Epilogue
Sage
Sunlight pours across the butcher-block like honey, warm and slow, catching in the steam that curls up from my mug.
The ocean beyond the glass is a steady shimmer, the same rhythm I hear in Leo’s breathing when he sleeps.
The apartment smells like vanilla and browned butter, and the camera light winks blue, steady as a heartbeat.
“Hey, Fire crew,” I say into the lens, voice low and easy.
“Today is a small kind of joy: lemon-ricotta pancakes for no reason at all.” I reach for the bowl, whisk catching the light as I fold the batter.
Flour dusts my knuckles. A squeeze of lemon perfumes the air.
“Tip of the day—rest your batter while your pan heats. Patience tastes better than panic.”
The little Surge pennant Leo hung over my filming corner stirs in the A/C draft. It wasn’t my idea—to make that tiny flag part of my background—but it’s perfect. That’s us now: food and ice, grit and grace, side by side like it always should’ve been.
I set a pat of butter in the skillet and listen to it sigh.
The first ladle of batter blooms into a circle; the edges set, the surface freckles with bubbles.
I talk my audience through the flip, the press, the patience.
The counter behind me is a neat parade of ingredients: honey, berries, lemon zest in a pinch bowl, a small stack of plates. My plates. Our home.
“Question of the day,” I murmur, tilting the pan as another pancake lands.
“What’s your ‘for no reason at all’ meal?
The one that reminds you you’re safe?” I smile into the lens and mean it.
I can hear the future comments already—stories about cinnamon toast and ramen with soft-boiled eggs and grandmothers who swore by extra nutmeg.
The elevator hums somewhere down the hall; our building is never truly quiet. I plate three pancakes and crown them with berries. When I reach for the honey, two arms slide around my waist, palms spreading warm over my hips like they belong there. Because they do.
“You’re supposed to be taking a day off,” Leo says against my cheek, voice rough with morning and ocean air. He’s barefoot. I don’t need to turn to know; the way he moves tells me everything. “Coach said rest. Your coach,” he adds, teasing, like I’m the one who needs managing.
“This is my version of rest,” I say, letting my head tip back to his shoulder as the camera’s red light blinks on. The ring on his finger—his ring, champion-bright—glints when he reaches past me to steal a berry. “Cooking for fun.”
“For science,” he corrects, tasting the berry like it’s a new play to memorize. His laugh is low and certain, the sound that still surprises me in how much space it fills. “You talking to your people about patience again?”
“It keeps working,” I say, and flip off the camera. The quiet that follows is soft, not empty. It feels like exhales.
He noses along my jaw, and I pretend I’m immune to it. I’m not. “Smells illegal,” he murmurs, eyeing the stack I’ve been saving for B-roll.
“Hands,” I warn, dragging a plate out of reach. “I need at least one photo before you turn this into a crime scene.”
He lifts both palms in surrender, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
The ocean catches the light behind him, a bright flash that paints the room in silver.
I catch our reflection in the glass—me in an apron, him in a washed-out Surge tee and sleep-tousled hair—and for a beat I can see the last few months layered over this morning like translucent film: games and road trips and late-night edits and lemon zest on his knuckles because he swears it makes his tea better.
I slide a pancake to a side plate and garnish it with a messy halo of berries. “Taste test?”
He leans in, steals the top one clean off the stack. “I’m strictly quality control.”
I roll my eyes, but my chest is warm, loose. Outside, waves tap the shore. Inside, the kitchen hums like it’s breathing with us. I set the camera to standby and tuck the pennant straight with a fingertip.
“Okay,” I tell the room, and him, and myself. “Let’s eat.”
Leo
The pancakes are gone. So is any chance of pretending I didn’t eat half the stack before Sage could photograph them. She’s leaned against the counter beside me, bare feet brushing mine, still in that soft gray tank that makes my brain short-circuit before coffee.
“Those were unfair,” I tell her, licking honey off my thumb. “Like, league-suspension-level unfair.”
She grins without looking up, scrolling through her footage on the camera. “Good thing you’re the comeback story of the year. I think you can survive one breakfast violation.”
“Bold of you to assume this is breakfast.” I reach for another pancake crumb, but she smacks my hand away with the spatula she still hasn’t put down. The tiny sting makes me laugh. “Okay, fine, brunch. Post-championship recovery fuel.”
Her head tilts, eyes softening. “You still can’t say it without grinning, can you?”
I don’t try to hide the smile. “Nope.”
The championship ring catches the sunlight when I move. Every time I catch the flash of it, it hits different—not just the win, but what it took to get here. The suspension. The noise. The fight back. The people who stood beside me when everything went to hell.
People like her.
Sage slides the camera aside and studies me. “You look lighter.”
“That’s because I am.” I reach for her hand, tracing my thumb along the inside of her wrist. “You have a lot to do with that.”
Her eyes flick up, smiling but quiet. “You give me too much credit.”
“Not possible.” I lean closer, pressing a kiss to her temple. “You built something out of chaos. And somehow, you made space for me inside it.”
She laughs softly, turning to face me fully. “You mean our space.” She gestures around the kitchen, at the open shelving and the framed Surge photo tucked next to her recipe cards. “You built this, remember?”
I shrug, feigning nonchalance. “Maybe I just wanted an excuse to stay close to the best chef in the city.”
“You say that like I’d ever let you leave,” she says, stepping into me, eyes gleaming with that same quiet certainty she’s had since the first night I kissed her.
And just like that, the hum of the kitchen softens again. She leans her head on my chest, and for a while, we just stand there. No games. No noise. Just us.
The sun creeps higher, painting her skin gold, and I realize that peace doesn’t look like silence—it looks like this. Her heartbeat against mine. Coffee cooling between us. A life we built from the wreckage and somehow made whole.
Sage
We eat at the counter, elbows bumping, knees finding that easy tangle under the stools like they’ve been memorizing the space between us.
The plates are warm against my wrists; the honey has gone glossy in the light.
I slide the last pancake onto Leo’s plate and he leans in, voice dropping like we’re conspirators.
"For the record," he murmurs, brushing a thumb along the edge of the pancake to steal a comet tail of syrup, "these still beat every pre-game meal I ever had."
"That’s because they’re made with love, not macros," I say, nudging his knee with mine. The line comes out teasing, but the truth of it softens the center of me. Love has its own nutrition label—quiet, stubborn, impossible to count until it’s everywhere.
Between us on the counter, my cookbook mockup sits open to a chapter called Comforts You Can Carry.
The printer sent it yesterday—half real, half promise, the pages heavy with placeholder photos and my margins full of notes.
Beside it, Leo’s tablet glows with his playbook: color-coded lines, angles and options, the language he speaks in motion.
Our worlds side by side, ink and ice, feeding each other.
He reaches for the mockup, careful with his syrupy fingers. "This photo—" He taps a draft shot of biscuits nestled in a skillet. "—needs your lemon-honey trick. The one you said tastes like winning."
"It tastes like Sunday mornings without alarms," I say, stealing a piece from his plate before he can protest. "But I’ll workshop the copy."
He snorts, then lifts his playbook with his other hand like a scale. "I’ll trade you a two-on-one breakout for a better biscuit headline."
"Deal if the headline is Don’t Panic, Just Skate," I shoot back, and he groans, which makes me grin into my coffee.
A breeze slips through the cracked balcony door, bringing salt and the faint cry of gulls.
The city’s low roar is a coastline hum beneath it all.
Leo’s ring flashes when he gestures; the glint lands on my mockup like a tiny sun.
It does something fizzy in my chest that still catches me off guard—how the pieces of our lives don’t just fit, they illuminate.
I thumb open a sticky note where I scribbled a recipe tweak at two a.m. "I might add a section on travel snacks for away games. Fuel that doesn’t feel like punishment."
"Put my name on the taste-test committee," he says, chewing. There’s a crumb at the corner of his mouth; I swipe it with my thumb and he catches my hand, kisses the pad of it like a reflex. The contact is so simple it makes my ribs go loose.
We drift into a quiet that hums, not the brittle silence of holding breath, but the warm kind that lets you hear the small sounds: the distant elevator, the soft fizz of the soda I never finished, the hush-and-drag of waves against rock. I can live a whole life inside this kind of quiet.
On the far end of the counter, a tidy stack of mail waits for me to sort.
Junk flyers and one thick, crisp envelope with the league crest embossed in navy.
I clock it without reaching. Not yet. I let the moment stretch, golden and ordinary, because I know when I pick it up it’ll pull our day into a sparkling orbit.
Leo follows my gaze and arches a brow. "Fan mail from the overlords?"
"Probably a parking ticket from the overlords," I deadpan, but the paper looks expensive, the kind that wants to be opened with a letter knife. Heat flutters low in my belly—anticipation or nerves, I’m not sure. Maybe both.
He bumps my shoulder with his. A small warmth unfurls in my chest at the casual contact. "Finish your coffee. Then we’ll see what they want from us."
Us. The word lands soft, certain. I take another slow sip and memorize the way it feels in my mouth, the way the ocean throws light across our table, the way my cookbook and his playbook touch at the corners like they were always meant to meet.
Leo
Sage’s coffee mug is still warm where she left it, a faint ring on the counter beside that league envelope.
I run a thumb over the seal—raised, official, a reminder that the world outside this penthouse still wants pieces of us.
I shouldn’t care; I’ve faced scarier things than fancy stationery.
But for once, it’s not nerves about me that make my pulse pick up. It’s what this might mean for her.
Sage comes back from rinsing dishes, humming under her breath. She looks like the morning—hair up, sunlight touching her cheekbones, a smear of flour at her wrist she hasn’t noticed yet. “You opened it without me?” she teases, grabbing a towel.
I hold it up. “Didn’t dare. Thought it might explode in confetti.”
She smirks. “That’s more your department.”
I crack the seal, careful, the paper giving that crisp sound that used to mean game-day rosters and trade announcements. But this—this one’s good news before I even finish reading it. “It’s an invite,” I say, scanning. “Charity gala. They’re calling it a ‘comeback celebration.’”
Sage pauses mid-swipe, the towel twisting between her fingers. “For you?”
I nod, then turn the page. “And for the sponsors.” I glance at the letterhead again, and there it is—her logo. Fuel Your Fire. Right next to the Surge crest. I can’t help the grin that spreads across my face. “Looks like they finally figured out we’re a package deal.”
Her hand goes to her mouth, eyes wide for half a second before she laughs. “Oh my god. They actually did it?”
“Guess your pancake diplomacy paid off.” I tug her closer, my free hand finding the small of her back. “They want us both there. You, the sponsor. Me, the redemption story. Kinda poetic, don’t you think?”
Her laugh softens into something quieter, the kind that vibrates through me instead of just around me. “I remember when you couldn’t even say the word ‘redemption’ without swearing.”
I shrug. “Guess I found better words.” My fingers toy with the edge of the letter before setting it down between us. “You realize what this means, right? You’re part of this world now. Officially.”
Sage’s gaze flicks to the balcony, the ocean beyond it, the horizon that always feels like both a finish line and a start. “I think we both built something new,” she says. “Together.”
She’s right. It’s not just about the comeback anymore—it’s about the life that came after. The kitchen that smells like cinnamon and caffeine instead of antiseptic and ice packs. The mornings that start with her voice and not an alarm.
I reach for her hand, lacing our fingers, feeling the faint tremor that always happens when she’s trying not to cry. “We should probably start thinking about what to wear,” I say, because levity is safer than everything else swelling in my chest.
She snorts, wiping at her eye with her free hand. “You own, like, one suit, Leo.”
“Yeah, but it’s lucky.”
She grins. “Then I’ll make sure it still fits.”
And in that small, perfect moment—the ocean gleaming outside, her laughter bouncing off the glass, the letter lying between us like a promise—I realize it’s not luck that got me here.
It’s her.
If Leo and Sage stole your heart, get ready—Mason and Laney’s nanny romance in Nanny for the Hockey Grump will sweep you away next.