Epilogue First
Lesley
The Summit reopened on the second Saturday in December, under a sky so clear and cold that the stars seemed close enough to touch.
The new lodge was beautiful. I’d seen the plans, and I’d walked the building with Hank twice during construction, and it was still a shock to come up the long drive in the dark and see it lit up against the mountain.
Timber and stone and tall glass, the same bones as the old building, but better in all the ways Tom and the architects had spent a year arguing about.
Wider corridors. A second grand staircase.
Emergency lighting that ran along the floor as well as the ceiling.
Three service stairwells in the east wing instead of one, each of them with exterior exits at ground level.
I noticed the stairwells. I didn’t say anything. Hank noticed me noticing and squeezed my hand.
The ballroom was full. Three hundred people again, some of them the same people: investors, the press, half the hospital foundation board, the whole Cavanagh family.
Neil and Amy, with Amy already in tears during the welcome toast. Tom in a new suit, beaming, accepting congratulations from everyone who passed.
Warren Pike, silver-haired and gracious, with his chairman beside him.
Evelyn Price in a velvet jacket, holding court at a table near the windows with a gin and tonic, telling anyone who’d listen that she’d been on the third floor of the old building the night it burned, and that the baby asleep in the carrier across the room had been named after her.
I wore red. Hank had never seen me in red before. When I came out of the bathroom in our suite, he’d stopped in the middle of fastening his cufflinks and simply looked at me for a long moment without saying anything at all.
“What?” I’d said.
“Nothing,” he’d said. “I’m just trying to remember how to breathe.”
Nora was six and a half months old and had spent most of the evening being passed from grandmother to grandmother to Heather to Jo to Evelyn, like a small, red-haired dignitary receiving visitors.
She’d been remarkably good-natured about it.
By nine thirty, though, she’d started rubbing her eyes with her fists and making the low, grumbling sounds that meant she had about fifteen minutes of goodwill left before the situation deteriorated.
I retrieved her from Clive, who’d been showing her the chandeliers, and found Hank near the bar.
He was talking to Tom. Or rather, Tom was talking to him, quickly and quietly, with a slight crease between his eyebrows.
Warren Pike was hovering nearby, clearly waiting his turn.
Across the room, Nancy was waving at Hank to come join a photograph with Clive and a woman from the Aspen Times.
Neil was heading toward him with the expression of a man who needed thirty seconds.
Four people who needed something from him. None of it an emergency. All of it perfectly ordinary. The kind of evening that used to end with me upstairs alone, waiting.
Hank saw me coming with Nora on my hip, and he said something to Tom and stepped away from all of them and came to me.
“She’s done,” I said. “I’m taking her up.”
He looked at Nora, who was grinding her fist into her eye, and then at me.
“Do you want me to come now?” he asked. “I can. Tom’s got a freezer alarm in the kitchen, and Warren wants to introduce me to someone, and my mom wants a picture, and Neil wants something.
None of it has to be tonight. Tell me what you want. ”
I looked at him. In the old days, there would have been no question. He’d have kissed my cheek and said fifteen minutes, and I’d have gone up alone, and I’d have counted.
“Go,” I said. “Do the things. Just tell me what you’re doing.”
He nodded. “Freezer with Tom, because the kitchen staff are worried and it’s their first night.
Five minutes. Picture with Mom and Dad. Two minutes.
I’ll tell Warren breakfast tomorrow, and I’ll tell Neil to find me in the morning unless it’s on fire.
” He paused. “Which it won’t be. Twenty minutes, tops.
If it’s going to be longer, I’ll call you. ”
“Okay.”
He bent and kissed Nora’s forehead, and then mine. “Twenty minutes,” he said, and went back across the ballroom.
I carried Nora up in the elevator to the third floor of the east wing.
Our suite was the corner room on the north end.
The same corner. The same floor. Hank had asked me in October, when he booked the reopening weekend, whether I wanted a different room.
Anywhere else in the building. The new west wing, or a cabin down by the creek, or a suite on the other side of the lodge that had nothing to do with that night.
I’d thought about it. Then I’d said no. I wanted the corner room. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life avoiding one room in a building my husband had built twice.
The suite was beautiful. The stone fireplace was new, and the furniture, and the carpet. But the balcony was in exactly the same place, looking straight up the valley.
I changed Nora into her pajamas and fed her in the armchair by the fire, and she fell asleep against me before she’d finished, heavy and warm and smelling of milk.
I laid her in the portable crib the staff had set up by the bed, tucked Nancy’s second blanket around her, and stood watching her sleep for a while.
Then I opened the balcony door and stepped outside.
The cold took my breath. The air was clean and sharp and smelled of snow and pine. Below me, the side parking lot was full of cars, and there were no flashing lights, no hoses, no generator rumbling. Only the lodge glowing warm behind me, and the dark mountain above, and the stars.
I stood at the railing where I’d once waved a bathrobe until my arms shook, and I let myself remember it.
I didn’t push it away. Courtney had taught me that.
You let the memory come, and you notice where you are now, and you let the two of them sit side by side until the present gets heavier than the past.
My phone buzzed in the pocket of my dress.
Freezer’s fine. Photo done. Telling Warren breakfast. Up in five.
I read it and smiled and put the phone back in my pocket.
He came through the door eighteen minutes after he’d left me in the ballroom. I heard him in the suite behind me, moving quietly, checking on Nora in the crib. Then he came out onto the balcony and stood beside me at the railing and put his jacket around my shoulders without a word.
It was a small thing. He did it without thinking.
I don’t think he even knew he’d done it.
But I felt the weight of the jacket settle over me, warm from his body, and I thought about another night and another jacket and the phone inside it, and I felt something in my chest that was almost too large to hold.
“She asleep?” I asked.
“Out cold. She’s got one fist up by her face like she’s plotting something.”
“She’s always plotting something.”
“She gets that from you.” He leaned his forearms on the railing, looking up the valley. “Tom says the kitchen staff wanted me to know they appreciated it. That I came down myself.”
“That’s nice.”
“It was just a freezer.” He shrugged. “Took four minutes. The alarm was set wrong.”
I looked at him. He didn’t see anything remarkable in any of it.
He’d told me what he was doing, done it, and come upstairs.
He’d sent a text when he said he would. He’d arrived two minutes earlier than he’d promised.
None of it had felt to him like a choice between me and anything else.
It was just what he did now. It had become ordinary, and that was the point. That was the whole point.
For seven years, I had been the person Hank believed could always wait. The capable one. The strong one. The one who would understand. And I had understood. I’d understood so well, and for so long, that I’d almost forgotten there was any other way to be loved.
I knew better now. I’d never go back to being last in my own marriage.
I’d built a life that could stand without him, and I’d chosen him anyway, and I’d keep choosing him only as long as he kept choosing me back.
Not in some grand, dramatic moment, with the building on fire and everything at stake.
In the small ones. The Thursday dinners.
The phone calls instead of texts. A freezer, a photograph, and twenty minutes.
And Hank knew it too. He’d learned it the hardest way a man could learn anything. Loving me had never been the question. Choosing me was, over and over, on the ordinary days, long before any emergency ever came along to ask.
Behind us, through the open door, Nora sighed in her sleep and turned over.
Hank straightened. “I’ll get her,” he said, already moving.
“She’s fine. She’s just turning over.”
He stopped in the doorway and listened. The suite was quiet again. He came back to the railing and put his arm around me, and I leaned into him, and we stood there together in the cold with the whole valley spread out beneath us under the stars.
“Do you want to go back down?” he asked after a while. “There’s still dessert. My mom will want to dance.”
I thought about it. The ballroom, the music, our families, Evelyn with her gin and tonic. Three hundred people in a building that had burned and been built again.
“In a little while,” I said. “Stay out here with me first.”
“Okay,” he said, and he did.