Epilogue
SNOW DUSTED THE QUAD in a thin, bright layer that caught the morning light and turned the walkways into pale ribbons between the campus buildings.
Skylar took the shortcut to the house because the path passed the oak grove where the bare branches held snow in their joints and the sight called to her.
The Nikon rested against her hip, lens cap off, the strap softened by months of use.
She stopped at the entrance to the grove and raised the viewfinder to her eye.
A maintenance worker on a ladder replaced a bulb in one of the campus path lights, and his silhouette against the bare branches created a composition she would have ignored in September.
Back then she would have kept walking, head down, calculating the minutes between her shift at the hospital and the bus to the diner and the hours left for homework.
Now she pressed the shutter, lowered the camera, waved at the man on the ladder, and kept walking.
Not every photograph needed to mean something. Some just needed to exist.
She cut across the lower quad toward Elm Street, boots crunching through the fresh layer, and climbed the stairs of the converted Victorian three blocks from campus.
The key Charlie gave her turned the lock on the second-floor apartment, and the warmth of the radiator-heated hallway folded around her.
Grant’s burr grinder sat on the kitchen counter beside a matte-black espresso machine and a row of spice jars.
The whole kitchen smelled of cinnamon and ginger from whatever Grant had cooked that morning, and a cutting board leaned against the backsplash, its surface scarred with years of knife marks.
Charlie’s room sat at the end of the hall, door open, January light pooling across the desk, books stacked two-deep on a shelf he’d assembled himself.
The day Charlie moved out, the condo looked the same as the day she’d photographed him for the portrait assignment.
The key to the McLaren sat on the marble countertops, the chrome fixtures gleamed, and his grandmother’s quilt draped over the arm of the elongated gray couch.
The quilt lay folded at the foot of his bed. Everything else he’d left behind.
Charlie sat on the bed with his laptop balanced on his knees, headphones looped around his wrist, fingers moving across the keyboard in a rhythm she recognized. Writing rhythm. His posture carried no tension. The man who had hidden his words sat in an open room with the door wide, producing pages.
Above his desk, a collage of photographs covered a square of wall.
Charlie and Grant outside the stadium. Charlie and Seb at Frank’s, mid-argument over something that made Seb throw his hands in the air.
Charlie and Skylar on the porch in Ironwood, her grandmother’s garden blurred behind them.
A postcard-sized watercolor of a coastline pinned above the others, the brushstrokes loose and confident.
Lyla’s hand in every stroke. Beside the postcard, a photograph identical to the one on Skylar’s desk: Charlie at the campus fair, crouching beside the lost boy, his happiness captured in a snap.
Two copies of the same image in two different rooms. The symmetry bloomed low in her abdomen, warm and steady.
“You’re staring.” He closed the laptop and looked up.
His lips lifted, one corner first, then the rest following like a picture coming into focus.
The warmth behind the gesture spread across his whole expression without effort, without calibration, without the mechanical brightness that used to snap into place whenever a camera or a donor or his father entered the room.
Nobody in this apartment expected anything from Charlie except his honest company.
“Occupational hazard.” She crossed the room and kissed him, her cold nose pressing against his cheek. He pulled her down beside him and the scent of grass and salt air rose from his collar and she breathed him in and let the warmth settle.
“How’s the writing?”
“Slow. Honest.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “Dr. Linden says the honest part is the only part that matters.” His fingers brushed along her spine, settling at her waist. “My mom read the new story.”
“Yeah?” Skylar studied his face. No tightness around his eyes or rehearsed casualness. The ordinariness of the moment pressed against her collarbone with a sweetness that almost hurt.
“She said the ending made her cry.” He huffed out a laugh. “And that my scene breaks need better transitions.”
“Sounds like you’ve found yourself an editor.”
“She wants to come here for spring break.” Charlie’s heart pounded under Skylar’s palm. He’d flown to Italy at Christmas on his own money, the airfare covered by a pair of running shoes he’d sold, the first time he’d visited his mother without his father’s wealth paying the way.
“I can’t wait to meet her.”
He kissed the corner of her mouth, slow and deliberate, and her thoughts scattered like papers in a draft. His fingers traced the hem of her sweater, and she arched into the touch before the rational part of her brain caught up with the rest of her.
“I have class in twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen-minute walk.”
“Twelve if I cut through the library.”
He kissed her again, longer this time, and she lost another thirty seconds she couldn’t afford. She pulled back and pressed a finger to his chest. “Hold that thought.”
“I’d rather hold you.”
She placed a finger against his lips. “Any word from the fellowship?”
He shrugged. Easy, unbothered. Whether the letter arrived in January or March or never, the man who’d written in secret for ten years sat in open daylight producing work he shared with his mother and his therapist and her. The fellowship was a door Charlie had already walked through.
“So.” He leaned back against the headboard. “Grant has decided that Sunday mornings are for Puccini. Full volume. Seven a.m.”
“Opera.” She laughed, leaning into him, and closed her eyes.
“Opera.” He tipped his head back against the headboard. “The man cooks a six-course meal at midnight and wakes me with Italian tenors.”
“Well.” Skylar tucked her feet beneath the quilt. “The offer to come live with me is always open.”
He turned his head, and his eyes held the particular blue that surfaced just before he let her in. “Sleep on that tiny bed? I think I’m better here.”
When he’d first told her about losing the condo and all the other perks Brennan Carnell had used as strings to control his son, Skylar had immediately offered to live with him.
But he’d refused, explaining between kisses that if she chose to live with him in a year or two, he would gladly share a bed with her every night.
Three months ago, the conversation would have leveled her. She would have translated the words into you aren’t enough and retreated behind the barricade that had kept her upright since she was twelve.
Instead, the warmth in his voice reached a place behind her ribs where the old wound lived, and it recognized the kindness in his distance. He loved her enough to give her the room to become whoever Skylar Hartley turned out to be when she wasn’t carrying someone else’s weight.
“Good thing this place is only three blocks away.” She kissed the hinge of his jaw.
“Just far enough.” His thumb swept across her knuckles. “But maybe we spend Saturday nights at your place.”
Frank’s Diner buzzed with Wednesday night energy, the kitchen bell ringing behind the counter, the scent of coffee and homemade pie warm against the outside chill.
Skylar slid into the corner booth beside Charlie and Poppy, the vinyl creaking under the weight of half a football team crammed into the table.
Seb pointed at her with a french fry. “You’re not working tonight.”
“Night off.”
He pouted. “That means no free fries.”
“You never got free fries.”
“I got extra fries.” He popped the fry into his mouth and launched into a story about a teammate and a laundromat that had the conviction of courtroom testimony.
Wyatt laughed so hard he knocked his water into Booker’s lap.
Grant occupied a chair at the end of the table, coffee mug between both palms, angled toward the center of the table with the stillness of a man listening to everything while appearing to listen to nothing.
Rosa appeared with a tray of plates, setting a burger in front of Grant, a grilled cheese in front of Charlie.
“I thought we could share.” Charlie pushed the plate between them, handing Skylar the ketchup bottle.
Skylar picked up her half. The bread crunched between her teeth, butter and cheddar and the particular warmth of a kitchen that knew her name.
Poppy leaned close, her voice dropping below the table noise. “I need to tell you something.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“Remember the championship game?” Poppy chewed her bottom lip. “When the team won and I ran onto the field?”
“You mean when you jumped into Grant’s arms.” The image surfaced instantly: Poppy sprinting across the turf, Grant catching her, the kiss that landed on the jumbo screen for a stadium to see.
“Yeah, the one time my family decides to watch.” Her eyes flicked across the table, then down at her entwined fingers.
“They think he’s my boyfriend. At Thanksgiving, I may not have corrected them.
” A blush bloomed on Poppy’s cheeks. “Now they want me to include him in the bridal party. My sister is one groomsman short.” She winced. “My mother bought him a gift.”
Skylar pressed her lips together. “For a man she’s never met?”
“A monogrammed bathrobe.” Poppy covered her eyes with both hands. “I need him to come to this wedding. What am I going to do?”
Skylar’s gaze drifted across the table. Grant sat at the end of the bench, his attention fixed somewhere past Seb’s left ear, but his body angled toward Poppy. Had been angled toward Poppy since she sat down.
He glanced over and caught Skylar looking. One eyebrow rose, a question mark sketched in the scar that crossed his brow. He held her gaze for a single beat, then looked away.
“Ask him.”