Epilogue
Liliana
The lilies go in the vase I made myself, and I stand back to look at them, letting myself have the small proud thump of it.
It’s a good vase. Not a perfect one, there’s a slight wobble to the lip that I’ve decided is character, but I threw it on my own wheel in my own studio with my own two hands, and now it lives on our windowsill holding a fresh armful of white lilies, because a year into the best stretch of my life, the flowers still come every week.
His flower. For me. I trim the stems and arrange them just so, the afternoon light pouring gold through the glass, and I think, not for the first time, that I built this.
This quiet, ordinary, radiant life. I built it out of the rubble of the other one, one wet lump of clay and one hard conversation and one enormous gamble at a time.
From down the hall, drifting soft under the afternoon quiet, comes the sound of a guitar.
I follow it.
Tristan is sitting on the edge of our bed with his back to the door, the Martin in his lap, his head bent, picking out a slow melody I don’t recognize yet, one of the half-formed ones that live in him before they have words.
He doesn’t hear me come in. His shoulders are loose, his hair a mess, the low sun catching the gold in it, and I stand in the doorway for a second just watching my husband make a beautiful thing out of nothing, the way he always has, the way I hope he always will.
Then I cross the room, and I slide my arms around him from behind, and I press my cheek between his shoulder blades.
The melody stops.
“Inspired, huh?” I murmur into his back.
I feel him smile. He turns his head sideways, so I catch him in profile, that crooked mouth, that warm eye.
“I’ve got a lot to write about these days,” he says. “Turns out being disgustingly happy is terrible for the tortured-artist thing and great for everything else.”
“Poor you.” I press a kiss to his spine through his shirt. “However will you cope, married to the love of your life with nothing to be sad about.”
“It’s a real struggle.” He sets the guitar aside, careful, leaning it against the nightstand, and then he twists in my arms to face me, catching my waist, tugging me a step closer between his knees. “I’m suffering. Look at me… Wretched.”
“Devastating.” I comb my fingers back through his messy hair, and he tilts his face up to me, and the teasing goes quiet in both of us all at once, the way it does now, easy, like a door swinging shut on the rest of the world.
I lean down and I kiss him.
It starts slow. It always starts slow now, and that’s the thing I never tell anyone, the secret nobody warns you about on the other side of almost losing it all, that the sweetest version of this isn’t the desperate one or the hungry one, it’s this.
Unhurried. Certain. Two people with nowhere else to be and nothing left to prove and all the time in the world.
I ease him back onto the bed and follow him down, and for once I don’t let him take the lead.
Now, he’s mine to take care of, and I want to, so I press him into the mattress with a palm flat on his chest and I kiss him the way I’ve learned him over these months, slow and deep and thorough.
I feel him go pliant under me with a low sound in his throat, letting me, giving himself over to it, trusting me with all of it.
“Lily…” he breathes against my mouth, his hands settling loose on my hips, not guiding, just holding, letting me set the pace.
“Shh.” I smile against his lips. “I’ve got you this time. Just let me.”
And he does. He lets me.
This man who spent years running the show, who used to fill every silence and steer every moment, just lets go beneath me and lets himself be loved, his eyes soft and dark and open on mine as I take my time with him.
I undress him slow, unhurried, my mouth mapping every inch I uncover, and he shivers under me and murmurs my name like it’s the only word he knows, and when he reaches to return the favor I catch his wrists and press them gently back into the pillows.
“Let me,” I say again, softer. “I want to. I want to take care of you for once.”
A tenderness moves through his face, open and undone.
“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay. I’m yours.”
When I finally rise over him and take him into me, I do it slow, watching his face the whole way, watching his breath catch and his jaw go slack and his hands come up to hold my hips like I’m the only solid thing in the world.
And I set the pace, easy and deep, rolling into him unhurried, drawing it out, both of us gasping quiet into the gold light, no rush, no fear, no ghost of anything we’ve survived, just this, just us, just the warm slow certainty of a love that got to keep going.
“God, I love you,” he breathes, his thumbs stroking over my hipbones, his eyes never leaving mine. “Look at you, baby. I get to have this. I get to have you. I’ll never understand what I did to deserve getting a second chance at you.”
“You showed up.” I lean down and kiss him, not breaking the slow rhythm of us, my forehead dropping to his. “Every day. You showed up. That’s what you did.”
He makes a wrecked sound and wraps his arms all the way around me, pulling me flush against his chest, and we move together like that, tangled and close and unhurried, my face buried in his neck.
His heartbeat slamming against mine, until the slow build finally crests and breaks over both of us at once, gentle and enormous, and I feel him shudder and gasp my name into my hair as I come apart in his arms.
It’s the safest I have ever felt in my life.
Coming down from the high, we lie tangled in the warm wreck of the sheets.
The sun is going down amber through the windows, and I’m draped half over his chest, boneless and glowing, while he traces lazy lines up and down my bare back.
I feel him shift, reaching for the nightstand.
And then I hear the telltale click of a phone camera.
I crack one eye open. He’s holding his phone up above us, angling it down at me where I’m sprawled across him, lit up gold in the last of the sun, and he’s grinning at the screen like a man who just won a prize.
“Tristan.” I don’t even lift my head. “What are you doing?”
“Documenting.” He taps at the screen, entirely unrepentant. “Look how beautiful you are right now. This is art. I’m going to post this. ‘My wife’”
“You are not posting a photo of me in bed, dumbass.”
“It’s very tasteful. You’re mostly sheet.” He’s already thumbing at the screen, that mischief all over his face. “The people need to know how lucky I am. They will die of envy.”
I huff a laugh into his chest and let him have it, too warm and wrung-out and happy to fight him on it, and I close my eyes and listen to him type. My cheek rising and falling on his chest with his breathing, the whole world reduced to this one perfect amber-lit room.
And then the warmth turns.
It comes over me slowly, a queasy roll low in my stomach, the same one that’s been ambushing me at odd hours for the better part of a week now.
I sit up carefully, one hand pressed flat to my middle, breathing through it, and Tristan’s brow furrows immediately, his phone forgetting its way down onto the sheets.
“You okay?”
“Fine.” I swing my legs out of bed and reach for his discarded shirt to pull over my head. “Just need the bathroom for a second. Too much sun, maybe.”
“Come back,” he protests, catching at my wrist, all warm and lazy and unwilling to let go. “You’re leaving the best cuddle of the entire year.”
“I’ll be thirty seconds.” I lean down and kiss his forehead, disentangling myself. “Try to survive without me. I know it’s hard.”
“Barely holding on,” he calls after me, mournful, and I’m smiling as I shut the bathroom door behind me.
The smile fades the second I’m alone.
I brace my hands on the edge of the sink and I look at myself in the mirror, and I press my fingertips to my temples, and I let out a slow breath. Because it isn’t the sun. I know it isn’t the sun.
It hasn’t been the sun for six days now, this queasy roll that comes and goes, the bone-deep tiredness, the way the smell of his coffee turned my stomach yesterday morning, and the small stubborn fact I keep circling and circling in the back of my mind and refusing to look at directly.
I open the drawer under the sink.
It’s sitting right there where I tucked it three days ago, the little box I bought and hid and haven’t been brave enough to open until now, because opening it makes it real, one way or the other, and I haven’t known which answer I was more afraid of. I bite my lip.
I take it out. My hands are not entirely steady.
I’ve spent this whole year learning how to be brave.
How to gamble. How to want a thing out loud instead of bracing for it to be taken away.
Time to be brave one more time.
Minutes pass, and they last approximately a decade each.
I sit on the edge of the tub with the little plastic stick balanced on my knee and I watch and I wait and I don’t breathe right the entire time, and when it finally, finally shows me what it has to show me, my whole heart lurches up into my throat and stays there.
Afterwards, I stare at it. I stare at it for a long, long moment.
Then I stand up on legs that don’t feel mine, and I fold my hand around it as I open the door.
Tristan is exactly where I left him, sprawled back against the headboard, shirtless, one arm behind his head, thumbing at his phone with that little crease of concentration between his brows. He glances up when I come out, and grins.
“There you are. Thought I’d lost you. I was about to send a search party, or at least a very sad text.”
“Are you fighting online again?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel, and I nod at the phone, buying myself a second, my hand tucked behind my back.
“Oh, absolutely.” He turns the screen toward me, delighted with himself, entirely unbothered. “I’m trending. Again. Look at this.”
I come around and look. It’s his post from an hour ago, the photo of me half asleep and gold-lit and mostly sheet, captioned, simply, my wife.