Epilogue
ANDY
Five years later…
The farmhouse settles around us like a sigh — wooden beams creaking their familiar song, porch light casting long shadows across the hardwood floors we picked out together.
Declan sleeps against my chest, two months old and still small enough to curl perfectly in the space between my ribs and shoulder. His breathing matches the rhythm of the grandfather clock in the corner, the one Jameson restored from Pete's motel when we bought our own furniture.
The TV flickers across the coffee table — the same awards ceremony I used to watch from an empty house in LA, counting down minutes until Jameson came home. If he came home.
"And the nominees for Best Director..."
I shift Declan higher, his tiny fist uncurling against my collarbone. The film they're about to announce — Jameson wrote it in his motel room five years ago, pages and pages of a man losing everything that mattered.
He showed it to me after we came home together. I cried halfway through page ten and told him he had to make it into something real. He fought me on it, said it was just therapy, just him working through his own stupidity on paper. I won that fight.
"Jameson Rivers, for 'The Distance Between Us.'"
My heart pounds against Declan's back. The camera pans to an empty seat in the audience — Jameson's empty seat — then cuts to a man in a gray suit walking toward the stage.
"Accepting on behalf of Mr. Rivers..."
Something's wrong. Jameson should be there. This is his moment, his film, his?—
I grab my phone with my free hand, thumb fumbling over his contact. Maybe something happened. Maybe there was an emergency with the theater release. Maybe?—
His ringtone cuts through the house behind me.
I freeze. Turn.
Jameson stands in the hallway, still in his tux but with the bow tie hanging loose around his neck. Hair mussed like he's been running his hands through it. He's holding his phone, watching it buzz in his palm instead of answering.
"Why are you here?" The words come out breathless. "You should be there accepting that award."
He walks to the couch, sits beside me, and leans over to press his lips to my forehead. Then he does the same to Declan's tiny head, his hand cupping our son's back carefully.
"I told you before, and I'll tell you again. You're the most important to me. And now Declan too. The award isn't going anywhere. I couldn't wait to come home."
He kisses me then, soft and sure, and I taste the promise he's kept every single day since that night at Pete's motel. Not tomorrow. Not later. Now.
THE END