Epilogue
LAUREL
THREE YEARS LATER
Our house is forty minutes outside Nashville, sitting on six acres of green we have no practical use for, and I fell in love with it before the realtor finished telling us the square footage.
Beckett pretended to be discerning for about thirty seconds, asked about the roof and drainage, then walked into the library and stared through the windows at the old magnolias like a man already deciding where his chair belonged.
We bought it the way we once discussed buying a home during a thunderstorm, months before either of us admitted we were discussing a future at all: half from me, half from him, both names on the deed, separate offices at opposite ends of the second floor and a writing room facing east because morning light makes me less homicidal.
We emptied both our houses, argued about furniture, kept the ugly things we loved and built a third place that slowly became ours.
Daddy’s Martin has its own stand beside the windows in my writing room.
Mama keeps slippers in the guest room for her visits from Savannah.
Nora and I still see each other most days at Bellamy House, and late dinners or writing sessions send her to our guest room so regularly Beckett has started calling it Nora’s room.
Lila and Matt bring Theo and Evie most Sundays; Dean, Monica, Owen and Lily come up from Savannah often enough for the other guest room to feel permanently claimed.
The house is expensive, beautiful and almost never perfect. I used to think wealth was supposed to make life look untouched. The thing I love most about this place is that ours never does.
The garden was what made me fall in love with the house first. The property already had old roses climbing a stone wall, two enormous magnolias and a creek threading along the meadow; over three years, I added hydrangeas, foxglove, lavender, peonies and one Japanese maple Beckett developed an unreasonable attachment to.
I once caught him watering it during a week we had already received four inches of rain.
He denied favoritism. I accused him of lying directly to my face.
Neither of us was willing to escalate the matter to professional mediation, so the maple survived.
Now, on a warm Saturday afternoon, I’m outside after three hours of writing and nearly suffer a coronary when I find three of my hydrangea branches snapped near the southern wall.
“Beckett Vale!” My voice carries cleanly across the lawn, strong and rough at the edges, still capable of startling me with gratitude when it comes without pain.
He appears beside the stone arch in jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves pushed up, hands in his pockets, looking far too calm for a man standing near a horticultural crime scene.
I hold up one of the branches. “What did you do?” He claims innocence. I remind him I saw him outside before breakfast. He informs me owning property occasionally requires stepping onto it.
“Well, I can’t accuse anyone else. No one’s here except us.” I pause. “Unless Mama drove up from Savannah in the middle of the night.”
Beckett lifts one shoulder. “State lines have never stopped your mother from pulling off a surprise.”
Fair. I give him a reluctant nod, but another broken branch farther along the path distracts me before I can continue prosecuting him. Then another. My annoyance gives way to suspicion when I notice small cream ribbons tied around each one.
I follow them deeper into the garden and finally see what has changed. Hurricane lanterns line the stone path, unlit in the afternoon sun; pale flowers spill from urns I do not own, ribbons weave through the roses, and photographs hang between thin panes of glass from the first magnolia.
Mama and me outside the Ryman the night I sang again, both of us swollen-eyed and grinning.
Nora and me asleep upright in Studio B, her mouth open, my head on her shoulder.
Beckett beside my hospital bed with the ridiculous notebook across his knees.
Dean and Monica on our back porch with Lily between them and Owen making a face at the camera.
Lila and Matt at Christmas, Theo and Evie ruining the photograph from behind them.
My coffee beside Beckett’s on the morning we closed on this house.
None of them are the moments people usually decide deserve framing. They are the pieces in between, ordinary days we barely noticed becoming our life.
I reach the next photograph and stop. Daddy is in it, younger than I ever knew him, sitting under a tree in Savannah with a guitar across one knee and his head thrown back laughing. My fingers go to the glass. “Where did you get this?” My voice gives me away.
“Your mother,” Beckett says softly.
I stare at Daddy until his face blurs, then turn and find Beckett several paces behind me, waiting. And I know. “No.” The word comes out broken, tears already running down my face. “You said you wouldn’t surprise me with this.”
He comes closer but stops before reaching for me. “I said I wouldn’t ask until I believed you wanted me to.” His voice is quiet. “I believe you do. But if I’m wrong, Laurel, I stop here.”
Of course he does. Years of loving me, sleeping beside me, building a home with me, becoming part of my family and letting me become part of his, and Beckett still leaves room for no.
I wipe my face and shake my head. “You’re not wrong.” The relief in his face almost starts me crying harder. “Keep going.”
He takes my hand, and we follow the path through photographs of Sunday dinners, Christmas mornings, hospital rooms and children growing taller until we reach the last magnolia.
One final picture hangs there: the two rocking chairs on our back porch at dusk, empty and angled slightly toward each other.
I remember choosing them. I remember saying old people deserved furniture specifically designed for sitting outside and talking shit about their neighbors.
My mouth trembles. “You remembered.”
Beckett squeezes my hand. “I remember you.” Then he steps in front of me, and for the first time all afternoon, he looks nervous.
His hand trembles when he reaches inside his jacket.
Seeing Beckett Vale scared of anything on a day like this cracks me open all over again.
He lowers himself into the grass and opens the box.
The ring is antique, an elongated cushion set in platinum, with two tiny sapphires tucked at the base of the center stone. My birthstone. Daddy’s favorite color.
I cover my mouth, crying harder, and Beckett takes my hand.
“I spent a long time thinking I loved you because I wanted a life with you.” His thumb moves over my knuckles.
“I had it backward. I want this life because I love you. I love who you are when you’re writing too long and forget to eat, when you’re tired and mean, when you sing to yourself in the kitchen and pretend you aren’t doing it.
” His voice roughens. “You told me once you couldn’t promise who you’d be five years from now.
I don’t want you to. I want to meet her with you.
” My face crumples. “I want the ordinary days, Laurel. The ones we photograph and the ones we forget until twenty years later when one of us says, remember when?” His fingers close around mine.
“I can’t promise we’ll never hurt each other or get lost or have years harder than this one.
I can promise you’ll never have to disappear to stay loved by me.
” He swallows, eyes shining. “You gave me a life I didn’t know how badly I wanted until I was already living it.
Let me keep living it with you.” He looks up at me from the grass. “Laurel Bellamy, will you marry me?”
For a second, I can’t answer. Everything beyond him blurs until there is only Beckett kneeling in the grass, holding out a future neither of us is pretending we can control.
I’ve said yes to forever before. I meant it with my whole heart when I said it, and knowing how that marriage ended doesn’t make the woman I was foolish or the love I gave less real.
It only taught me that loving something with everything in me cannot guarantee it will stay the same.
Once, that would’ve terrified me. Now it makes this moment feel more precious.
I drop to my knees in front of him, cup his face and kiss him before I remember he is still waiting for an answer.
When I pull back, his eyes are wet. “Yes.” For one tense breath he only stares at me, as if the word needs time to become real, and I press my forehead to his. “Yes, Beckett. I’ll marry you.”
His eyes close, and when they open again, his smile is so open, so completely his, I know I’ll remember it when we’re old. He slides the ring onto my finger, and I turn my hand until the sapphires catch the afternoon light. Daddy’s blue, hidden underneath. Another piece of him carried forward.
Only after Beckett kisses me do I hear crying behind the roses. Mama comes out first, making no attempt to hide her face, and everyone else follows her with the guilty expressions of people who have discovered far too late that shrubbery is not soundproof.
Dean has one arm around Monica; Lily is crying beside her, Owen grinning. Lila reaches her brother first, Matt just behind her with Theo and Evie, and Beckett’s mother kisses his cheek before pulling me into her arms.
Nora is crying openly, evidence I fully intend to preserve for later.
Champagne opens somewhere behind us. Mama keeps touching my hand as if the ring may vanish if she stops checking.
For a few minutes we stand together under the magnolias, everyone talking at once, Beckett’s shoulder pressed to mine, and the garden feels less like the place where he proposed than another room our family has managed to fill.