Epilogue - Lila
A year later
Taryn gets married in a mountain meadow with the whole town watching. She’s wearing a cut I helped to make over her dress that says PROPERTY OF HAWK, and Hawk has tears in his eyes when he sees her.
My daughter takes her flower girl duties as seriously as she does most things.
She walks the aisle in her yellow dress scattering petals with the precision of a farmer seeding a field, one handful per step, and Waffles walks beside her in a flower crown.
Half the town is sniffling before the bride even appears.
I cry through the vows, of course. Wrench's arm is around me the whole time, solid, his thumb moving slow on my shoulder, and when Hawk's voice breaks on the word wife, my big silent man clears his throat twice.
The reception spreads out under string lights as the sun drops behind the ridge.
Somebody's hauled the jukebox up from the Saloon on a flatbed, which I'm told is now a club tradition. Bethany, eight months along and magnificent, directs the cake table from her lawn chair throne while Striker hovers. June and Viv have started a card game in the corner that appears to have a buy-in. Marvin walks around telling everyone he’s going to be next to get married, if anyone wants him.
Doc's been deep in conversation with the deputy for an hour, and Prez stands at the edge of it all, arms crossed, face calm and impossible to read.
My dresses are in Viv's boutique regularly now, with the little cards that say made in High Vale, by Lila.
The cherry-print sold the first week. I made Taryn's going-away dress as a wedding gift.
Viv is excited about my spring collection, which is a sentence I still can't say without laughing.
My designs, in a store, in a town I love and where I'm staying.
The porch step remains unfixed. I think Wrench is superstitious about it. I accused him of stretching the work so I stayed forever. He looked back at me with his eyes twinkling. “Shit. You worked it out.”
We're slow dancing, my cheek on his chest, when he bends to my ear.
“Something you should know,” he says. “There's a ring in my sock drawer.”
My feet stop. His don't; he just carries me through the turn.
“Wrench.”
“It's not going anywhere. Neither am I.” His hand spreads warm over my spine. “And I know you don’t like surprises. So it stays in the drawer until you say so, dulzura. Tonight, next year, ten years. You decide.”
“You're a very strange man,” I tell him, “and I can’t wait to marry you.”
“If you say so.”
I laugh into his chest, and we keep dancing.
Later, Taryn throws her bouquet backward over her head with tournament form, and it arcs high over a crowd of shrieking women. Savage rises out of the middle of them and takes it clean out of the air, one-handed, to a chorus of boos and at least two marriage proposals from the knitting circle.
Lucky's phone rings after he’s come back from flying Hawk and Taryn to their mountain cabin.
Wrench and I are standing near enough to catch it: his easy grin as he answers, and then the grin going. He turns away from the lights, shoulders coming up, a finger in his other ear.
“Slow down. Where? That's not... nobody flies that ridge at night, it's…” His broad shoulders are tense. “How'd you even get this number?”
The party rolls on around him, oblivious. I put my hand on Wrench's arm, and his arm tightens around me.
“Stay on the phone,” Lucky says. “Keep her talking and keep that light burning. I'm coming.” He turns around, and Hawk's brother has a face I've never seen on him: flat and focused and ten years older. He crosses to Prez, talking to him in a low voice. Prez nods.
“Take Savage's truck,” Prez says. “Go.”
Ten minutes later, a small plane climbs up over the meadow, wings tipping once above the string lights, and threads away between the black shoulders of the mountains.
“Should we worry?” I ask.
Wrench keeps his eyes on the wing lights until the dark takes them. “He's the best pilot in three states.”
“That's not what I asked.”
“No, honey. But it’s the best I’ve got.” And he pulls me back into the dance.
Rosie's asleep across two chairs by the cake table, yellow dress rumpled, a fistful of petals she refused to surrender still clutched tight.
Waffles lies underneath her chairs, flower crown askew, one eye opening at anyone who comes near.
Wrench crosses over, quiet for a man his size, slips off his jacket, and lays it over her shoulders.
My daughter sighs in her sleep and pulls it to her chin, and the patch on the back rises and falls over the smallest member of the High Vale Outlaws.
Wrench comes back to me and folds me into the last slow song.
“Stay?” he asks against my hair.
“Forever,” I say.
And we dance.
Read Lucky’s story in Ex-Military Biker’s Bride.