Epilogue
NATE
The Spanish sun is relentless and perfect, casting everything in that golden Mediterranean light.
I'm standing in front of a mirror in a small room overlooking the sea, adjusting my bow tie for what has to be the fourth time now and somehow managing to make it worse with each attempt.
My hands won't stop shaking.
Not from nerves, exactly—not from doubt or fear or second-guessing what's about to happen.
Just from the sheer weight of this moment finally arriving after years of wondering if it ever would.
Three years we've been walking toward this day.
We would have done it sooner, but Nora's film production took almost a year, then she moved back to Eden and decided she wanted to keep Gracie's Bookstore alive after all, which meant renovation and inventory and learning how to run a business she'd inherited from someone who'd believed in us before we believed in ourselves.
Time just kept slipping away from us, though not in a bad way.
Not in the way it used to, when distance and silence made every day feel like losing ground.
This time it was just life. The good kind. The kind where you're so busy building something real that you forget to make the symbolic gestures official.
Not that we needed official. We've been committed to each other in every way that matters since the night she showed up at Westbrook and didn't leave.
But still.
This feels important. This feels like closing a chapter that's been open since we were kids, and finally starting the one we've been too scared to write.
And now we're here.
In Málaga, where it all started seven years ago when we were twenty-two and stupid and so convinced we were inevitable that we didn't realize how much work inevitable actually takes.
The door opens behind me and Nick walks in, looking annoyingly put-together in his grey suit, sunglasses pushed up on his head like he just stepped off a yacht.
"You look constipated," he says by way of greeting.
I flip him off without turning around.
"Thanks. Very helpful."
"Seriously though." He comes up beside me and takes the bow tie out of my hands before I can destroy it completely. "You're making this harder than it needs to be. It's a tie, not a crisis."
He fixes it in three smooth movements—the kind of effortless competence that's always made me simultaneously grateful and irritated that he's better at this stuff than I am.
"There," he says, patting my chest once. "Now you look almost presentable."
"Almost?"
"Well, you're still you." He grins. "But Nora seems to like that about you, so I guess it works."
I look at myself in the mirror, trying to see what she sees.
The face staring back is older than the last time I stood in this city, but softer too. Less haunted. The kind of face that comes from seven years sober and three years of waking up next to someone who makes you want to be better without making you feel like you're not already enough.
"You ready?" Nick asks, and his voice has gentled in that way it does when he knows I'm processing something bigger than the moment.
"Yeah," I say, and I mean it with everything I have. "I'm well past ready."
He squeezes my shoulder once—firm and brief and full of things we don't need to say out loud.
"Let's get you married then," he says.
The ceremony is set on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean—the same stretch of coastline where we walked seven years ago, where I picked up a pebble and enlightend her about how penguins mate for life when the female accepts the pebble.
Twenty chairs are arranged in a small semi-circle facing the sea.
Just family and the friends who've become family over the years. The people who held us together when we couldn't hold ourselves.
Kat is seated next to Mia, holding little Sophia—the latest addition to the family, all of six months old and already the center of everyone's universe.
Ollie is trying to wrangle three-year-old Annie, who's wearing a flower crown and attempting to eat it while simultaneously refusing to stand still long enough for anyone to explain what walking down an aisle actually means.
Camilla and Jay are in the second row, her hand resting on her stomach in that unconscious way pregnant women do, even though she's only just started showing.
Julian and the rest of the band are scattered throughout, looking uncomfortable in formal wear but here anyway because that's what family does.
Mom and Dom are sitting together near the front, his hand covering hers in a way that still makes something in my chest settle every time I see it. Proof that second chances don't have expiration dates, that it's never too late to claim the life you were supposed to have.
It's small and intimate and perfect in a way that has nothing to do with planning and everything to do with the people filling these chairs.
A string quartet plays something soft and Spanish as I take my place at the front, Nick standing beside me as my best man.
The ocean crashes against the rocks below us, steady and eternal. The air smells like salt and citrus and the kind of possibility that only exists when you're standing at the edge of something that will change everything.
My heart pounds hard enough that I can feel it in my throat. My palms are damp despite the breeze coming off the water.
Then the music shifts and everyone stands.
And there she is.
My Nora.
Walking down the makeshift aisle on Ollie's arm, and I forget how to do anything except stare.
She's wearing a simple dress—cream-colored, flowing, catching the breeze off the ocean in a way that makes her look like she's floating. No veil. Hair loose around her shoulders the way I love it, with small white flowers woven through that I know she picked herself this morning.
She's smiling, and it's the kind of smile that reaches all the way to her eyes and makes everything else in the world fade to background noise.
She catches my eye halfway down the aisle and her smile widens impossibly further, and I have to blink hard because my vision is already blurring and we haven't even started yet.
I've never seen anything more beautiful in my life than my future wife walking toward me, barefoot on warm stones, looking at me like I'm the only person in the world who matters.
Ollie brings her to me and places her hand in mine with a squeeze that says everything he can't say out loud in this moment. Then he whispers something I don't quite catch because all I can focus on is the warmth of her palm against mine and the fact that this is real.
This is actually happening.
After everything—after all the years and the silence and the almost-but-not-quite and the building and the waiting—this is actually happening.
The officiant—a local woman Camilla found who speaks perfect English with a slight Spanish accent—begins talking about love and commitment and choosing each other every day even when it's hard, especially when it's hard.
I hear maybe half of it because I'm too busy looking at Nora, memorizing this moment, this version of her, this feeling of standing in the Spanish sun about to promise forever to the person who's already been my always.
Her eyes are bright with unshed tears. She's biting her bottom lip the way she does when she's trying not to cry in public, and it's so completely her that my chest aches with how much I love her.
"Nate?" The officiant's voice breaks through my thoughts. "Your vows?"
Right. Vows.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the folded paper I've been carrying for weeks, the edges soft from how many times I've taken it out and read it over, trying to make sure I got it right.
I look at the words I wrote and rewrote and agonized over for days, and suddenly they feel inadequate. Like no combination of sentences could possibly capture what I need to say.
But I try anyway.
"I read something once," I start, my voice rougher than I intend. "About the difference between the love of your life and your soulmate."
I look up from the paper and see her staring back at me with those green eyes that have always seen straight through me, and I almost forget how to breathe.
"One's a choice, and one is not. And I think our souls fell in love long before we ever knew what love was supposed to mean."
Her face crumples. Tears spill over and stream down her cheeks. She doesn't bother wiping them away.
"Len," I clear my throat, try again. "I've loved you since I was seven years old."
She lets out a sound that's half laugh, half sob, and I have to pause to collect myself because if I don't, I'm going to lose it completely.
"I've loved you through nine summers that felt infinite and seven years of distance that felt impossible.
I've loved you through silence, through nights when I wasn't sure if I'd ever make it through.
I've loved you in the quiet ways I knew how all while hoping that someday, somehow, you'd find me again.”
I fold the paper back up because the rest of what I wrote doesn't matter now. It's just words on a page, and she deserves more than that.
She deserves the truth spoken out loud, unpolished and imperfect and completely real.
"And now you're here," I continue, and my voice steadies slightly because this part is easy.
This part is just fact. "And I get to love you out loud.
I get to love you in all the ways I couldn't before—in the everyday moments and the hard moments and the boring moments that make up an actual life together. "
She's crying openly now, and so is half the crowd, but I keep going.
"I get to love you when you're stealing all the covers at three in the morning.
When you're crying over fictional characters who aren't real but in your mind they are.
When you're so deep in your writing that you forget I exist and I have to literally put food in front of you to make sure you eat something. "
She laughs through her tears, and the sound makes my heart feel too big for my chest.
"I promise to always tell you the truth, even when it's scary.
Even when I'm afraid it might be the thing that pushes you away. I promise to let you make your own choices, even when every instinct I have wants to protect you from everything that could possibly hurt you. I promise to keep building—houses and futures and memories—with you.”
I take both her hands now, hold them tight enough that she can feel how much I mean this.
"You're my home, Lenora Wells. You always have been, even when I didn't have you.
Even when I thought I'd lost you. And I promise to spend every day of the rest of my life making sure you know it.
Making sure you never doubt it. Making sure you always feel loved exactly as you are, not as some version of yourself you think you need to be. "
I pause, take a breath, finish it.
"I choose you, Len. Today and every day after. In every timeline. In every version of this story. For as long as you'll have me."
The officiant is crying now too, so is pretty much everyone else.
Nora takes a shaky breath, doesn't reach for notes because she never wrote any. She just speaks from the heart the way she always has when it matters.
"I always knew fate existed. I saw it in other people’s stories—in the way two souls seemed to find each other, even against the odds. But for the longest time, it felt like something I was meant to witness, not live. Until you.”
She squeezes my hands hard enough that I feel it in my bones.
"From that moment you made the ordinary feel extraordinary. You became my calm in the chaos, my laughter in the silence, and the safest place I’ve ever known. With you, love isn’t something I chase —it’s something that feels like home.”
Her voice breaks, but she pushes through.
“I promise to love you without condition, to stand with you in the light and in the dark, to celebrate your victories, and to hold you steady through the moments that feel uncertain. I vow to see you, truly see you — not just who you are now, but every version of the man you’ll become.”
She's smiling now, through the tears, and she's so beautiful it hurts to look at her.
“I’ll laugh at your jokes, even the ones that don’t land, steal your fries, your hoodies, and maybe a few of your dreams, because I plan on building new ones with you. I’ll be your loudest cheerleader and your softest place to land, your adventure partner, and your quiet at the end of the day."
"So Nate, if the difference between the love of your life and your soulmate is that one's a choice and one is not, then I choose you every single day.
Even on the days when it's hard. Especially on the days when it's hard.
I promise to let you love me out loud and to love you just as loudly back.
I promise to fill our library with more books and our house with more noise and our garden with more sunflowers and our life with all the messy, beautiful, imperfect moments that make forever worth having. "
She takes a breath, steadies herself.
"You're my home too, Nate. You always have been."
The officiant barely gets through the "I do's" before I'm kissing her, and everyone's laughing and crying and applauding, and the string quartet is playing again, and the sun is setting over the Mediterranean in streaks of orange and gold that look like they were painted specifically for this moment.
And Nora is my wife.
My wife.
We walk back down the aisle together, barefoot on the warm stones, and I can't stop smiling.
I can't stop looking at her. Can't stop thanking whatever cosmic force or dumb luck or sheer stubborn inevitability brought us both back to this cliff where I’d silently promised her forever.
At the end of the aisle, before we rejoin our family and friends for the reception, she stops me. Reaches into the small bouquet she's carrying and pulls something out that's been tucked in there the whole time.
A pebble.
Not just any pebble.
The pebble. The one I gave her seven years ago, when I made a stupid joke about penguins and had no idea she'd keep it for this long.
"Penguins mate for life," she says, echoing my words from back then, and she's smiling.
My hands tremble as I cup her face. My heart pounds so hard I'm sure she can feel it. We kiss again—slower this time, deeper, full of seven years of waiting and three years of building and a lifetime still stretching ahead of us like an unwritten story.
When we break apart, she's grinning in that way that makes her whole face light up.
"Ready for forever, Mr. Sullivan?"
I look at this woman who's been my friend, my first love, my almost, my always. The person who knows every version of me and somehow chose me anyway.
"I've been ready since forever, Mrs. Sullivan.”