Epilogue
The river was loud in spring.
I sat on the back porch of our house with my coffee and watched Brook chase a butterfly across the yard. She’d been chasing it for ten minutes. She’d never once gotten close enough to touch it, and she didn’t seem bothered.
She was three. She had her father’s dark hair and my brown eyes and a stubbornness that belonged to neither of us—she’d come up with that one on her own.
Ross was at the grill. He had been since ten, which was ridiculous because the cookout didn’t start until noon. He liked to be ahead of things.
I rested my hand on my stomach. The baby kicked. I’d been able to feel her for three weeks now, and she’d already decided she preferred mornings, which I appreciated.
“She’s chasing that butterfly into the next county,” Ross said.
“She’s content.”
“She’s three. She’s not content. She’s plotting.”
I laughed.
He came over and bent down and kissed the top of my head, the way he’d done every morning since the first one in the apartment above the auto shop.
We hadn’t lived there in four years. We’d built the house the year we got married, on a piece of land two miles up the river from the Alderman cabin—close enough to walk, far enough to be ours.
Trucks came up the drive, one after another.
Suri was first out, with a baby on her hip and a four-year-old climbing out behind her. Kyron came around from the driver’s side with the diaper bag, which he carried the way some men carry rifles.
Behind them, Bishop and Wells and Flint and Cade pulled in one after the other, with their wives and their children spilling out into the yard. There were too many kids now to count. But everyone loved getting together like this. We were one big, messy family.
Brook abandoned the butterfly and ran.
I stood up slowly—pregnancy had stopped being graceful around month five—and Suri met me halfway across the porch. She hugged me without crushing my stomach. She was a pro at the angle by now.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Tired.”
“Three weeks.”
“Three weeks.”
We stood there with our arms around each other for a beat.
“You remember,” she said, “the first time you came out of the cabin.”
“I remember.”
“You walked the wrong way.”
“I know.”
“I almost said something. About the way you looked when you came back.”
“You didn’t.”
“That’s one of my best qualities.”
I laughed. She walked over to her husband and her son and her new baby, and I watched her go, and I thought about the woman who’d sat on a couch with a book in her lap and watched her best friend fall in love without saying a word.
That woman had been right not to say anything. She’d been wrong about almost everything else. But she’d been right about that.
Ross caught my eye across the yard. He was holding the spatula in one hand and Brook in the other arm, and he was looking at me the way he’d looked at me on a road in July five years ago.
The way he’d looked at me on a rock by a river that afternoon.
The way he looked at me every morning when I woke up.
He hadn’t drifted anywhere.
I hadn’t either.
I crossed the yard slowly and joined him at the grill. Brook reached for me, and I took her, and Ross put his arm around my shoulders and his hand on my stomach. The three of us stood there in the spring sun while our friends and their children moved around us.
“You good?” he said.
“I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Stop asking.”
“I’m going to keep asking.”
I leaned into his side, and he kissed the top of my head, and the river kept moving past us through the trees behind the house.
Same direction. Every day.