Epilogue
FLORA
MY CLIENT HAD STOPPED talking about her patio redesign. She’d stopped talking entirely. She was staring past my shoulder at something behind me, and I watched her mouth open, close, and open again.
“Is that your office?” she said.
I angled the screen so she could see the full panorama: the meadow, the hive clusters along the tree line, the Sapphire Range still holding snow on its highest ridges while everything below had exploded into color.
Lupine so purple it looked criminal. Blanketflower thick and blazing orange in the afternoon heat.
My pollinator corridor, designed for a client who didn’t exist, running from the creek bank to the upper slope in the overlapping bloom succession I’d drawn on a sketchpad two months ago — alive now, every species doing exactly what I’d asked of it.
“That’s my office,” I said. “Also my front yard. Also, technically, a working apiary.”
“I hate you. I’m looking at a parking garage right now, Flora. A parking garage.”
“The lavender border you approved is going in next week. I’ll send progress photos.”
“From that porch.”
“From this porch.”
“I need to rethink my entire life.”
“Your patio is going to be beautiful. Focus on the patio.”
She looked at me the way people had been looking at me for weeks — half envious, half certain I’d fabricated my entire existence. I hadn’t. The porch was real, the view was real, and the bump under my sage sundress was very real and becoming harder to pass off as a large lunch.
I closed the call, shut my laptop, and stretched back in the chair.
My sundress was pulled snug where the bump was winning its slow war against my wardrobe, and my hair was piled on top of my head in a clip that was losing its own fight.
Four months. The nausea had backed off three weeks ago and been replaced by a hunger so specific and relentless that Atlas had started keeping a grocery list on the fridge in his block printing.
The current version read: Watermelon. More pickles (jar is empty).
Peanut butter (crunchy, not smooth — do not get smooth again).
And at the bottom, underlined twice: Peaches. Only fresh. Do not bring home canned.
He tracked my cravings with the same focus he gave his hive inspections. I’d caught him adding to the list at five in the morning after I’d mumbled something about wanting waffles in my sleep.
He was in the extraction shed. I could hear the extractor running from here, that low mechanical hum underneath the constant drone that had become the background frequency of everything.
Pine resin on the updraft. Warm grass. The faint sweetness coming off the meadow.
Somewhere on the ridge, a varied thrush dropped its two-note call into the afternoon.
First extraction of the season. Spring wildflower — that pale gold that tasted like the meadow smelled, that he’d drizzled across my collarbone the night everything between us stopped being a secret and started being a future.
I thought about going down there. Watching him work, the way I had every day since I’d showed up on this property with binoculars and a cover story and a talent for destroying hive equipment.
But the chair had me. The sun was warm on my skin.
The shooting star I’d planted along the creek had spread into drifts of pale pink and my eyes stung, which was the hormones, or the pride, or both.
My phone buzzed.
How’s my grandchild? my mother texted. I’m sending you an article about folic acid.
Don’t skip it. Also your father has been studying your garden photos and says the soil drainage on the south slope looks excellent and to tell Atlas he approves.
He wants to know if Atlas has tested the pH below the creek bank.
I told him to stop interrogating my daughter’s boyfriend through text message and he said it’s not interrogation it’s professional interest. Eddie Diaz does not have professional interest. He has opinions he won’t stop sharing. Like his daughter.
I typed back: The baby is the size of an avocado and does not have opinions about soil pH yet.
Yet, my mother replied. Give it time.
Both families were planning to visit in June. My parents were driving up from Bend. Atlas’s parents were making the trip from Billings. Everyone would meet for the first time on this mountain, and my mother had already texted me twice about what to cook for people she’d never laid eyes on.
Next, a text from Dahlia: I’m driving up in June. I need to see this mountain that stole my sister. Also Mom won’t stop talking about it and I need visual evidence that you haven’t lost your mind.
Bring layers, I typed. Eighty degrees at noon and forty by dinner. And I haven’t lost my mind. I’ve relocated it.
And Britt, in the tone of a woman who had been waiting two months to deliver this line:
Booked my flight. Landing in Missoula June 14th.
I need to meet the man who seduced my best friend with trout.
I have questions, Flora. Pointed, invasive, deeply personal questions.
Also does Atlas have a brother? You mentioned a brother.
Is he single? Is there a family resemblance?
I’m bringing wine for me and judgment for you.
I laughed loud enough to startle a junco off the railing.
The loft had a window now. South-facing, wide, framing the view: wildflowers and mountains and the long sweep of the valley beyond.
Atlas had cut the opening himself, fitted it, sealed it, set the glass on a Tuesday afternoon while I sat on the bedroom floor handing him tools and pretending I wasn’t crying.
The room smelled like fresh pine and beeswax.
The floor he’d sanded weeks before I ever found the prenatal vitamins was smooth underfoot.
There was no furniture in it yet. We had time.
I heard the shed door bang shut. Boots on gravel.
Then he came around the corner of the cabin carrying a frame of capped honeycomb, shirtless — because June in Montana was warm enough to justify it and Atlas would have been shirtless in a blizzard if the bees needed tending.
The sun caught the honey on his hands and the hard planes of his torso.
My entire body responded with the subtlety of a five-alarm fire.
Four months pregnant. Fully committed. Living with the man.
And the sight of him walking across the yard hit me the same way it had the first day, when I’d been facedown in his bee yard with a bee on my nose and my dignity scattered across three counties.
My pulse climbed. My skin flushed warm. I pressed my thighs together on my chair and thought, very clearly: I am building a life with this man and I still want to climb him in broad daylight.
Which was reassuring, in a way. Some things the hormones couldn’t take credit for.
He saw me. His face shifted — that subtle rearrangement around his eyes and mouth that I’d learned to read like weather. Almost a smile, but not yet — the thing that came right before it, the version he only did for me.
“First extraction’s done,” he said. “Twelve frames. Pale gold. The clover’s coming in next — should be ready in a couple weeks.”
“I want to taste it.”
“It’s not strained yet.”
“I want to taste it now.”
He climbed the steps, held the comb out, and I dragged my finger across a cap of wax and brought it to my mouth.
Warm, floral, sweet in a way that tasted like the last two months of my life — layered, specific, earned.
His meadow, my garden, his bees carrying pollen from the corridor I’d built.
I closed my eyes and the sound I made was, again, entirely inappropriate for a porch.
When I opened them he was watching me with an intensity that had nothing to do with honey.
“We got the ultrasound results back,” I said.
He went still. The comb in his hands, wax caps gleaming in the sun. The bees working the slope behind him, sixty thousand tiny engines in their daily commute. His gaze dropped to my belly, back to my face.
“It’s a girl.”
His chest expanded. His jaw worked once. He set the comb down on the rail with a care that made my throat close, and then he was in front of me, on his knees, both hands spreading across my stomach, and his forehead pressed to the bump.
“A girl,” he said. Low. Almost to himself.
“You’re going to be outnumbered.”
“I’ve been outnumbered since you showed up.”
His chin tipped up. Brown eyes bright in the sun, so certain they made my chest ache. I put my hands over his.
He reached into his back pocket. My breath stopped.
A ring. Old, thin gold, a single small stone that caught the afternoon light. He held it between his thumb and forefinger with a steady hand. This was it — right here, with uncapped comb on the railing and his daughter under his palms.
“Atlas.”
“It was my grandmother’s.” He turned it in the light. “I’ve had it out of the closet for weeks.”
My hands were shaking. My vision was blurring and I couldn’t speak, which had never happened to me before in my life and might qualify as a medical event.
“I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you. I want to raise our girl on this mountain.”
I was crying. Obviously I was crying. I was also laughing, because the most important question of my life was being asked by a man with honey on his hands, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“You haven’t asked me a question,” I managed.
He slid the ring onto my finger. It fit — barely, snug past the knuckle, warm from his pocket. “Flora Diaz. Will you marry me?”
I grabbed his face and kissed him hard enough to knock him off balance. He caught himself with one hand on the planks and laughed into my mouth. A real laugh, full and startled — the sound of a man who’d spent six years alone up here and was never going to be again.
“Yes,” I said against his lips. “Obviously yes. I moved to Montana for you. I committed extensive fraud for you. The answer was always going to be yes.”
The gold was thin and smooth against my skin. I turned my hand and the stone flashed — small, bright, older than both of us.
He stayed there. Ring on my finger, palms on our daughter, face tipped up to mine with a look that would have buckled me if I’d been standing.
The creek ran below us. The garden was blooming — penstemon and lupine and blanketflower, all of it alive and thriving and built on a lie I’d told a stranger who became the person kneeling in front of me.
The plan had been so good. Insemination, positive test, baby on my own terms. A solid plan.
A smart plan. A plan that did not account for a mountain, or a quiet beekeeper who spoke to his colonies with more tenderness than he showed the rest of the world, or honey on a collarbone, or a cleared loft with a window he’d cut before anyone asked him to.
The plan didn’t bring me here. I brought me here. And then I tripped over a hive box and the plan grew into something I couldn’t have designed, and I design things for a living.
Atlas stood. Kissed my forehead. Picked up the frame.
“The nursery needs a crib,” he said.
“Of course you’re going to build it.”
“I already bought the wood.” He held the door open. Waited. Sticky-fingered, sawdust on his jeans, a daughter on the way. And me — a woman who’d picked him from a catalogue, then picked him again in person, and intended to keep picking him every single day.
I got up. Followed him inside. The screen door closed behind us, and the mountain settled back into its own sound — the creek, the wind, the hum of the colonies working the garden I’d planted for a man I’d come to spy on and stayed to love.