Epilogue #3
“And it isn’t borrowed. You earned this, Adrian.
Not the house, you could’ve bought ten houses and it wouldn’t have mattered.
Not the book, not the money, none of the big loud things.
Me. You earned me, one impossible morning at a time, when there was nothing in it for you and no guarantee I’d ever come back.
That’s not luck and it’s not a dream and nobody gets to take it back, because you built it, with your own two clumsy hands, the same way you built that terrible cardboard house. It’s yours because you made it yours.”
He looks at me and his eyes go bright, and he pulls me down and kisses me, slow and deep and grateful, and I let him, and when we come up for air I settle back against his chest and listen to his heart.
“Promise me a thing,” I say, quiet, into the dark.
“Anything.”
“Promise we’ll always be this happy.”
He goes still, and I feel him go still, because we both know the weight of that word for him, the whole folder full of promises that broke, the whole reason we ended up here. And I wait, and I don’t take it back, because I want to hear what he does with it now.
“I’m not going to promise that,” he says softly. “Because I don’t get to promise the weather, and I don’t get to promise there won’t be hard years, and I’m done handing you promises I can’t keep, that’s the whole thing I learned.”
His arms tighten around me. “But I promise to try. Every single day. To show up, to pay attention, to say the true thing out loud, to never once let being comfortable make me stop seeing you. I promise to try every day, for the rest of my life. That’s the only honest version of that promise, and it’s the only one I’ll ever give you again. ”
And I feel it land, the difference between the man who promised me the moon in blue ink and never delivered and the man holding me now who won’t promise more than he can do, and it is, without any competition, the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.
“That’s the only version I want,” I tell him, and kiss him. I mean it with my whole entire heart.
I don’t sleep much, after.
New mothers don’t, and anyway I don’t want to, I want to lie there in the dark and listen to my husband breathe and feel the enormous unlikely weight of my whole life resting easy around me.
So I’m awake, hours later, when the sky outside our windows starts to go from black to the deep blue that comes before morning, and I slip out of bed and pad down the hall to check on Brianna, the way I do a hundred times a night, and find her asleep and perfect beneath the shadow box that holds a cardboard house and my father’s pencil.
Then I go and stand at the big window at the end of the hall, the one I put there on purpose, angled east, and I watch the light start to come up over the hills.
I don’t hear him get up. I never do anymore, he moves quiet in the mornings so he won’t wake the baby.
But I feel him a second before he reaches me, and then his arms come around me from behind, both of them, wrapping me up, his chest warm against my back and his chin coming down to rest on the top of my head, and he doesn’t say anything, he just holds me and looks out the window at the same thing I’m looking at, which is the sun coming up over the house we built and the garden where my father’s tomatoes are climbing their stakes toward it.
“You’re up early,” he murmurs into my hair.
“So are you.”
“I woke up and you were gone.” His arms tighten. “I don’t like it when you’re gone. I spent enough time in a bed missing you. I’m making up for that too.”
And I lean back into him and let him hold me, and we stand there together, the two of us, watching our first real morning break over the house I spent years drawing in secret and never once believed I’d get to live in, and I think about the woman I was years ago, eating dinner alone at a table set for two, drawing empty chairs in a book she’d never show anyone, so certain she’d stopped being allowed to want things.
I wish I could reach back and find her at that cold glass table and tell her to hold on.
Tell her the empty chairs won’t be empty forever.
Tell her the house she’s drawing in secret is real and it’s coming, and it will have her father’s tomatoes in the garden and her whole loud family in the kitchen and a little girl with stubborn eyes asleep in a room full of morning, and a man standing behind her at a window with his arms around her, finally, all the way, here.
She wouldn’t believe me. I know she wouldn’t, because I didn’t.
So instead I just stand in the light with my husband’s heartbeat against my spine and our daughter asleep down the hall, and I let myself, at last, all the way, without flinching, without waiting for it to be taken back, be happy.
“What are you thinking?” Adrian asks, quiet, his chin still on my head.
I watch the sun clear the hills and pour gold across the kitchen I fought him about and the reading nook I never sit in and the whole warm impossible house full of the people I love.
“That this is the house I was always drawing,” I say.
Adrian presses a kiss to the top of my head, and holds on, and we watch the morning come.
I just didn’t know, back then, that I was drawing it for us.
THE END