Epilogue
Hannah
The thing about marrying an architect is that he has opinions about venues.
Strong ones. Specific ones. The kind delivered with the quiet certainty I fell in love with on a deck in the Outer Banks and have been simultaneously grateful for and mildly exasperated by every day since.
We looked at eleven venues. Cruz had structural notes on seven of them.
I let him have this because I am a reasonable woman and also because watching him walk through a space with his hands in his pockets and his eyes doing that focused thing is still, eighteen months in, doing something to my pulse that I’ve stopped pretending it doesn’t.
We got married on the Outer Banks.
Obviously.
The same stretch of beach, the same gold evening light, the same ocean doing its ancient indifferent beautiful work beneath a sky that had the audacity to be even more spectacular than the one we stood under the night everything shifted.
Cruz found a house to rent three down from our original ones.
The one with the bad sunroom addition, which he spent the entire week silently suffering over.
Maya and both my daughters and approximately forty people who love us descended on the Outer Banks in late September and we got married with our feet in the sand and the Atlantic loud behind the officiant and Cruz’s eyes doing the thing where they go bright in a way he doesn’t try to moderate anymore.
He cried first.
I want that on record.
Cara’s toast is the highlight of the rehearsal dinner.
She stands up with her wine glass and looks at Cruz with the specific expression of a woman who has spent eighteen months conducting what amounts to a quiet but thorough background investigation and has arrived, somewhat grudgingly, at approval.
“I had concerns,” she says, to general laughter.
“I’ll be transparent about that. My mother called me from the Outer Banks and said she’d met someone and he was thirty-four, and I— had concerns.
” She pauses. “Then I flew to Denver three months later and watched him spend forty-five minutes making sure her chair at a restaurant was angled away from a draft because he’d noticed two weeks earlier that she always seemed cold in air conditioning.
” Another pause. “The concerns resolved.”
Cruz, beside me, ducks his head.
I take his hand under the table.
“He looks at her,” Cara says, quieter now, the humor giving way to something real, “like she’s the most interesting thing in any room.
And my mother, who is the most interesting thing in any room, spent a very long time being with people who didn’t notice that.
” She raises her glass. “Welcome to the family, Cruz. We’re a lot. You seem to be handling it.”
“I love you all individually and collectively,” Cruz says, which makes Mia cry immediately.
Mia cries at everything. She gets it from me.
The ceremony is short because we both agreed that the ocean is the point and long speeches compete with it.
We wrote our own vows. Cruz insisted and I pretended to be reluctant about it, but then spent three weeks writing and rewriting mine until they were exactly right, which Cruz somehow knew and found deeply endearing.
He goes first.
“Hannah,” he says, in that direct way, the one with no performance in it.
“You came to the Outer Banks to be alone, which was extremely inconvenient for me.” Laughter from the forty people behind us.
“You handed me back a fire extinguisher like it was a stapler and went back to your book and I was… done. Immediately, completely done.” He squeezes my hands.
“I know you built the case against this. I know you stress-tested the structure and checked the load-bearing walls and looked up the outcomes data.” His voice drops slightly.
“I’m so glad the data was good. I’m so glad you drove eight hours through Nebraska.
I’m so glad you’re here.” A beat. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life being the man who’s worth the drive.
That’s my vow. Everything else is details. ”
I breathe once. Carefully.
“Your turn,” he says softly, with the grin, the full one.
I look at him —this person, specifically, exactly this one— and think about a woman who drove twenty-four hours to be alone and found instead the thing she’d stopped believing in. The thing she’d quietly, efficiently, completely convinced herself she didn’t need.
“Cruz.” My voice is steady. I’m a professional.
“I came to the Outer Banks to remember who I was without everyone else’s needs in the way.
I found out something I didn’t expect.” I pause.
“I’m better with you in the way. Specifically, only you and don’t read into that,” I add, to laughter, to his grin widening.
“You see me. The whole thing, the lawyer and the mess and the fourteen years of careful and the woman who cries when she finally lets herself have something good.” I tighten my hands around his.
“I spent a long time being enough on my own. I’m proud of that. I’m keeping it.”
I allow a long beat. “But I’m also keeping you. That’s the verdict. Final, unappealable, and frankly long overdue.”
Cruz laughs, bright and real, and the forty people behind us are doing various things with their eyes that they’d probably prefer I didn’t notice.
The officiant says the words.
Cruz kisses me before he’s supposed to —impatient, joyful, completely him— and I kiss him back because I’ve stopped building cases against things I want.
The ocean is loud.
The sky is doing the thing.
Behind us, Mia is definitely crying.
Later, the reception long and warm and full of Maya trying to take credit for all of it, we’re on the deck of our rental in the dark.
Same railing. Same stars. Same ocean.
Cruz has his sketchbook open across his knee, not drawing, just holding it. I have my feet tucked up in my chair. Our chairs, always our chairs now. And a glass of wine that I opened at whatever time I felt like it.
“Q2,” I say.
He looks over.
“You said marriage was a Q2 conversation.” I look at the water. “On the first night. On this deck.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I was being conservative.”
“You were absolutely not being conservative.”
“I was being optimistic.” He reaches over without looking and finds my hand on the armrest, fingers loosely linking the way they did on the beach the first time— unhurried, inevitable, like tide. “I knew by Q1.”
“You knew on day two.”
“Day one,” he says. “Technically.”
I look at him.
He looks back at me with the expression I keep. The certain quiet one, the one underneath the grin, the one that isn’t for the two point three million strangers who know the performed version of Cruz Jackson and have no idea about the real one.
The one who’s just mine.
“Day one,” I agree.
The stars do their ancient thing overhead.
The ocean does its ancient thing below.
And Cruz Jackson, my husband, the hazard next door, the man who slowed down when he ran past me and left wine on a railing and asked before he kissed me and cried first at our wedding…
Keeps holding my hand.
Thank you for reading Cruz and Hannah’s story!