Epilogue
Sloane
New Year’s morning, the Raven House looks like a crime scene a fun crime committed.
There’s a folding table on its side in the front room, a boot on the mantel that belongs to no one anyone can name, and a truly upsetting amount of glitter, which is Margo’s fault, because glitter is always Margo’s fault.
The whole house is asleep. I’m not, because I’m never, because some people wake at six no matter how the year turns over — and this one turned over with Beau’s mouth on mine and Cash detonating something in the backyard that was almost certainly illegal, and now it’s morning and I’m the only one vertical.
I make coffee in a kitchen I live in now.
That’s the sentence I keep turning over while the machine does its work.
I live here. Not the room over Margaret’s — I kept that, because some habits you retire slow.
Not until the Sailmaker’s fixed; the Sailmaker’s been fixed for weeks, and I didn’t move back, and nobody made me explain it.
Here. My coat’s on the hook beside Beau’s.
The coconut shampoo’s in the shower, the one Cash keeps threatening to drink.
There’s a shelf in the front room with my books on it, between a trophy and a framed photo of the four of them looking criminally young, and Beau gave me the whole case and said he doesn’t read them so they might as well be mine, which is the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me, and I’m never telling him so.
My mug’s back in the rotation, too. The good one, with the chip, that somehow nobody used the whole time I was gone — I found it shoved to the back of the cabinet, clean, waiting.
I didn’t ask. Wyatt didn’t explain. He just took it down my first morning back and handed it to me like it had been holding my spot.
They all do versions of that. Cash saves me the chair with the working springs and parks himself on the broken one like he prefers it.
Wyatt makes too much breakfast and calls it habit.
Theo doesn’t do anything, which is how Theo communicates; he simply stopped scowling at me sometime in December, which from Theo is a ticker-tape parade.
I’m two sips in when the stairs creak, and Margo comes down them.
Heels in one hand. Last night’s dress. Her hair, which is a discipline Margo does not permit to fail, is doing something it was not engineered to do. She’s coming down from the third floor, and there is nothing on the third floor but Theo Mercer’s room.
She sees me. She stops on the landing like she’s walked into glass.
“Don’t,” she says, before I’ve said a word, before I’ve done anything but hold my chipped mug. “Whatever you’re about to do — don’t.”
“I was going to offer you coffee.”
She comes down the rest of the stairs at a careful, dignified pace that fools exactly neither of us, sets her heels on the counter, and accepts the mug I pour her with the face of a woman accepting surrender terms. Margo Ashby is never not put together.
She irons things I didn’t know could be ironed.
Right now she’s put together so hard it’s splitting at the seams, and I know that particular over-correction from the inside — it’s the face you wear when your insides are doing something your outside hasn’t signed off on.
“It’s not a thing,” she says into the coffee.
“Okay.”
“It’s the opposite of a thing. It’s New Year’s.
People do. It’s practically tradition. It means nothing.
” She takes a sip too hot, the exact way I do, which I clock and file to think about later.
“It’s Theo. You understand. Nothing happens with Theo, Theo is a wall with tattoos, last night was a clerical error. A one-time, isolated, clerical error.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re saying it with your entire face.”
“This is my regular face.”
I don’t push, because I know what it is to come down a staircase you don’t want clocked, to leave a room before the room can mean something.
I know the choreography from the inside out.
So I do the only kind thing on the menu, which is hand her the cover she’s already reaching for.
“There’s a back way through the mudroom.
Comes out by the side gate. Nobody’s up to see. ”
She looks at me, and for one second the put-together drops all the way down, and there’s just a girl in last night’s dress holding a stranger’s coffee, and she says, quieter, “Thank you,” and means something other than the coffee.
“It means nothing,” she says again at the mudroom door, mostly to herself.
“Sure.” And then, because I can’t entirely help it, because Bella did it for me once and it turned out to matter more than I wanted: “Margo. The ones that really mean nothing don’t usually need three sentences of defense.”
She doesn’t answer that. She goes out the side gate into the cold with her heels in her hand and her chin level, and I let her, and I rinse her mug, and I keep her secret — which is apparently a business I’m in now, keeping people, holding their doors. New, for me. I’m getting the hang of it.
My phone goes off on the counter, face up, where I leave it these days. Danny. New Year’s, not a Wednesday, which means he’s making an exception, and Danny does not make exceptions, which means he wanted to.
“Still alive?”
“Still alive.” And then, because the whole point of a new year is the new thing: “I’m good, Danny. Actually good. I moved in with him. The room over the shop’s just for show now.”
A silence with an ocean in it. Then, and I can hear it across every mile, the smile: “Yeah? He good to you?”
“Ask him yourself.” Because Beau’s in the doorway — has been, I realize, for a minute, in sweats and the sling, hair doing its thing, watching me tell my brother the truth in the middle of his kitchen with the phone face up.
He doesn’t perform anything about it. He just looks at me like looking at me is a habit he has no plans to break.
I put it on speaker and set the phone on the counter between us, which I would not have done in October — which I would not have done at all, because in October I kept Danny in one pocket and Beau in another and never let them into the same room.
Beau says, “Hey, man,” and Danny does the thing where he pretends to run an interrogation, and Beau answers every question straight, no captain in any of it, and somewhere in there Danny asks, “You let her have the good chair?” and Beau says, “She fought Cash for it and won. I just watched,” and my brother laughs in another country.
I stand in a kitchen that’s mine, drinking coffee too hot on purpose, with no secrets in any of my pockets, and I genuinely do not know what to do with how little I’m bracing for.
After we hang up, Beau comes the rest of the way in and gets his good arm around me from behind, careful, chin on the top of my head.
“PT guy says I’m ahead of schedule.” Into my hair.
“Cleared by August if I keep at it. Full go for senior season.” He says it easy, no need under it, which is how I know he means it.
“Whole year of it still in front of me. I keep waiting to feel robbed about the junior season, and it just doesn’t come. Weird.”
“You’re going to be insufferable on the ice.”
“I’m going to be incredible on the ice. There’s a difference, and you’ll learn it.
” His arm tightens, careful of nothing, because I’m the safe side.
Then, quieter, the late way he arrives at things, feeling it a second before he can say it: “You came back when you were ready. That’s the part I keep coming at, when I can’t sleep.
I didn’t talk you into it. I didn’t wait you down.
You lost Yale and got cornered by every ghost you own and you decided, on your own, in a plastic chair, that you’d stay.
Nobody made you. That’s the thing I get to keep for good. You picked it too.”
I don’t say anything for a second, because he’s right, and because the true ones still land somewhere I never got around to armoring.
“Don’t narrate me,” I say, finally, which is how I say the other thing.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He’s smiling into my hair. I can feel it land.
We take our coffee out to the porch, because the porch is where this house says the true things, and it’s cold enough that the steam comes off the mugs and the snow from two nights ago is still clean along the rail and the whole town is sleeping off the year.
Beau sits. I sit next to him, close, on his good side, and I don’t catalogue the exits.
I notice that I don’t. There are two doors off this porch and a whole quiet street past the steps, and a year ago I’d have had every one of them mapped before I sat down, the way you do when staying has never once been the safe thing.
I’m just sitting. On a porch, on the first morning of the year, next to the thing I picked out loud, with no train to run for and no name on a door I’m watching and no speech loaded in the chamber in case I have to go.
My phone buzzes once more. Margaret. I told you he was worth the trouble. No question mark. She doesn’t use them. Neither do I, so I send back the only true thing there is: You did.
He sets his mug on the rail. Then he does the slow thing, the one that still undoes me — two fingers under my chin, turning my face up to his like he has all the time anyone has ever been given. The sling’s in the way. He works around it. He always works around it.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“I had a whole speech.” His thumb moves once along my jaw. “Cash helped me write it, which should tell you how it went.”
“I don’t want the speech.”
“I know.” A breath — the late way he arrives at things, the truth landing a beat behind the wanting to say it.
“So here’s the part that was mine. I’m going to keep showing up.
Every Wednesday, every season, every bad day you try to manage alone before you remember you don’t have to.
You don’t have to earn a minute of it. That’s the whole speech. The rest was Cash.”
There’s a sentence I’ve spent my whole life keeping behind my teeth — the one that costs more than any other, the one I’ve said to him exactly once and then guarded ever since, like saying it twice might use it up.
I look at him on this porch in the cold, with his wrecked hair and his bad shoulder and the year turning over clean behind him, and I find I don’t want to guard it anymore.
I find I want to spend it. On him. Recklessly, and on purpose.
“I love you.” Plain. Whole. No floor going out from under it, no body bracing for the bill. Just the true thing, in a complete sentence, while looking at the person I’m saying it to. “That’s not a speech either. It’s just the fact.”
Something goes through his face that I’m going to keep for the rest of my life. He doesn’t perform it. He never performs the ones that matter.
“Yeah,” he says, rough. “Yeah. That’s the fact.”
He kisses me — careful of the coffee, careless of the rest — and it isn’t the studio and it isn’t for anyone but us. The cold can keep. I let it.
Beau bumps his knee against mine. The sun’s coming up over somebody’s gutter, doing nothing special, doing it beautifully.
“Happy New Year, Sloane.”
“Happy New Year.” And I put my head on the shoulder that works, and for the first time in my whole life, in a place I could leave, I stay because I want to.
The End