Epilogue
EPILOGUE
Fall
We go apple picking at an orchard forty-five minutes outside the city and wind up with inside-out clothes and kiss-bruised lips when we make it back to the car.
I start an Etsy shop for custom ribbons and bridal sashes—because I’m me, and even when I’m doing nothing, I can’t do nothing. When I’m not at my sewing machine, I’m helping Will and Brooks set up their business. Which mostly consists of recipe tasting (more aspiring than vegetarian) and “borrowing” the Revenant photographer to take photos for their new website. I repay Will in favors, finally feeling fair, even though I’ve accepted nothing is.
We visit New York in early November, stay with Cami and David close to Gramercy Park. I meet Zoe’s boyfriend, Martin, a bespectacled Londoner who fits her so perfectly I see exactly what Will meant when he said he can’t fault him.
Will and I return home to a warmer autumn in Austin and fall deeper in love.
Winter
I start therapy in December, the same week Will and Brooks do their first catering gig. My Etsy shop explodes over the holiday season, which keeps me busy on the nights he’s working. I never re-download social media, but I do send Will a selfie per day, and in return, he shows me all the things he’s DM’d my latest defunct account.
On the nights Will isn’t working, we sometimes try a new restaurant on our ever-growing list, sip cocktails with fancy names, and then make drunk, messy, verbal love when we stumble back to his town house.
Other nights, we’ll stay home—usually his place—and make slow, desperate, quiet love that lasts hours and folds time.
Christmas is in Nashville. Christmas Eve with my family, the morning after with his mom and Zoe. It snows, and I catch snowflakes on my tongue, and Will’s cheeks go rosier the longer I make him stand outside.
Spring
We go on countless bike rides, plant flowers outside Will’s house. He says nothing at all as more and more of my things accumulate there. My bike, my only phone charger, two out of four of my sewing machines. Will simply clears a space and makes me feel like he’d been patiently waiting for those things to arrive.
We visit New York again with Gio and Leonie, who insist on a three-hour expedition to the Times Square Margaritaville with the whole gang. Will keeps his hand on my knee in the sticky booth and moans with boyish grief every time a Jimmy Buffet song comes on. I laugh at him and swoon over him and love him.
“I never got to see him live,” Will complains, slurping on his cocktail.
“At least we have Margaritaville,” I say.
On the other side of the table, Camila and Zoe are exchanging phone numbers.
Summer
JOSEPHINE DAVIS HAS FOUND HER THIRD WIND
B Y Z OE G RANT FOR T HE N EW Y ORK T IMES
You know the brand, and you know the name. Now it’s time you knew the person.
Josephine Davis was eighteen years old when she left her hometown of Nashville behind and relocated to Austin, Texas—where she would spend her next four years of college, and another six years after that building her company.
Josie grew up sewing with her grandmother, she tells me on a sunny afternoon when I’m invited into her home for the purpose of gathering notes for this piece. She lives in a dated, unassuming house not far from the South Congress shops (where the first physical store of her beloved brand has been thriving for almost a year now). Josie’s refrigerator is mostly empty, every available surface covered with patterns or scraps of fabric or a container of buttons. She points to an old sewing machine in a corner. “That one was Oma’s favorite,” she says. “It isn’t very functional, but I love to have it around.”
One thing Revenant’s customers might be surprised to learn is Josie didn’t set out to build her company the way it currently exists. “It was mostly one-off designs I’d sell via DM at first,” she admits, adding a laugh. “The buyers would just Venmo me. But the demand got away from me in those early days, and I couldn’t bear to tell anyone no. Eventually I came to the conclusion I was going to need to grow or let the following down. I chose to grow.”
Between the early days of one-offs and the brand we know today came the dramatic exit of both Camila Sanchez and Davis from the company around this time last year—and the social media storm that surrounded it.
“Neither Camila nor I left because of the bad press,” Josie assures me. “We’re still best friends, and we still love the brand. But as coincidence would have it, it was time for each of us to take a step back and leave Revenant in Derrick Lovell’s hands.
“I spent years putting all my worth into that company,” she goes on, sipping a grapefruit-and-seltzer mocktail. “Its success or failure was literally tied to what I believed about myself as a human being. I left no room for error. I left no room for other priorities. With therapy and a life change, I’m in a much better place now where things can be different, but last year, it was nonnegotiable for me to take a break.”
When I ask her what part of her life changed, she blushes.
Josie tells me she’s spent the last year figuring out what she wants for the rest of her twenties, her thirties, her forties. In between, she made dresses that sold at auction for charities, took vacations, joined a local book club. She helped her boyfriend get his catering business off the ground and spent time with her niece and nephew in North Carolina.
“And now?” I ask her—the question you’ve all been waiting on, as rumors continue to circulate about whether Josephine Davis’s “step back” from Revenant was temporary or not. “What are you planning to do now?”
Josie’s eyes drift over to a U-Haul packing box in a corner of her living room; it’s been halfway loaded with books, some of which I recommended to her myself.
She’s headed for a new life phase, she explains, which starts with selling this house because “Will can’t bear to part with his kitchen, and I want to leave my memories of this place just to me and Camila. I’m moving in with my boyfriend,” she says. “We’re getting a puppy.”
“And Revenant?” I probe.
She takes a deep breath, and answers: