Epilogue
Hannah
One Year Later
The garden is small. Intimate. Nothing like our first wedding.
That one was Prentiss’s production, a cathedral packed with guests, a reception I had no say in and no stomach for. I wore a dress someone else chose, walked an aisle lined with strangers, married a man I thought I knew in front of a crowd that had already decided I wasn’t good enough.
This one is ours.
Fairy lights strung through the trees. White chairs arranged in two short rows. A simple arch wound with greenery and pale roses that smell like summer rain. The guest list fits on a single notecard, and every person here actually loves us.
Summer stands beside me in lavender, already dabbing at her eyes with a tissue she swore she wouldn’t need. Mom gave up on composure twenty minutes ago. She’s openly weeping in the front row, clutching the handkerchief I tucked into her hand before the music started.
Jack came alone. Prentiss declined, which is probably best.
He sits at the end of the second row, quiet and still, watching with an expression I can’t quite read. When our eyes meet, he nods once. Just that. But from Jack Jasper, it’s everything.
And Cameron waits at the altar.
He’s wearing a simple gray suit, no tails, nothing his mother would have approved of, and at his wrists are the platinum cufflinks I gave him for our second anniversary.
His hair is slightly mussed from running his hands through it nervously, and his eyes are locked on the doorway where I’m about to appear.
The music shifts. Something soft and acoustic that we chose together, lying in bed at two in the morning with my laptop balanced between us, arguing over lyrics until we found the one that made us both go quiet.
I step into view.
His face does something that cracks my heart wide open. Wonder. Gratitude. A love so raw and unguarded that I have to blink rapidly to keep from ruining my makeup before I even reach him.
“You’re beautiful,” he mouths.
I walk toward him. Toward us.
The aisle is short, fifteen steps, maybe twenty, but each one feels like a reclamation. Every step away from the woman who used to beg for scraps of attention. Every step toward the life we’re building on the wreckage of the one we almost lost.
Cameron takes my hands when I reach him. His fingers are trembling.
“Hi,” he whispers.
“Hi yourself.”
The officiant speaks, but I barely hear the words. Something about love and commitment and the journey that brought us here. I’m too busy watching Cameron’s face, cataloging every micro-expression, memorizing this moment so I can carry it with me forever.
Then it’s time for vows.
Cameron pulls a folded paper from his jacket pocket. His handwriting. I can see it through the thin sheet, cramped and careful, the penmanship of a man who usually types everything.
He clears his throat. Unfolds the paper. And begins to read.
Slowly. Deliberately. Every word given space to land.
Then he reads it again.
The same vows, the same pace, twice through, because he knows that’s how my brain hears best. Because he learned, somewhere in the wreckage of our marriage, that my ears catch what my eyes sometimes scramble. Because he pays attention now in ways he never did before.
“I vow to always come home,” he reads. “To put you first. To never make you feel like you don’t matter again.”
My throat tightens. Summer sniffles behind me.
“I vow to read you your own words when you can’t see them. To fill our home with flowers. To dance with you in the kitchen every night for the rest of our lives.”
He looks up from the paper. His eyes are wet.
“I vow to be the man you deserve,” he says, off-script now, voice rough. “Even when I fail. Especially when I fail. Because you taught me that love isn’t about being perfect. It’s about showing up. And I will show up, Hannah. Every single day. I swear it.”
The officiant turns to me. “And do you have vows you’d like to share?”
“I do.” I take a breath. “But I’m not going to say them. I’m going to give them.”
I reach into the hidden pocket of my dress, the one Summer helped me sew in last week, laughing at the absurdity of a secret compartment in a wedding gown, and pull out a folded piece of paper.
Cameron frowns slightly, confused. He takes it when I offer it, unfolds it carefully.
And goes completely still.
“I was going to wait,” I say, my voice thick. “But I wanted you to know today. On this day, when we’re starting over.”
He’s staring at the paper. At the grainy black-and-white image printed on it. At the tiny bean-shaped blur in the center with the arrow pointing to it and the words BABY JASPER, 8 WEEKS written in the technician’s careful hand.
“We’re going to need a bigger house,” I whisper.
Cameron Jasper, who commanded boardrooms, who walked away from empires, who faced down his mother and the media and his own worst impulses without flinching, cannot produce a single word.
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Nothing comes out.
Then he just pulls me into his arms and holds me so tight I can barely breathe, his face buried in my hair, his whole body shaking.
“I love you,” he finally manages, rough and broken. “God, Hannah. I love you so much.”
“I know.” I pull back, cup his face, kiss him softly. “Now finish marrying me. We have a lot to celebrate.”
The officiant pronounces us married. Again, properly, for real this time. Cameron kisses me like we’re the only two people in the world, and somewhere behind us, Summer whoops loudly enough to startle birds from the trees.
The wedding night is nothing like our first.
That one was champagne and exhaustion and the distant sounds of the reception still going downstairs. We were too tired to do more than fall into bed, too overwhelmed by the spectacle to find each other in the aftermath.
This one is just us.
Our bedroom in the house we chose together: blank walls we’re slowly filling with photos, a view of the garden where we just exchanged vows, sheets that smell like lavender because I read somewhere that it helps with sleep and he went out the next day and bought six bottles of the stuff.
Cameron unzips my dress slowly, taking his time with the zipper like we have all night. We do. The fabric pools at my feet and I step out of it, turn to face him in nothing but white lace and the ring he put back on my finger a year ago in the rain.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs, the same word he mouthed at the altar, but different now. Hungrier.
“Your turn.”
I undo his tie. His buttons. Push the jacket off his shoulders and let it fall. He stands before me bare-chested and breathing hard, and I take my time looking: the planes of his chest, the trail of dark hair below his navel, the way his muscles tense when my fingers trace across his stomach.
“Hannah.” He says my name like something he’s afraid to break.
“Shh.” I press a finger to his lips. “Let me.”
I kiss his throat. His collarbone. The space over his heart where I can feel it pounding. He stands perfectly still, letting me explore, his hands clenched at his sides like he’s holding himself back through sheer force of will.
“You can touch me,” I murmur against his skin. “I want you to touch me.”
His control snaps.
His hands are in my hair, tilting my face up, and then he’s kissing me deep and desperate. We stumble toward the bed, shedding the rest of our clothes along the way, falling onto cool sheets in a tangle of limbs.
But when he settles over me, he pauses. Brushes hair from my face. Looks at me with an expression so tender it makes my chest ache.
“I can’t believe you’re real,” he says quietly. “I can’t believe I get to keep you.”
“You get to keep me.” I pull him down, wrap my legs around his waist. “Now prove you deserve to.”
He does. Slowly this time, none of the frantic desperation of our other reunions. Every touch deliberate. Every kiss purposeful. He worships me with his hands and his mouth and his body, and I let him, let myself be cherished in a way I’d almost forgotten was possible.
He kisses down my body, slow and thorough, pressing his lips to every inch like he’s re-learning me.
His hands follow, mapping the curve of my waist, the swell of my breasts, the soft skin of my inner thighs.
I lie back and let him, breathing in the quiet of our new house.
When he finally settles between my legs and pushes inside me, it’s so slow I feel every inch.
We both go still once he’s buried deep, just breathing, just feeling.
He stays like that, buried and still, for a long moment. One hand braces by my head, the other cradles my face. Our foreheads touch. His eyes stay open, locked on mine.
“I love you,” he says, starting to move. “I love you. I love you.”
“I love you too.” I arch into him, meeting his rhythm. “Don’t stop saying it.”
“Never.” He buries his face in my neck. “Never again.”
We build together toward something inevitable and perfect, bodies rocking in perfect time. When I finally shatter, he’s right there with me, both of us breaking and remaking in the same breath, foreheads still pressed together as he comes deep inside me.
After, we lie tangled in sheets that definitely need washing now, my head on his chest, his fingers moving slow against my bare shoulder.
“A baby,” he says, like he’s still trying to make it real. “We’re having a baby.”
“We’re having a baby.”
“I’m going to be a father.”
“You’re going to be an amazing father.”
He pulls me closer, presses a kiss to the top of my head. “I don’t deserve any of this.”
“Probably not.” I tilt my face up, grin at him. “But you’re getting it anyway. So don’t screw it up.”
He laughs, a real laugh, full and warm. “Yes ma’am.”
Later that night, we dance in the kitchen.
Our new kitchen, in our new house, the one with blank walls we’re filling together, the one with a garden visible through every window, the one that’s starting to feel like home.
But the table is old. The table came with us from the first house, the one he sold after everything fell apart. It sits in the corner now, scarred wood and memories, a reminder of what we almost lost and what we chose to keep.
The company is everything I blueprinted at Summer’s kitchen table during those dark weeks when I didn’t know if I’d survive. Our foundation funded its first hundred scholarships this year: students with learning disabilities who’ve been told their whole lives that they’re not enough.
Cameron runs strategy for me now. Turns out the man who built an empire is pretty good at helping me build mine. He hasn’t missed a single dinner in twelve months.
There’s no music playing. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of wind in the trees outside. But we sway anyway, his hand on the small of my back, mine pressed flat against his chest where I can feel his heart beating.
“Happy?” he asks.
“Deliriously.”
“Good.” He pulls me closer, rests his chin on top of my head. “That’s all I want. For the rest of my life. Just you being happy.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“I’m counting on it.”
We sway in silence for a while. The kitchen windows are dark, reflecting us back to ourselves: two people dancing barefoot on cold tile, surrounded by empty walls waiting to be filled with whatever comes next.
“Nothing on this earth outranks you,” he murmurs against my hair.
And this time, I believe him.
THE END