Epilogue
Hannah
Six months later, I’m standing on a rooftop in Chicago with string lights tangled in my hair.
It’s Eliza’s fault, technically. She grabbed a strand while Griffin was carrying her and refused to let go, and in the resulting chaos the whole string came down and I ended up looking like a very confused Christmas tree.
“Hold still,” Griffin says, laughing, trying to untangle me while also keeping Eliza from eating the bulbs. “You’re making it worse.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m standing here. This is your fault.”
“How is this my fault?”
“You’re the one who insisted on bringing the baby to a rooftop with delicate electrical equipment.”
“She’s one. She doesn’t understand personal space yet.”
Eliza chooses this moment to shove a fistful of lights directly into my face. I sputter. Griffin loses it completely, bent over laughing while our daughter coos triumphantly.
“I hate both of you,” I announce.
“No, you don’t.”
“I could. I could learn to hate you. There’s still time.”
He finally gets the lights untangled and sets Eliza down in the portable playpen we brought up, because apparently this is our life now, rooftop dates with infant accessories. She immediately starts gnawing on a stuffed elephant and ignoring us entirely.
“There.” Griffin steps back and looks at me. “Good as new.”
“I have tinsel in my bra.”
“I can help with that.”
“Later.” I swat his reaching hands away, but I’m smiling. I can’t help it. I’m always smiling these days. “What is all this, anyway? You said we were having dinner.”
“We are having dinner.” He gestures to a small table I didn’t notice before, set with candles and covered dishes. “I just thought we’d have it somewhere special.”
I look around at the rooftop. Really look.
String lights everywhere. Candles in glass jars. The Chicago skyline blazing in the distance, the same view I fell in love with eight years ago, when a nervous young founder in a borrowed blazer got down on one knee and asked me to be his wife.
“Griffin.” My voice comes out strange. “Is this…”
“The same rooftop.” He nods. “I had to pull some strings. The building’s changed owners since then, and they don’t usually allow private events up here, but I made a compelling case.”
“What kind of case?”
“The ‘I screwed up my first proposal so badly I need a do-over’ kind of case.” He takes my hand. “Come here.”
He leads me to the edge, where the railing overlooks the city. The view is just as breathtaking as I remember, all those lights, all that life, spread out below us like a promise.
“Eight years ago,” he says quietly, “I stood in this exact spot and asked you to marry me.”
“I remember.”
“I said all the right words. I told you I loved you. I told you I wanted to spend my life with you.” His jaw tightens. “And I meant it. I thought I meant it. But I didn’t really understand what I was promising. I didn’t know what marriage actually required.”
“Griffin…”
“Let me finish.” He turns to face me. “I spent seven years taking you for granted. I let my mother insult you. I let another woman take credit for your work. I chose my ambition over you again and again and again, and you forgave me every time, and I never stopped to think about what that was costing you.”
“We’ve been through this. You’ve apologized. We’re past it.”
“I know. And that’s not what this is.” He reaches into his pocket. “This is about the future.”
He pulls out a ring.
Not my old ring. A new one, simple, elegant. A single diamond that catches the city lights and throws rainbows across his shirt, just like the first time.
“Oh my God.” My hand flies to my mouth.
“Hannah Bloom.” He gets down on one knee, and I can’t breathe, I literally cannot breathe. “I was an idiot the first time I did this. I thought proposing was the hard part and everything after would just fall into place. I didn’t understand that love is a choice you have to make every single day.”
“Griffin…”
“I understand now.” His eyes are wet. So are mine. “I’ve spent the last six months choosing you. Showing up. Paying attention. Putting you and Eliza first, every time, no matter what. And I want to keep doing that for the rest of my life.”
“Yes,” I say, before he can even ask the question.
He laughs, a watery sound. “I didn’t finish the speech.”
“I don’t care. Yes. The answer is yes.”
“Let me at least ask properly.” He holds up the ring. “Will you marry me? Again? For real this time?”
“Yes.” I’m crying now, both of us are crying. “Yes, you idiot. Yes.”
He slides the ring onto my finger, and it fits perfectly, because of course it does, and then he’s on his feet and I’m in his arms and we’re kissing like the world is ending, like we’ll never get enough of each other, like the past two years were just a bad dream and we’re finally, finally awake.
“I love you,” he breathes against my mouth. “I love you so much, Hannah.”
“I love you too.” The words come easily now. I’ve been saying them for months, ever since I finally let myself trust that this was real. “I love you, Griffin. I never stopped.”
“Even when you wanted to murder me?”
“Especially then.”
He laughs, pulling me closer. “That tracks.”
From the playpen, Eliza makes an impatient sound. We break apart to find her standing up, holding the rails, watching us with an expression of profound baby judgment.
“She’s unimpressed,” Griffin says.
“She’s hungry. It’s past her dinner time.”
“Right. The actual dinner.” He releases me reluctantly and moves to the table. “I ordered Korean. An extra order of the dumplings, because I know how you are about sharing.”
“You did not.”
“I did. Also that wine you pretend you don’t love but definitely love, and tiramisu, because fusion is legal on rooftops.”
I look at him, this man I married, divorced, and am apparently marrying again, as he fusses with covered dishes and pours wine and sneaks glances at me like he can’t quite believe I said yes.
“Hey,” I say.
He looks up.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not giving up.” I cross to him, wrapping my arms around his waist. “For fighting for us. For becoming the man you always should have been.”
“You make it sound like it was hard.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “It wasn’t hard, Hannah. It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. All I had to do was finally pay attention.”
“Still. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He kisses my forehead. “Now come eat. Our daughter is about to stage a mutiny.”
We eat dinner on a rooftop in Chicago with our baby between us and city lights spread out below.
We talk about the wedding, small this time, just family and close friends. We talk about the future, maybe another baby eventually, once Eliza’s a little older. We talk about the house Griffin’s been looking at, the one with the big backyard and the nursery with room for a crib and a toddler bed.
And somewhere between the dumplings and the tiramisu, I look at him and realize that I’m happy.
Not just content, and not just surviving.
Happy. Actually, genuinely, stupidly happy.
“What?” Griffin asks, catching my expression.
“Nothing.” I smile. “Just thinking about how different this is from the first time.”
“Better different or worse different?”
“Better.” I reach across the table and take his hand. “So much better.”
“Yeah.” His thumb traces circles on my palm, the same gesture he’s been doing since our first date all those years ago. “It really is.”
“I have something for you too,” I say, and pull a folded page from my jacket pocket.
He takes it, wary. “If this is a prenup, your timing is incredible.”
“Read it.”
He unfolds it. I watch his eyes move down the lines, watch him reach the signature, watch the exact second he understands, because his jaw does the thing it does when the numbers surprise him.
Half the company. Signed back. His name next to mine.
“Hannah.” His voice is careful. “We agreed. You argued. There were spreadsheets. You won.”
“I won the argument about whose it was.” I reach across the table and flatten the page between us.
“This is a different argument. I don’t want your empire as a trophy, Griffin, and I don’t want mine over the door alone any more than I wanted yours there.
I want the thing we should have built the first time.
” I tap the paper. “Fifty-fifty. Partners. On the letterhead and everywhere else.”
He looks at the page, then at me, and his eyes are shining in the string lights.
“Partners,” he says, like he’s testing the word. Like it’s new. It is new. It’s the first thing we’ve ever actually split down the middle.
“Don’t cry at my business proposal.”
“I’m not crying. You’re crying.”
“We’re both crying,” I concede. “Eliza, don’t look at us.”
Eliza chooses this moment to throw a piece of bread at Griffin’s head. He catches it without breaking eye contact with me.
“She’s got good aim,” he says.
“She gets it from me.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
We clean up as the city glitters below us and our daughter yawns in her playpen and the ring on my finger catches the light every time I move.
Later, at home, after Eliza has been fed and bathed and negotiated into her crib with the full diplomatic corps of stuffed animals, Griffin catches my hand in the dark hallway and pulls me back against him, his mouth finding the spot below my ear.
“Mrs. almost-Bloom-again,” he murmurs. “I believe we have a merger to celebrate.”
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Give me tonight. I’ll top it.”
We make it exactly four steps before I have to put my hand over his mouth because he’s laughing, actually laughing, and our daughter is a light sleeper, and he retaliates by kissing my palm and then my wrist and then walking me backward down our own hallway like a man with a destination and no patience for hallways.
“Quiet,” I whisper, and it lands with all the authority of a woman who’s already got her hands under his shirt.
“You’re the loud one.” He says it against my jaw, grinning, and unzips my dress with the practiced ease of a man who has raised unzipping to an art form. “Historically. I have data.”
“Slander.” The dress pools on the hallway floor, and his shirt joins it, and we tumble through the bedroom door in a tangle that’s nothing like the desperate reunion of six months ago.
This is easier, warmer, a language we speak fluently now, and when he lays me down on our bed he’s still smiling against my mouth.
The new ring catches the lamplight when I reach up to touch his face, throwing little sparks across his cheekbone, and he turns his head and kisses the band without breaking stride, unhurried, thorough, working his way down my body like a man reading his favorite book for the hundredth time and still finding lines he loves.
His thumb finds the spot between my eyebrows and smooths it, pure reflex.
“No crease,” he reports, smug.
“Nothing to overthink.” I pull him back up by the jaw. “For once in my life, absolutely nothing.”
We move together slow and deep and laughing at the wrong moments, his hand laced through mine on the pillow, the ring pressed between our palms, and when the heat gathers and crests it takes us within a breath of each other, my face buried in his neck to keep the sound from waking the baby, his arms crushing me close like he still can’t believe his luck.
“Regret anything yet?” he murmurs afterward, breathless and insufferable.
“Ask me in fifty years.”
“I’m putting it in my calendar.”
I laugh into his shoulder, boneless and warm, and we rearrange ourselves into the tangle we sleep in now, his leg thrown over mine, my head on his chest, my left hand resting over his heart where the diamond catches the last of the lamplight.
In the dark, with the whole day settling over us like a blanket, I think about beginnings.
This isn’t the ending I imagined when I was nineteen years old and falling in love for the first time.
It’s better.
It’s messy and complicated and hard-won. It’s built on broken promises and second chances and the slow, painful work of learning to trust again.
But it’s ours.
And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
THE END