Epilogue
Elizabeth
Iwas practically living at Matt’s house by December, which is a sentence I’d have bet money against a year ago.
It had happened the way the best things do, without anyone deciding it out loud.
First it was dinners. Then it was dinners that ran too late to drive home from.
Then it was a toothbrush in the cup by his sink, and a drawer he’d cleared without mentioning it, and my rain boots by his back door, and somewhere in there I’d stopped thinking of it as his house and started thinking of it as the place I went at the end of the day.
I still had my room in the little house up on the farm—still had my mother across the hall and my coffee setup on the counter and Sunday mornings that belonged to the Starling women—but most nights, now, I was here, on Alder Street, in the square white house with the too-neat yard.
Which did not stay too neat, because I got my hands on it.
The man had lived for years in that house without so much as a wreath on the door, and I’d been quietly appalled about it since the first night he cooked me spaghetti.
So I fixed it. We’d put a Christmas tree up together the weekend after Thanksgiving—Matt hauling it in through the front door swearing under his breath, me directing traffic, both of us arguing cheerfully about whether the lights went on before or after the ornaments—and it stood in the front window now, crooked at the top where neither of us could reach, strung with a mismatched collection we’d started building together.
A little tin pumpkin from the festival, a bee ornament my grandmother had given me, a truly ugly felt cardinal Becca had made him keep.
And the porch—I’d finally, gloriously gotten my hands on that sad empty porch, and it had greenery down the rail now, and a wreath on the door, and warm white lights I’d strung myself, one evening, in the cold, while Matt stood in the doorway with two mugs of cider and let me turn his bare, careful house into something that looked, unmistakably, lived in. Loved in.
We were at Matt’s house making dinner when the first snow came, right at dusk, drifting down soft and slow out of a pewter sky past the kitchen windows. He took one look outside and reached for my hand. “Come outside with me.”
“It’s freezing.”
“I know.” He was already pulling his coat around my shoulders, over my sweater, his hands lingering at the collar to close it beneath my chin. “I’ll keep you warm. Come on.”
So I went, because I have never once been able to say no to that voice, and he led me out across the patio to the edge of the bluff, to the low stone wall, and the whole valley below us was disappearing into white—snow sifting down through the last blue light, the first lamps glowing on in kitchens far below, everything gone quiet in the held-breath hush that only snow knows how to make.
Flakes caught in my hair, on my lashes. He stood behind me with his arms wrapped around me and his chin resting on top of my head, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all, and I thought that if the whole world ended right here, in this exact minute, I would have absolutely no complaints to file.
“Elizabeth.”
“Mm.”
“Turn around.”
I turned in his arms, and the look on his face stopped my heart before he ever said another word. Tender and terrified and absolutely certain, all at the same time, snow settling on his dark hair, his hands finding both of mine and holding on.
“I have loved you since before I understood what was happening to me,” he said, low, rough, each word placed with the care of a man who had clearly been rehearsing this and was wrecked by it anyway.
“You walked into my quiet life and turned every light on. You made my house a home and my days something I look forward to and my heart—” His voice caught.
He breathed, and went on. “I didn’t know I was lonely until you fixed it.
I didn’t know that I was building any of this for you until you were standing in it.
And I don’t want to spend another season of my life that isn’t yours. ”
Then he stepped back, and knelt down in the thin new snow, right there on the stone he’d laid with those same steady hands, and looked up at me through the falling white, and opened a small velvet box.
The ring glowed even in the dying light.
“Marry me,” he said, and his voice broke over it, and he let it. “Marry me, Elizabeth. Let me love you through every winter, every spring, every ordinary morning, for the rest of my life. That’s all I want. You are everything I want.”
The snow kept falling, soft and silent, and my tears were warm going down my cold face, and I couldn’t get to him fast enough.
“Yes.” I pulled him up out of the snow by both hands, or he rose to meet me, or both. “Yes, yes—”
He caught my face in his hands and kissed me, deep and slow and reverent, snow melting between us, his thumbs brushing the tears from my cheeks as he tilted my head back and kissed me again like a man who had all the time in the world now and intended to use every minute of it well.
I held onto his wrists and kissed him back with my whole heart, and the valley went on filling up with white below us, and neither of us felt the cold at all.
When he finally drew back, just far enough, he slid the ring onto my finger—his hands trembling, this steady, unshakable man, trembling—and then he pressed his lips to it, sealing it there, and looked at me with snow in his lashes and forever in his eyes.
“I promise to love you forever,” he said quietly, my hand still held against his lips. “That’s the last one I’ll ever need to make. And I will keep it every day you let me.”
“I know you will.” I laid my palm against his cheek, my ring cold and bright between us, my heart so full it ached. “That’s why I said yes. I love you too. So much.”
He wrapped me into his coat, into his arms, and we stood together at the edge of the bluff while the snow came down and the lights came on, one by one, all through the valley below—every window a small gold promise against the dark—and winter settled in soft around the two of us as if it had only ever come to tuck us in.
I used to say fall was my favorite. The beautiful endings of things letting go.
But standing there in the first snow, in the arms of the man I’m going to marry, I finally understood what all those endings had been for.
Every last one of them had been clearing the way for this.
Thank you for reading! For a free peek at Matt and Elizabeth’s Happily Ever After enjoy Autumn and Always, a short wedding story!
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