Epilogue
NOVA
It’s a beautiful day for a carnival. The sky is a picture-perfect shade of blue, not a cloud in sight, the sun shining high overhead. All around me are the sounds of kids playing, laughter, music, and the delighted shrieks from the ride section on the other side of the field.
And my husband is holding my hand.
“Smells good, doesn’t it?” Lawson asks, nodding toward the food booths. “Nothing like the scent of greasy carnival food.”
He’s trying to tease me—Lawson seems to love nothing more than to give me a hard time about my “rabbit food” healthy eating.
Of course, that doesn’t stop him from inhaling the Impossible Burgers I make him at least once a week.
He’ll never admit it, but I know he likes them better than the real meat ones.
“Vegans can eat churros, you know,” I tell him.
He smiles down at me. “I actually did a little recon while you, Ellie and Jules were shopping at the craft vendors,” he tells me. “There’s an Indian food truck over there. Lots of vegan options.”
Warmth spreads through my chest. My big, bad Barlowe boy is way more thoughtful than anyone would guess. He’s always doing stuff like that; sweet, everyday things to show me that he’s thinking about me all the time, that he wants to make me happy in ways both big and small.
It still shocks me, sometimes, how much I love this man.
“Aunt Nova! Uncle Lawson!” a voice calls, and we turn to see Lucas running toward us, a huge, misshapen, bright orange stuffed toy clutched under his arm. “Look at what I won!”
“Holy shit, dude!” Lawson says, and I smack his arm. He pulls out a dollar for his nephew and hands it over. “You won that?” He shoots me a quick, questioning look, clearly as uncertain as I am to the identity of the stuffed toy.
“On the basketball shooting game,” Lucas says, in that trying-to-be-cool voice he always uses when he wants to impress his uncles. “I shot four baskets in a row!”
“Amazing,” I tell him, ruffling his hair. He grins up at me and my heart gives a squeeze. He recently lost a front tooth up top and it’s almost painfully cute.
“Lucas, you can’t run off like that,” Ellie says, hurrying up to us as best she can in her condition, breathing hard.
“Yeah, buddy,” Jonah says, slipping an arm around his heavily pregnant wife. “You know it’s hard for mom to keep up right now.”
“But I could see Aunt Nova and Uncle Lawson right over here. I wasn’t talking to any strangers.”
I feel Lawson’s gaze on me as I watch the parents arguing with their kid. He has a soft, knowing look in his eyes and I duck my head, sheepish. We’ve been married for more than 6 months, but he knows it still makes me ridiculously happy to hear Lucas call me Aunt.
Being a part of a family is so much better than I ever could have imagined.
“What’s everyone doing standing around?” Sawyer asks, joining our little circle with Nick and Julianna. “I thought we were hitting the Skee-ball next.”
“Lucas was just showing off his kick-ass prize,” Lawson says. Of course, Nick and Sawyer have to do the whole bro-high-five thing to hype the kid up all over again, even though none of us have any idea what it is. Lucas looks beyond pleased with himself.
“An elephant?” Lawson whispers in my ear.
“The tail is way too big,” I reply.
“I thought maybe a beaver,” Sawyer says in an undertone. “But it kind of looks like it has a horn?”
“It’s demented, whatever it is,” Lawson says, and I have to cough to cover my laughter.
“We were actually thinking about hitting up the petting zoo first,” Ellie is saying. “It’s getting late, and they don’t stay open much longer.”
“Petting zoo it is,” Julianna says, slipping her arm through Nick’s.
“I can almost smell the goat shit from here,” he mutters, too quiet for Lucas to hear.
We set off across the fairgrounds in a big group. Only Mac is missing, since he stayed back in Solitude to cover at the bar.
I used to feel a bit awkward, when the whole family was together like this.
Not because anyone was rude or anything—Lawson’s brothers and the girls couldn’t have been more welcoming.
It was just so different from anything I’d ever been a part of.
An actual family, who bicker and laugh and talk over each other.
But it didn’t take long for me to feel more relaxed around them. Julianna seemed to make it her mission to include me in everything. Before I knew it, I was having girls’ nights with her, Ellie, and Jules’ best friend Arden. I’d never really had girlfriends before—now I have sisters.
And not just symbolically. No, Ellie and Jules are the legal kind of sisters.
The kind I got from standing next to Lawson in front of an Elvis impersonator in Vegas two months after the fire, saying vows that would tie us together forever.
We’d talked about having a proper wedding in Solitude, planning something that required flowers and guest lists and formal clothes.
But in the end, neither of us wanted to wait another minute to make things official.
Besides, this was more our style—I walked down the aisle to classic rock, we went and got inked with ring tattoos right after, and ended the night eating dim sum in our bathrobes in a swanky suite on the strip.
It was the best night of my life. Though, if I’m honest, most nights with Lawson have felt like the best. I look up at him now and find him looking right back, a soft smile on his face.
“You look happy,” he says.
I shrug. “I told you that I love carnivals.”
It turns out Nick wasn’t exaggerating about the smell of goat shit. It hits me before we even reach the pens, so strong that I stop in my tracks, my stomach lurching.
“You okay?” Lawson says, immediately noticing my reaction.
“Fine,” I say, trying not to breathe through my nose. I really feel like I might puke.
“Is it the animals?” My husband sounds vaguely panicked, like me being in any kind of discomfort is terrifying to him. “Is it making you feel bad because they’re in cages?”
I mean, I don’t love to see animals in cages, but I can acknowledge that the goats and horses are being treated very well in their open-air pens with plenty of room and lots of kids eager to spoil them with their little buckets of pellets.
No, my aversion to this section of the fair is not quite what he’s assuming.
“I feel a little nauseous,” I tell him. “Maybe I should walk around for a bit instead?”
Ellie catches my gaze and I can see a flash of understanding in her eyes. I have to look away before I grin in response—or do something really embarrassing like burst into tears.
This is not how I wanted to tell Lawson my news.
“Of course,” he’s saying, already starting to pull me away from the pens. “Let’s get you something to drink.”
We find a vendor selling water bottles and I’m relieved we don’t have to go over to where the food trucks are.
Now that my stomach has been set off, I’m not so sure the smell of fried foods will be as welcome as it was earlier.
Instead, we walk around with our water, Lawson shooting me worried little glances every few minutes.
I’m not doing much to soothe his worries. I’m too on edge, my heart pounding with anticipation, to do a convincing job of assuring him I’m all right.
I’d planned to do this later in the evening.
I figured I’d get him alone at some point once the sun set and bring him over to the tree where he’d waited for me that first night, when I had watched him while shutting down the tattoo booth and knew, deep in my gut, that I was going to follow wherever he led me.
That tree seemed like the right place to tell him the news.
But now, I’m not so sure I can wait that long.
“What do you say?” he asks, startling me out of my thoughts. I look up to see him smirking down at me, his eyebrows giving a little waggle. That’s when I realize where we are—the hot air balloon.
“I’ve got a twenty,” he continues. “We could bribe the attendant again. Get some extra time at the top.”
“We can’t,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper.
His eyebrows come down. “Are you still not feeling—”
“We can’t, because I’m not allowed to ride that. At least, that’s what the sign says.”
He looks over at the sign outside the ride’s line, confusion furrowing his brow. “Why wouldn’t you be allowed to ride it?”
My heart is pounding so hard I can barely hear myself think.
“Look at number four,” I say. I watch his face as his eyes scan the numbered rules, see the exact moment he reads the fourth line.
His expression shifts, confusion bleeding into shock, then disbelief, then shock again.
By the time he turns to face me, his eyes are huge, his face nearly white.
“Nova?” he asks, voice shaking.
I’m already crying as I reach for his hands, bringing them to my stomach. “They don’t let pregnant women ride that thing.”
He stares at me for so long I wonder if maybe he’s gone into shock. Then all of a sudden, his face breaks out into the most beautiful, most joyful smile I’ve ever seen. “Are you serious?”
I nod, laughing, still crying. “I took a test yesterday. Actually, I took about six tests. I couldn’t quite believe—”
My voice cuts off in a squeal when he grabs me and pulls me into his arms, my feet leaving the ground as he spins me around. “Oh my God,” he croaks into my ear. “Oh my God, Nova.”
“I know,” I laugh. “It’s insane.”
We hadn’t been planning this. I was on the pill. But last month, Linc’s husband, Jim, had needed gallbladder surgery, leaving me to manage the shop and cover his clients for a week. It had all been so busy and stressful that I’d forgotten a pill. Or maybe a couple pills.
And now here we are.
“Are you happy?” I ask, heart in my throat.
He pulls back enough to look at me, his expression incredulous. “Are you kidding me? This is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard!” And then he smiles at me so big that my heart actually aches with the joy of it.