Epilogue
Casey
SIENNA TURNS FIVE ON a Saturday in July.
The hair grew back curly, which she considers a personal injustice.
She spends ten minutes every morning explaining to Bart that the curls aren’t her fault.
She’d like them to stop. Bart, who has survived a bone marrow transplant, six hospital admissions, and a cross-state relocation, offers no commentary.
For her birthday, we got out the hair chalk, and she has the rainbow ‘do of her dreams.
She runs everywhere. She can’t be caught. She climbs the rented trampoline Sterling bought for the backyard of the house on Merrimon Avenue, which isn’t rented anymore because Sterling bought it two months ago when I agreed it should be our home.
The birthday party is in the backyard. Hettie made the cake, three layers with purple frosting, and an elephant on top that Sienna designed herself with a level of creative direction that suggests she may have inherited her father’s management style.
Eight children from preschool are running in circles on the lawn.
Marnie drove down from Charlotte and is sitting in a lawn chair with a glass of wine, watching the chaos with the calm of a woman who works in the ICU and considers a children’s birthday party a low-acuity situation.
She caught my eye earlier and raised her glass toward Sterling at the grill.
I nodded, and she grinned. The entire exchange took two seconds and contained a year’s worth of conversation.
Marnie was the one who drove three hours to Asheville when the ATG failed.
Marnie was the one who held my hand during delivery because Sterling was in Charlotte believing a lie.
Marnie was the one who told me, six months into the rented house and the bakery office and Sterling’s quiet campaign of not-pursuing, that I was allowed to choose the man who’d hurt me if the man who’d hurt me had genuinely changed.
She said it over the phone at midnight when I called her from his bathroom while he slept, telling her everything about Abigail and his father, and what we’d said.
She’d thought for a moment before she said it because Marnie has always told me the truth even when the truth was something I didn’t want to hear.
That night, I desperately wanted to hear it was okay to give myself permission to allow a second chance with my husband, and she’d told me it was, but not to placate or soothe me.
She’d believed it then, and she believes it now. So do I.
Sterling is at the grill. He’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and an apron Sienna gave him that says WORLD’S OKAYEST CHEF, which Sienna selected because she told him he isn’t the best chef and she doesn’t want to lie to him.
Bart is wearing a matching apron and sitting in the seat Sterling uses when he rests from grilling.
Bart is still a near-constant companion, but he hangs out more with me or Sterling now that Sienna has her preschool friends.
Sterling accepted this assessment voluntarily when Sienna said she wanted a cookout instead of a fancier birthday party.
He’s grilling hot dogs, and the wedding band on his finger catches the sunlight from time to time.
He’s doing it wrong, which Hettie has mentioned twice, and Sterling has acknowledged twice, but has changed nothing about his technique.
I sit on the back steps and watch my family.
Twenty-one months ago, my daughter was dying.
Six months ago, she was bald. Today, she’s upside down on a trampoline arguing with a boy named Oscar about whether elephants can swim.
Bart is watching from the chair, supervising with the authority of an elephant who has been through more than any stuffed animal should have to endure.
The silk elephant from the estate is now on Sienna’s bookshelf at home.
She occasionally lets it join them for tea, which is probably all the acceptance Ivory will get.
Ivory is no Bart. Her life has been too easy, but she’s tolerated because Daddy gave Sienna the white elephant as a gift.
He also named it when she wasn’t enthusiastic about the task.
She humors him. He knows it but doesn’t mind.
My husband, who threw me out of his house five years ago on a lie his mother constructed, is burning hot dogs in a backyard he bought because I agreed it would make a good home. We made the offer together.
He ordered the trampoline without asking if I wanted it after taking Sienna to a local trampoline park, which she declared the “funnest thing in the world.” That’s the one remaining Sterling Hollingsford impulse I haven’t managed to cure.
He spoils our daughter, and I try to keep it under control, but I don’t really mind. She’s earned a few indulgences.
We still live in Asheville. Sterling runs Hollingsford Capital from the office over the bakery on Haywood Road. He flies to Charlotte twice a month. Dana Whitlock runs the day-to-day, and she’s better at it than Sterling was, which Sterling admits freely and without apparent damage to his ego.
The fund closed eight months late, smaller than projected, after the forensic audit traced the fabricated email to an IP address linked to a consulting firm Gretchen retained.
Sterling told me the result but not every detail.
Martin sent Danielle the final forensic report because the fabrication carried my name, so I know the rest through her.
We don’t discuss the specifics but don’t need to.
The trust is real and solid this go-round.
The ring is back on my finger now, where Sterling put it in a courthouse five years ago.
I don’t remember the exact morning I moved it.
It was sometime in the weeks after we slowly moved into his house, after Sienna started sleeping in the orange bed three nights a week, then five, then every night.
One morning, I took off the chain and put the ring on my finger.
Sterling noticed. He said nothing but squeezed my hand and swallowed hard.
It touched him, but we didn’t make a big issue out of it.
Gretchen hasn’t apologized. She won’t. She hasn’t seen Sienna.
She sends a card every few weeks with formal handwriting and no return address, as though anonymity makes the violation of the boundary less deliberate.
I throw them away unopened. Sterling has never once asked me not to.
I’m afraid if I let him handle it, he will get the police involved as he once threatened.
I just want peace and hope she never escalates.
If she does, I almost feel sorry for her, knowing what Sterling will do to protect us.
Brittany is in therapy. She sends letters, real ones, handwritten, arriving every few weeks in envelopes addressed to Sterling.
At first, he refused, but when I left them out pointedly, Sterling started reading them.
He keeps them in the drawer of his desk at the bakery office. He hasn’t written back.
Last week, we stopped by his office with an impulsive lunch, before I started my new job at Mission. He was at the desk with one of the letters open in front of him, his coffee getting cold. He seemed like he would hide it for a minute but then sagged. “Another one.”
“She’s trying,” I said.
He’d clamped his lips in that stubborn line he gets. “Trying doesn’t undo what she did.”
“No, it doesn’t.” I sat across from him. “She was twenty-three and terrified of your mother. That doesn’t make it forgivable, but it makes it human. You were twenty-nine and terrified of losing me. That didn’t make what you did forgivable either, but I chose to let you back in.”
He looked at me.
“Forgiveness isn’t something people earn, Sterling. It’s something you decide to give. She was wrong, and she knows it. You were wrong. and you know it. If you can come back from yours, maybe she can come back from hers.”
He didn’t answer. He folded the letter and put it back in the envelope.
He finished his coffee. Two days later I noticed a card on his desk, addressed to Brittany, stamped but not yet mailed.
I didn’t read it but it was encouraging.
It’s not for her sake. I don’t care much about what happens to Brittany, and I haven’t forgiven her yet.
I might never do so, but I don’t need to the way Sterling does.
He has precious little family besides us, and if he and Brittany can forge a post-Gretchen relationship, it will be good for him.
Because he’s the best in the area, Alec is still Sienna’s hematologist for her regular follow-up in Asheville, while Osgood handles the transplant surveillance from Charlotte.
I’ve still seen a lot of him but only in a medical context.
We saw him at the post-transplant follow-up this week, a few days before her birthday.
That appointment was less awkward than they have been, and I saw him smiling at the new nurse in a private way as Sienna and I exited the exam room. I’m happy for him.
The appointment confirmed she has obtained full chimerism, with normal counts, and immunosuppression discontinued. Sienna is, by every medical measure, healthy. She’s a normal, exhausting, opinionated five-year-old whose body is making its own blood with donor cells that belong to her father.
Alec sent a card home with Sienna and a book about elephants, because he remembered Sienna likes elephants. He pays attention to his patients in a way that makes him exceptional at his job and will make him a good husband for the right wife someday.