31. Epilogue Noelle
Chapter thirty-one
Epilogue: Noelle
Three Years Later
Snow falls outside the kitchen window, the same slow, patient kind that used to feel like a countdown to something dangerous and now just feels like weather.
I stand at the counter with a mug of decaf, which I still haven’t gotten used to, three years of black coffee undone in nine months by a very insistent obstetrician, and watch it come down over a backyard that belongs to us, an actual deed with our names on it, four blocks from the station that used to be the only home any of us knew how to imagine.
The house still smells like cinnamon most mornings. Some habits never needed breaking.
“That’s too much garlic,” I say, without turning around, because I know exactly what Mateo’s doing at the stove without having to look.
“There is no such thing as too much garlic. That’s a myth invented by people with no ambition.”
“You said that about the last three things you’ve cooked.”
“I stand behind all of them.” A pan sizzles. “Sit down, you’re supposed to be resting.”
“I’m standing in a kitchen. It’s not exactly demanding.”
“You’re seven months pregnant standing in a kitchen. Sit.”
I sit, because arguing with Mateo about my own wellbeing has never once worked in three years and I don’t expect this to be the year it starts.
He slides a plate in front of me a few minutes later, eggs and toast and fruit cut into shapes that are technically for the toddler currently commandeering the living room but have somehow ended up on my plate instead, because apparently pregnant women also deserve pineapple shaped like a star.
“Dada, higher!”
That’s Emma, just past two, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room in fleece pajamas with reindeer on them, one small fist gripping the doorframe like she owns the building, which, functionally, she does.
Wes appears behind her a second later, on his hands and knees, halfway through the architectural undertaking of a blanket fort that has been under construction since seven this morning and shows no signs of reaching completion anytime soon.
He’s got a couch cushion balanced against one hip and the particular expression of a man engaged in serious structural engineering.
“Roof’s coming,” he tells her, entirely serious. “Structural integrity first.”
“Higher,” Emma insists.
“After the roof.”
She considers this negotiation, decides it’s acceptable, and returns to arranging a small mountain of stuffed animals inside the half-built fort with the gravity of someone furnishing a very important building.
Whichever one of them, biologically, put those eyes on her, dark and enormous and endlessly curious, she got Wes’s patience whole cloth, watching him work through a problem with the same unhurried focus she now applies to deciding exactly where each stuffed rabbit belongs.
None of us have ever needed to ask which of them fathered her. Some questions this family simply decided, early on, weren’t worth the answer.
I feel Grant’s arms come around me from behind before I hear him cross the kitchen, the way I’ve felt it a thousand mornings now and it still, every single time, does something to my chest that I’ve stopped trying to name.
“Sleep okay?” he asks, low, against my hair.
“She kicked me awake around four. I think she takes after Mateo. No respect for sleeping schedules.”
“I heard that,” Mateo says from the stove.
Grant’s hand finds my stomach, resting there the way it does most mornings now, and I put my hand over his.
We stand like that for a moment, the two of us and the third of us who hasn’t even arrived yet, while the kitchen fills with the smell of too much garlic and the living room fills with a toddler’s very specific opinions about fort architecture.
I still investigate fires. That surprises people sometimes, when they find out, like the job and the life I built afterward shouldn’t be able to coexist.
I went back to Morrison’s office after the New Year, the way I said I would, and I stayed exactly four months before I understood I didn’t want the whole caseload back, just the parts of it that mattered.
I run a smaller unit now, three investigators under me instead of a stack of files with my name alone at the top, and once a year I teach a seminar on accelerant patterns to incoming firefighters.
Grant sat in on the first one, arms crossed in the back row, and told me afterward I undersold myself by half. I’ve never once believed him, and I’ve never once stopped being glad he says it anyway.
Delaney is three years into a federal sentence that will outlast most people’s patience for remembering his name.
Marsh took the plea, testified, and is somewhere upstate serving considerably less time for considerably more honesty. I don’t think about either of them often anymore. Some cases you close and carry. That one, finally, I got to just close.
Through the window, the snow keeps falling, gentle over a street I never expected to call mine, over a house that exists because four people decided, two years ago, that the family they’d built in a burning firehouse deserved somewhere permanent to keep growing.
They asked me in this kitchen, actually, before it was fully our kitchen, back when it was still just a listing with good bones and bad wallpaper, down on one knee on a floor covered in paint samples, with Mateo filming the whole thing on his phone and narrating like a sports commentator until Wes took the phone away from him halfway through.
I said yes before he finished the question. I’d apparently been ready to say it for longer than I’d let myself admit.
Danny still comes by on Sundays, always with some story that’s grown in the retelling since the last time.
Tara brings Emma a new fire truck about once a month, which the rest of us have accepted we can’t compete with.
Rico’s eyebrow grew back years ago, and he still tells the story like it happened last week, embellished now to the point that I’m fairly sure the fire itself has become a supporting character in his own personal mythology.
The station itself stands exactly as it always has, rebuilt clean, the north wall’s new wiring holding steady through three winters now, the stockings hung every December on the mezzanine rail, one for each of us, even the ones of us who don’t sleep there anymore.
Mateo named the baby’s middle name after his brother, months before either of us knew if we were having a boy or a girl, which meant it had to work either way, and it does. Luis, if it’s a boy outright.
Louisa, if it’s a girl, which the doctor’s fairly confident it is. He told me about it quietly one night in the equipment room at the station, the same room where he first told me Luis’s name at all, and he didn’t make a speech out of it.
He just said it, and then went back to whatever he was doing, and I understood that some grief doesn’t get resolved so much as it gets folded into something new and given somewhere gentler to live.
Wes still has the letters. All three of them, plus a fourth now, one his mother sent him last December with his grandmother’s recipe for the cookies she used to make, copied out in his mother’s handwriting because the original had gone too faded to read.
He reads Emma one of the cards most nights before bed, not because she understands a word of it yet, but because some traditions aren’t really about being understood. They’re about being kept.
I think about the girl in the old photograph sometimes, still framed now, hanging in our hallway instead of hidden in an envelope, the little girl on the ambulance step in a coat four sizes too big, staring at nothing.
Emma shrieks with laughter from the living room, some triumph in the fort’s construction finally achieved, and Wes says something too quiet to catch that makes her laugh even harder.
Mateo starts singing along to whatever’s playing on the radio, off-key on purpose, the way he does every December, the way he probably will every December for the rest of all our lives.
Grant’s arms stay where they are, steady, unhurried, home.
Outside, the snow keeps falling on the street, and the house, and the family inside it, all of it quiet and warm and completely, finally, safe.
The little girl who survived the fire found her way home.
Not ready to say goodbye to Noelle, Grant, Mateo, and Wes?
Neither was I. ??
That’s why I wrote an exclusive bonus epilogue just for my readers.
Come back five Christmases later to see what life looks like for Noelle and her three firefighters now—with two little girls, one very suspicious four-year-old determined to expose Santa, and three men who are still completely obsessed with her.
And yes… once the kids are asleep, things get a little less Merry Christmas and a lot more naughty Christmas. ????
Get the FREE Bonus Epilogue here → [BONUS EPILOGUE LINK]
But don't put your Kindle down yet…
If you loved watching Noelle fall for three protective men who couldn't possibly expect her to choose between them, I have three more men waiting for you in Vegas.
Meet King, Doc, and Ghost. ??
I flew to Vegas to get married. I left with three husbands I never planned for.Long story. Very short on regrets.
King gives orders like breathing—and looks at me like I’m his to keep.Doc is steady, warm, and dangerously good with his hands.Ghost is the quiet one who figured me out before I figured out myself.
I needed a way out of the worst night of my life. They needed a PR win.It started as sixty hours, a penthouse, and a check with a lot of zeros. It was supposed to end there.
What none of us planned for? Actually falling.
Now a rival MC is circling, my life is going viral, and the only thing I know for sure is this:Sixty hours was never going to be enough.
Vegas has a rule—the house always wins.Too bad I don’t play by the rules.
And I’m done pretending I can choose.
READ FREE in Kindle Unlimited HERE
Here's a Sneak Peek of Chapter One.
Elena
“My best friend is getting married!”