Epilogue
Five months out, Emmett's woodshop smells like cedar and sawdust and the particular quiet of a building with no schedule attached to it.
"Careful," he says, when I duck under a half-finished bookcase to see what he's working on. "Splinters don't care how important you are now."
"I'll take my chances." I run a hand along the piece he's building, a desk, cedar-topped, the joinery visible where he hasn't sanded it smooth yet, a detail I suspect he's leaving exposed on purpose, so I can see exactly how it's put together instead of just trusting that it holds.
He's traded his tour blacks for an old flannel gone soft at the elbows, sawdust in his hair he hasn't noticed yet, and I find myself watching his hands more than the wood, the same hands that used to coil cable at midnight without complaint, now moving over something that belongs entirely to him, no tour manager standing over his shoulder with a schedule.
"You've been busy," I say, nodding at the row of finished pieces along the far wall, shelves and a bench and something that might eventually be a cradle, though I don't ask.
"Five months of nothing scheduled will do that to a man." He wipes his hands on a rag hanging from his belt. "Turns out I like it better than I expected to, not answering to anyone's calendar but my own."
"This is for Farrow Books," I say, running my hand along the desk again.
"It's for you." He sets down the plane he's been working with and turns, watching me look at something he built with his own hands instead of handed off to someone else's crew.
"Wanted you to see the joinery before I finish it.
Figured you'd appreciate knowing how it's held together, not just that it is. "
"I do." I trace the joint where two boards meet, cut so precisely they barely need the glue holding them, and think about how different this is from everything I spent thirteen years building with a man who never let me see the seams of anything, only the finished, camera-ready shape of it. "Show me."
He does, patient, his hands moving over the wood the way they moved over cable and rigging for twenty years, competent without needing to announce it. Somewhere in the explaining, his hand finds mine on the desk's surface, no hesitation in it this time, no inch left uncrossed.
"No lanyard tonight," I say.
"No lanyard." He turns my hand over in his, thumb tracing my palm, plain and deliberate. "No schedule either. Nowhere either of us needs to be."
"Show me the loft," I say, and watch something shift in his face, want held steady the way he's held everything steady for months, waiting on my timing and never his own.
The loft above the shop is simple, a bed, good light, no screens anywhere in sight. He stops at the base of the stairs, hand still around mine, and looks at me with a question he's clearly been holding since the lobby.
"Tell me what you want," he says. "All of it. I'm not guessing tonight."
"I want you to stop being careful with me." I mean it as plainly as I've meant anything all year. "I've had five months of careful. I want you."
He kisses me then, slow at first, one hand at my jaw, and I feel the restraint in it start to give way, on my terms, exactly the way he's given me everything since the tour office table.
I set the pace, backing us toward the stairs, and he follows without once trying to take it from me, patient even now, especially now.
We undress each other on the stairs and then in the loft, and he stops twice to ask if this is still what I want, and both times I tell him yes, out loud, because I've spent a marriage having my answers assumed for me and I want this one entirely on record, spoken, mine.
"Tell me if anything's too much," he says, low, against my collarbone, hands moving with the same steady precision he uses on wood, learning the shape of me instead of performing a technique he's used a hundred times before. "I mean it, Gwen. Say stop and I stop."
"I'll tell you." I do, once, when he shifts too fast, and he slows immediately, no ego in it, just adjustment, and it's the single most reassuring thing anyone has ever done to my body in my life.
He takes his time with me first, mouth and hands unhurried, watching my face, checking instead of assuming, until my own voice breaks apart the quiet of the loft in a way I don't try to muffle, because there's nobody in this building to perform for.
When he finally moves over me, he pauses again, forehead against mine, breath uneven, waiting for the smallest nod before he goes any further, and I give it, and he doesn't rush what happens after even then, matching whatever pace I set with a patience that outlasts my own.
Afterward, we lie tangled in cedar-smelling sheets, his hand tracing slow, absent circles on my shoulder, a fine grit of sawdust still worked into the creases of his knuckles that I can feel against my skin. Neither of us is in any hurry to move or speak or narrate what any of it meant.
"That was—" I start, and he cuts in, gentle.
"Don't summarize it. Not yet." He kisses my temple. "Let it just have happened, for a minute, before you turn it into a sentence."
I let it. It's the first time in years that I've let anything simply exist without immediately filing it somewhere useful.
Morning arrives slow and gray-gold through the loft's one window, and we eat breakfast at the workshop's battered table, phones dark on the counter, laughing about nothing in particular.
"You're smiling at your eggs," Emmett says, not looking up from his own plate. "Should I be worried?"
"You should be flattered. I don't usually enjoy breakfast this much." I mean it.
"High bar, considering it's just eggs."
"It's not about the eggs." I look at him across the table, morning light catching sawdust still in his hair, and feel something settle in my chest that has nothing urgent left to prove. "It's about nobody grading how grateful I look eating them."
He reaches across the table and takes my hand, the same way he takes everything, and neither of us says anything else for a while, because for once, the silence doesn't need filling with a single word.
My phone lights up anyway, once, a text from Renata: a photo of a strip-mall storefront window, hand-lettered sign taped inside the glass, THE DARREN O HOUR, RECORDING LIVE. Beneath it, a screenshot: a livestream viewer count, small and final. 212.
I look at it for a moment, feel exactly as little as I expected to feel, and set the phone face-down on the counter without answering.
"Everything okay?" Emmett asks, not looking up from his coffee, giving me the space to answer or not.
"Everything's fine." I mean it, the way I mean everything now. "Nothing worth narrating."