Epilogue #3
Back to the hydrangeas. They are everywhere on this perfect late-June evening: banked along the house and exploding from the vases dotted along the tables under the white open-sided marquees and in huge blue-and-white urns along the edge of the terrace.
The lawn is strewn with fairy lights, an excellent band is playing, and my fiancée is the happiest and most radiant I have ever seen her in a short white sundress that has me positively feral.
My buddies are here: Kieran and Felix, Kieran sizing up the female guests quietly and Felix more vocally. Even by his standards, Felix is looking particularly smug today. I know I’ll regret asking him why, but I do it anyway and instantly want to punch myself in the face.
“Guess who got called in for a sit-down with Katrin this week?” he asks me with a self-satisfied grin.
I roll my eyes as Elyse smiles at him. She’s way too accommodating. “What did she say?”
“She has a sexy little project for yours truly.”
Elyse giggles. I purse my lips. This cannot be good. “Just say it already.”
He smirks. He’s enjoying this far too much. “A new member is joining and she’ll need a little… TLC. She’s high profile, if you get my drift, and she needs an induction.”
“Who?” my fiancée asks, eating right out of his sweaty, British palm.
“I’m not supposed to say.”
At this rate, I will detach my eyeballs from their sockets. “Like that’s ever stopped you.”
He looks around to check no one besides us is listening—they aren’t; he’s not that interesting—and stage-whispers, “Grace Sutton.”
Elyse gasps before clamping her hand over her mouth.
I snicker and shake my head. “You sneaky bastard.” Grace Sutton is as A-list as they come, an Emmy-award-winning actress who’s starred in the show American Royal for what must be four or five seasons now: think a Kennedy-esque family based in Newport with Succession levels of dysfunction (or Voss levels, if that’s more clarifying).
The show is fantastic, Grace Sutton is hot as hell, and she’s—
Shit. Isn’t she still dating her co-star?
“I thought she was dating Oliver Scott,” Kieran says. My point exactly. Oliver plays her on-screen husband, and they’ve been together off-screen for most of the show’s history, I believe. Even dudes like me and Kieran, who follow the tabloid press as little as humanly possible, know this.
“Apparently they’re toast,” Felix, who is really a seventy-five-year-old curtain-twitching grandma, says with glee.
“Their managers are keeping it on the down-low, because they’re filming season six and it’s good for publicity if they’re together.
But they’re not, which means poor little Grace needs someone very discreet and very hot to fuck her senseless on the side.
Maintenance, you know? She has to get it somewhere. ”
My fiancée looks like she might pass out from the scandal of this.
“But you’re not discreet,” I point out. This should be self-explanatory. “You just blabbed to us. Your stepmom would not be impressed.”
“You guys don’t count,” he says. “I’m fucking beside myself. Grace bloody Sutton! I need to book in for some manscaping next week.”
Elyse loses her shit completely at this unnecessary detail and bends over double. I rescue her champagne flute before it ends up on the ground.
“I’m ordering you a t-shirt from the Etsy shop where my brother gets his boxer briefs printed,” I tell him. “And it’ll say, She has to get it somewhere.”
On a more wholesome note, Fleur has been playing all day with my niece and nephew, Will and Ellie, who are intent on revealing every wonderful, secret corner of Fairwater to her.
After all, I hope she will spend a decent part of her childhood summers here.
Their mother is still legally married to my brother, although Charlotte and Seb are gearing up for an amicable split.
Whether my parents can be civilized about it is another question.
In a far corner of the outdoor dancefloor, Charlotte is dancing to “L-O-V-E” with her best friend from college, the woman who has held her heart for most of her adult life.
I know Elyse and I will cheer the day they can finally express their love publicly.
I only hope my brother can find the same kind of happiness.
As for us, we make our rounds of the party, ensuring that we check in with everyone.
I can barely stand to let Elyse out of my sight.
No matter what theories my parents’ friends may hold privately, it’s clear that she’s a huge hit—and how could she not be?
She’s kind and charming and genuine and beautiful.
She is a winner of hearts and minds, someone capable of binding the old guard to the new, and so ravishing in custom Carolina Herrera, hair slicked back and lips scarlet, that she would fit in anywhere.
Honestly, the only hint of snark I pick up on—and it’s the WASPiest, most passive-aggressive kind of snark—is from the women who wanted me to choose their daughters. And to them, I would say: I could never, ever have chosen better than Elyse Ward.
Probably the most terrifying pairing in the entire yard is Katrin Lawlor and Vanessa Tan, who are getting on far too well.
Elyse introduced them against my (very explicit) advice, and I’m convinced they are forming an alliance against me.
Vanessa is hitting the mint juleps hard, and I’m very glad we have no journalists here.
It says a lot about her and Katrin’s adoration of Elyse, though, that they consider her engagement to me as the ultimate endorsement.
In other words, if I’m good enough for her, then I can’t be a total douche. Maybe just a partial one.
Katrin gifted Elyse lifelong Alchemy membership as her engagement present.
Apparently, the directive came straight from Gen.
I’m still banned as a member but allowed in as Elyse’s guest “at her discretion.” Unfuckingbelievable.
(Still, it’s a win that means we can celebrate our anniversaries with pillories and stirrups and spanking benches, so I’ll take it.)
We are photographed by the party’s private photographer, who will release a couple of photos to the press.
She takes Elyse and me down the jetty and away from the party for what she hopes will be the official engagement shot against the Sound.
We stand in the shingle gazebo at the end of the jetty, and we smile for the camera.
I imagine I look like the happiest fucker alive.
After she’s left us, I wrap my beautiful fiancée up in my arms as the strains of “The Way You Look Tonight” drift down from the lawn.
We’re as good as alone down here, the Sound sparkling in the evening sunlight, and I for one am in no rush to get back to the party—especially when they’re playing a song about a guy who desperately wants to imprint the face of his love onto his mind’s eye forever.
We might just need to make this our wedding song.
“Dance with me, my darling?” I murmur against her cheek.
In answer, she winds her arms lazily around my neck and begins to sway.
I stroke the bare skin of her back as we move together, pulling away just enough to see her face: the face I was hypnotized by across a bar, the face that drove me to my lowest lows and has had made me happier than I have any right to be.
Now I see her every single night when I close my eyes. And if I need a refresher, I just open them, and she’s right there, next to me.
That’s enough—for now.
But I’m still a Voss. And I always want more.
So I won’t be entirely happy until I see her lovely features on our children’s faces, too.
THE END