Epilogue #5
I suck in a breath. My hand finds the cloth again, because my body doesn’t know where to put itself without a job.
Of everything he could have bought himself, he bought a route to my front door.
The refrigerator hums. A drip ticks into the sink.
“Would you want me here?” His voice drops under the room. “This close. In your life.” A couple seconds pass, and I feel his gaze on my face when he adds, “Even knowing how fucked up I can get?”
I set the cloth down. Fold it once, square, and leave it. Both hands flat on the wood. I make myself hold his eyes, my heart quivering when I see the flash of vulnerability in his gaze, the not knowing.
“I’ve watched you at your worst,” I say, my voice strong and solid.
“Standing right there—” I nod at the floor by the door “—snow still in your hair, so sick with what you couldn’t take back you couldn’t get the words out.
” I swallow down the beating lump threatening my throat.
“And I’ve watched you fight your way out of it.
Month after month. When it would’ve been easier to just… be the guy on the billboard.”
His jaw comes loose like he’s been holding it clenched without knowing.
“I don’t want to wait for the healed version and forgive the broken one. I want all of it. The one who showed up wrecked. The one who’s still figuring it out.” My voice thins, but I don’t stop it. “Whoever you turn into next. I’ve already decided I’m going to love him too.”
Gabriel’s shoulders drop the exact half-inch I’ve spent months learning to read. He sets the beanie down on the bar and takes his hand off it, and this time when he looks at me, the hunted thing behind his eyes is just—not there.
He doesn’t reach for a joke. Doesn’t smirk it away. He stands in the middle of my empty bar at the end of the best night of his season and lets it land on him, bare.
Then he pushes off the wood.
He crosses the space between us without hurrying. His hand comes across the bar slowly, his fingers finding my hands and holding them gently.
He holds my gaze.
“I love you, Ivy.”
“I love you, too.”
Neither of us moves for a beat. We’ve said the words before—in the quiet, in the dark, in the messy aftermath of the winter.
Then he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket.
A key slides across the bar.
Freshly cut brass, bright and sharp-edged, catching the low light. It travels the length of wood my dad built with his hands and stops when it reaches mine with a small, clean click that sounds enormous in the quiet.
“I want to show you the new place,” he says.
I look at the key.
Cold metal. New-cut smell. The particular weight of a thing that means something other than itself.
Casually, he adds, “Yours.”
I glance at him, his expression earnest, a little nervous.
A smile pulls at my mouth before I can police it. I close my fingers around it. It warms fast in my palm.
“Okay,” I say, and my voice comes out steady. “But I get the side of the bed with the view.”
His laugh rumbles low.
“Deal,” he says. He straightens, lets go of my hands, and waits.
There’s a version of tonight where I tell him now—the boarding pass sitting two clicks deep in my inbox, ten days in Siena come July.
I don’t. Some things earn a bigger stage than last call at an empty bar.
I’ll keep it below the waterline until he’s home from Edmonton, until I’ve had a few nights alone in that new place of his, breaking it in properly, missing him just enough to make the reveal worth it.
I kill the TV and the room drops into the particular quiet of a place that’s done for the night.
One look back.
The bar holds its shape in the dark the way it always has—worn wood, glasses drying on the rack, the mechanical wolf standing silent in the corner. Dad’s place. Still standing.
I press two fingers briefly against the bar top, right at the groove where he leaned in that framed photo, and I feel the solid certainty of it: the building isn’t going anywhere.
The bar isn’t going anywhere. His dream made it, and it will keep making it, with or without me white-knuckling the door from the inside. I turn away clean and lock the door.
Outside, the spring air is cold and soft at once, smelling of petrichor and wet pavement. The street is quieter than a playoff night deserves, like Whistler has finally breathed out after months of holding it in.
Halfway across the road, someone has a phone up. The screen catches the light under the streetlamp, lens aimed this direction.
I don’t break stride. Don’t angle my face. Don’t feel the old spike of dread that used to live just under my sternum waiting for exactly this.
Gabriel’s hand finds mine, fingers interlocking like that’s simply where they go.
We walk.
The storefronts slide past us, dark windows reflecting two shapes moving through them—one tall, one not, hands linked. The Penalty Box sign is behind us now, unlit, just a shape against the glass.
I have his hand, the key a small weight in my pocket, and the whole rest of the night ahead.
I don’t look back.