Epilogue
Az
Three Years After June’s Birth
The dahlia fields are gold and pink in the sunset light, and I’m about to marry my husband again.
The court dates are behind us now. Cody and Brynn are serving prison sentences for what they did.
Diane pleaded guilty to her part in the plan.
I keep the no-contact paperwork in a drawer with the things I hope never to need, and I have no intention of answering her letters.
For once, the end of a conversation with my mother belongs to me.
June tugs on my dress. “Mama, mama, mama.”
“What, baby?”
“I don’t wanna drop the flowers.”
I crouch down, mindful of the white fabric puddling around me. “Why not?”
“They’re pretty.” She clutches the basket to her chest. She’s three years old and has her father’s stubborn jaw, and right now her eyes are filling with tears. “If I drop them, they’ll get dirty.”
“That’s the point, sweetheart. You drop them on the ground so Mama and Daddy can walk on them.”
“But they’ll get smushed.”
I look up at Lupe, who is standing at the makeshift altar in a dress she swore she’d never wear, holding the officiant’s notes she got certified for “out of spite” after the county clerk told her she couldn’t.
“Help me,” I mouth.
Lupe shrugs. “She’s your kid.”
“She’s being stubborn.”
“She’s three.”
“She’s being stubborn and three.”
“Wonder where she gets that from.” Lupe’s eyes flick past me, and her mouth twitches. “The goat’s ready.”
I turn around. Elliot, the goat, not my husband, is wearing a bow tie.
A tiny, ridiculous bow tie that Mateo spent twenty minutes tying this morning while Elliot tried to eat his shoelaces.
He’s standing next to the row of chairs with a look of profound dignity that suggests he knows exactly how absurd this is and has chosen to embrace it anyway.
“Mama, the goat is wearing clothes.”
“Yes, baby. Because this is a wedding.”
“Does the goat know he’s at a wedding?”
“The goat has been to more of our important moments than most people,” I say. “He earned the bow tie.”
June considers this. Then nods. Then drops the basket.
“Wait-” I reach for it, but she’s already running, tiny legs pumping, heading straight for Elliot the goat.
“GOAT! GOAT WITH CLOTHES!”
“Well,” says a voice behind me, “this is going about as well as expected.”
I turn, and there’s Eli. My husband. My almost-again-husband.
He’s wearing a suit that looks alarmingly clean for a man standing on a flower farm, and his hair refusing to stay flat no matter how much product he uses, and he’s looking at our daughter chase a goat through the dahlia rows like this is exactly the wedding he always wanted.
“You’re not supposed to see me before the ceremony,” I say.
“We’ve been married for eight years. I think we’re past superstition.”
“Seven.”
“Eight. Five years before all that trouble, three more since June was born.” He grins. “I counted.”
“You’re thirty-five. Your math is suspect.”
“I’m thirty-six. My birthday was last month.” He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “You gave me a card that said ‘Happy birthday, old man’ and made June help you frost a cake that said ‘Dad is ancient.’“
“It was chocolate. You liked it.”
“I loved it.” He kisses my forehead. “I love you. I love our weird kid who won’t drop the flowers. I love our judgmental goat.”
“Lupe’s waiting.”
“Right.” He takes my hand. “Let’s go.”
June makes it all the way down the aisle without dropping a single petal. She’s concentrating so hard her tongue is sticking out, and when she reaches us, she looks up at Eli with pure triumph, green eyes shining, my eyes, the color she grew into after all.
“I did it, Daddy.”
“You did, baby. Good job.”
Elliot the goat bleats his agreement from where Mateo, twenty now and trying very hard to look dignified, has him corralled near the arbor after rescuing June’s basket. The bow tie was my idea. The goat was Eli’s.
Lupe clears her throat. “If the livestock portion of the ceremony is concluded?”
“Continue,” Eli says magnanimously.
“I’m only doing this because I got ordained out of spite,” Lupe announces to the assembled guests, “and I’m not wasting it.”
The laughter helps. My hands are shaking.
I go first.
“I choose you,” I say. “I choose you knowing exactly who you are, the mess and the music and the three AM phone calls. I choose honesty over comfort. I choose you.”
He’s already crying. I told him he’d cry.
“I had this whole thing planned,” he says, voice cracking. “About showing up. About asking instead of assuming. About making room for who you actually are instead of who I thought you should be.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“It was longer. There were bullet points.”
“Eli.”
He takes my hands. “I will show up. Every morning, every fight, every hospital waiting room. I will ask before I fix. I will make room.” He swallows hard. “And I will never, ever make you doubt that you’re the only one I want.”
Roz is sobbing. Hank is pretending he’s not. June is trying to feed Elliot flowers from her basket.
“Any objections?” Lupe asks. “No? Fantastic.”
Lupe pronounces us married with a look on her face that suggests she can’t believe she went through all that paperwork for this, and Eli kisses me, and June yells “EW GROSS” from her spot next to the goat, and somewhere in the crowd I hear Roz crying and Hank shushing her and Abbie whooping.
***
The reception is loud. Eli’s band is playing, acoustic stuff, nothing too rowdy, and the barn we converted last year is full of flowers and fairy lights and people I love.
Dahlia & Thorn runs out of the barn now.
Fran’s idea: why pay Beverly Hills rent when I own the dirt?
We do weddings all over the state, and the flowers travel farther than I have to.
And Eli’s been touring. Four weeks a year, one leg, carefully scheduled around June’s preschool and my busy season. We plan it together. Every show. Every trip. No more decisions made without me.
There’s a seat taped at every venue. AZ.
Even when I’m not there. Even when I’m here, at the farm, putting June to bed and listening to the concert through my phone.
He plays Doorstep every night, and every night he dedicates it to me, and every night I cry a little, alone in our bedroom, and I don’t mind at all.
“Hey.” Eli appears beside me. “Dance?”
“There’s no dance floor.”
“There’s a field. Close enough.” He takes my hand. “Come on.”
He leads me out of the barn, past the last row of chairs, into the space between the dahlia rows where the grass is soft and the sunset is spilling orange across the sky. The music from the barn is faint now. Just a murmur.
“This is where I walked,” he says. “Bunkhouse nights. Before you let me back in.”
“I remember.”
“I used to pace out here at night and think about all the things I wanted to say to you.” He pulls me closer. Starts to sway. “I had whole speeches. Apologies. Promises. None of them were good enough.”
“You said them anyway.”
“Yeah, well. I’m not known for my impulse control.” He spins me, slow and easy. “This is better, though. Having you here. Actually dancing instead of just imagining it.”
“Eli.”
“Hmm?”
“Shut up and dance with me.”
He laughs. Pulls me in. Rests his chin on the top of my head.
We dance. The band plays something slow, and I let myself sink into him, my forehead against his shoulder, his hand warm on the small of my back.
June is already asleep in Roz’s arms, exhausted from flower girl duties.
The reception carries on in the barn, laughter, clinking glasses, someone telling an embarrassing story about Eli’s early gigs.
I pull back. Take his hand.
“Come with me.”
I lead him past the last row of dahlias, along the beds Grandma June planted sixty years ago. The music fades to a murmur. The stars are coming out.
“Az.” He’s smiling, curious. “Where are we going?”
“Here.”
I stop at the far end of the rows, where the last beds run up against the old oak tree. Far enough that no one can see us. Close enough that I can still hear the party.
I pull him down and kiss him.
He laughs against my mouth. “We have guests.”
“They can wait.”
His hands find my waist, pull me closer. The wedding dress is ridiculous, too much fabric, too many buttons, but he’s looking at me like I’m wearing nothing at all.
He kisses me again, deeper this time, and I laugh into it because we are married twice over and still sneaking into the dahlia rows like teenagers who can’t wait for the barn to clear.
“We have guests,” he repeats, already losing the argument with himself, hands sliding over the ridiculous architecture of my wedding dress, buttons, lace, enough fabric to smuggle a goat.
“They have cake and acoustic covers and Elliot wearing a bow tie he tried to eat.” I back him between two tall rows of Café au Lait until the blooms close over our heads in a private pink-cream tunnel that smells like earth and celebration.
Music from the reception is a murmur under stars.
Fairy lights are a rumor through stems. June’s still out cold on Roz’s lap under the arbor, fist in her mouth, which means for ten stolen minutes these rows are adults-only and ours.
“I want you. Quick. Laughing. Right here among the flowers that started everything. Then we go back looking innocent and fail spectacularly.”
“Az, your dress, the guests, Lupe will murder us with the officiant notes-”
“The dress has a lot of fabric for a reason. Be creative, be filthy, be quiet-adjacent. Treat it like a song with a time limit.”
His eyes go bright with the specific derangement of a man who wrote Doorstep and still gets hard about dahlias and front-row promises. “Turn around. Hands on the stake. I’ll hold the skirt like I’m saving a national treasure.”