lectures while I still can.
" She looked across the room to where Nadia was talking to a couple of the collective members, relaxed and confident in a way that was different from the early months I'd known her.
More settled. "She is good for you. You are good for her.
" She nodded, satisfied with her own assessment. "Now stop being slow."
She moved off toward the dessert table, presumably to interrogate whoever was standing near it.
Nadia's parents arrived at seven, with her sister and the kids in tow. Emma held back and tried not to smile for fear of people noticing her braces. Jack spotted me from the door and made a beeline through the crowd with the focused energy that reminded me of his aunt.
"Uncle Daemon!" He hit me at roughly hip height. "Mom said we could stay for an hour."
"An hour's a lot." I crouched down to his level. "Have you eaten?"
"Not yet."
"Come on. Let's find your aunt and see what she can do about that."
Nadia's mother hugged me when I brought him over.
She'd started doing that sometime around month three, without announcement or explanation, as if she'd simply decided it was happening and there was no further discussion needed. Nadia’s dad shook my hand with the firm grip he always used, which I'd learned early on meant approval rather than critique.
"She looks well," her mother said, watching Nadia across the room. "Better than well."
"She is," I said.
"You both do." She gave me a look that reminded me Nadia had learned her ability to see too much from somewhere. "It's good to see."
I found Nadia near the kitchen doorway around eight, in the brief window between the main service wrapping up and dessert going out. She had her tablet in hand and was running through something with one of her staff, but when she looked up and saw me, she handed the tablet over and stepped away.
"How's it going?" I asked.
"Well. The Peterson coordinator is here, the one from the dinner. She's been talking to two other corporate clients all evening." She leaned against the wall beside me, shoulder to shoulder, and looked out across the room. "Six months ago I nearly handed all of this over."
"You didn't, though."
"We didn't." She tilted her head against my shoulder briefly. "There's a difference."
Across the room, Cole was standing near the edge of the collective group. Sarah had cornered him with a small notebook, obviously after his opinion on something. Cole was doing the thing he did when something had his attention without him wanting it to.
He wasn't looking at the notebook. He was looking at her, at the way she talked with her hands when she got going, his expression that of a man who'd walked into something he hadn't been prepared for.
I filed that away.
He'd been the one who told me three years ago that nobody owed me anything and that I had to build my own life. It had never crossed my mind that he'd need the same advice one day. I decided not to mention it. Some things a man had to figure out on his own.
"Come outside for a minute," I said to Nadia.
She looked at me. "Everything okay?"
"Everything's fine. I want to show you something."
She handed her earpiece to the staff member and followed me out through the side door onto the venue's patio.
The evening was cool and clear, the sort of California night that reminded you why people stayed.
String lights ran along the fence line, left over from a previous event, and the noise of the party was muffled to a low, pleasant hum through the walls.
Nadia looked around. "What did you want to show me?"
"Nothing." I turned to face her. "I wanted two minutes without sixty people in the room."
She looked at me, then at my jacket, then back at my face, putting it together.
"Daemon."
"I've been carrying something for three weeks," I said. "Waiting for the right time, and it keeps moving. I've realized the problem is I've been thinking about this like a man who's still afraid of getting it wrong."
I reached into my inside pocket. "I'm not afraid. I want you to know that. I'm not doing this because it's now or never, or because anything is forcing my hand. I'm doing it because I want to. Because you're the first thing I've ever been completely certain about."
She stilled.
I opened the box. Simple white gold, a single stone, clean and uncluttered. The jeweler had asked what she was like, and I'd said: precise, direct, no unnecessary decoration. He'd shown me this one first, and I'd known immediately.
"I love you," I said. "I won't be perfect. But I'm going to be here every day doing the work. That's what I've got to offer." I looked at her. "Nadia Becker. Will you marry me?"
She didn't answer right away. She looked at the ring, then at my face, and whatever she found there made her close her eyes briefly.
"Yes," she said. Her voice was steady, but something in it broke open in the best way. "Obviously yes. You ridiculous man."
I slid the ring onto her finger. She looked at it, then kissed me the way she had in the parking lot six months ago, like she was done waiting and done holding back, and the lights blurred at the edges, and I didn't care about any of it except her.
When we came back inside, Sofia was the first to notice. She let out a sound that was half sob and half triumph and said something in Italian that I suspected was aimed at God rather than either of us.
Nadia's mother saw next. Then her sister. Then, with the speed of big news in small towns, everyone.
Cherie Williamson found us at the edge of the crowd, beaming, and took Nadia's hand to look at the ring with the practiced eye of a woman whose profession was the architecture of joyous occasions.
"I know exactly what would suit you," she said, squeezing Nadia's hand. "When you're ready. No rush. But come and see me." She smiled. "I've been waiting for a bride I could really go to town for."
Nadia laughed, the real laugh, the one that took up the entire room. "I'll hold you to that."
Later, when the party had thinned and Lindsey Hunter had finished her reading to enthusiastic applause and Sofia had accepted a ride home with Nadia's parents because she was, as she put it, "built for speed but not for late nights anymore," I stood with Nadia in the middle of the venue while her staff broke things down around us.
She was leaning against my side, her hand in mine, the ring catching the light from the overhead fixtures.
"How does it feel?" she asked.
I thought about the cemetery, and the crow, and the parking lot, and the apartment, and all the ground between the man I'd been and the one standing here now.
"Like I finally stopped running in the wrong direction," I said.
She looked up at me. "Sofia's line."
"Good advice is good advice."
She smiled and leaned her head against my shoulder, and I held onto her in the quiet of the emptying room, thinking about what came next. Not with fear, but with the satisfaction of a man who knew exactly where he was and exactly where he wanted to be.
It turned out that those two things being the same place was all it took.