Epilogue
Four hummingbirds fight over the feeder this morning, and the smallest one keeps winning.
Garrett hung it from the porch eave in March, drove the hook into the beam with a single palm strike while I stood behind him describing Abuela's garden in Tucson.
The cracked tile patio, the jasmine growing through the fence, the old glass feeder she refilled every Sunday with sugar water she boiled on the stove.
I mixed the sugar water last night. One cup sugar, four cups water, boiled and cooled, the same ratio Abuela used.
The hummingbirds arrived in April. Two at first, then five, and now they rotate through in shifts, emerald-throated and copper-bellied, their wings blurring the air into a low thrum I can hear from the kitchen.
The smallest one, a female with a white breast, guards the front port like she owns it.
She dive-bombs the males when they try to drink.
I've named her Valeria, after my aunt, it keeps me entertained every morning while I drink my coffee on the porch.
June in Nightfall Cove turns the clearing into a place I wouldn't have recognized six months ago.
Garrett's garden stretches along the south side of the cabin, rows he tilled by hand in April and planted in May: tomatoes tied to wooden stakes, basil he pinches back every few days so the leaves stay fat, peppers hot enough that I made the mistake of rubbing my eye after slicing one and spent twenty minutes at the sink while he stood behind me with a wet cloth and a purr that shook with the effort of not laughing.
The cabin changed around us in small ways.
A second chair on the porch, Adirondack, wide enough for his frame, and a smaller one beside it that he built from the same wood so they match.
Hooks by the front door hold my jacket next to his cut.
A bookshelf in the bedroom carries his Rumi and Neruda on the top shelf and my nursing textbooks and romance novels on the bottom two.
My fingers find the pendant at my collarbone.
The horn—dark, curved, smooth—sits in a silver setting a jeweler in Portland crafted while Garrett stood in the corner of the shop and watched the man work with an expression that made the jeweler's fingers shake.
The chain is fine, almost invisible, and the horn rests in the hollow of my throat where anyone can see it.
The weight of it against my skin has become part of my body, the same way my heartbeat is part of my body—constant, present, mine.
The gap on Garrett's right horn has smoothed over the months.
The edges rounded, the raw spot where he filed the piece away no longer rough under my fingers.
But the gap remains. He catches me touching the pendant and the purr kicks in before he can stop it, rolling through the floorboards, vibrating the coffee in my mug, a sound that used to humiliate him and now leaks out of his chest a dozen times a day because he's stopped trying to hold it back.
The sign above the door reads NIGHTFALL AESTHETICS—ALL SPECIES WELCOME.
Construction started in April. A converted retail space on Main Street, wedged between Raven's Mystic Moon and the hardware store, small enough that I can stand in the center and touch both treatment room doors if I stretch.
Two rooms. A consultation area with a chair Jess found at a secondhand shop in Coos Bay.
A reception desk Garrett built from reclaimed wood, salvaged beams from a barn outside town, sanded and joined and sealed until the surface gleams, his hands moving over the grain with the same precision he uses on his carvings.
I'm booked through August.
My first client walked through the door on opening day, and it took me a full five seconds to process that Betty, the woman who'd fed half of Nightfall Cove from her diner counter, stood in my reception area with her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and her purse clutched in both hands.
"If you can get rid of these crow's feet," she said, pointing at her temples, "I'll name my next pie after you."
I did a consultation, explained the options, treated her with a conservative approach she approved with a nod and a comment about how her sister in Medford paid triple. She left with an ice pack, a follow-up appointment and a promise to bring pie.
A few days later, she brought the pie. Cherry. It's called The Nina.
My second client drove an hour and a half from the next town over.
A young orc woman, early twenties, with tusk scarring along her jawline, the rough, keloid tissue that forms where tusks press against the skin during growth surges.
She'd never had anyone look at it with anything but pity or disgust. A dermatologist in Portland told her it was cosmetic and declined to treat it.
Her GP referred her to a specialist who never returned her call.
I pulled up her chart, examined the scarring, and explained the treatment plan.
Microneedling first, then a targeted resurfacing protocol I'd adapted from a technique used on burn patients, modified for orc dermal density.
Sliding scale fee because she drove ninety minutes and paid for gas she couldn't afford.
She cried. Not from the treatment. From being touched by someone who didn't flinch. Who didn't treat her scarring like a condition, a species problem, an unfortunate side effect of being born with tusks in a world built for humans.
I handed her a tissue, booked her follow-up and charged her forty percent of my standard rate and wrote the difference off against the quarterly projections.
The numbers work. They're not Houston numbers, not the high-volume, affluent-client, rapid-growth numbers I spent two years building toward.
They're Nightfall Cove numbers. Smaller margin, fuller waiting room, patients who bring me produce from their gardens and name a pie after me and referrals from communities that have never had a provider who would touch them.
Nora draws my blood. A routine panel, the same labs I run on myself every quarter because I'm a nurse and nurses are the worst patients and the best self-monitors.
Then she stops.
She's looking at the rapid screening results from the point-of-care panel, the ones that process in minutes, the metabolic markers.
Her eyes lift from the readout to my face.
My hand moves to my stomach before my brain catches up.
Nora's hand stops moving. She reads the printout again, slower, and when she looks up her face has changed.
"Nina."
"I see it."
"You're—"
"I see it, Nora."
I sit on the exam table in my clinic with my hand flat against my abdomen, the paper crinkling under me and my pulse hammering in my ears.
My brain runs the timeline on its own. Dates, timing, the last period I logged in my tracking app, the weeks that line up with a night in the cabin when neither of us thought about anything except each other.
Nora sets the printout on the counter and leaves the room without another word. She closes the door with a soft click, and I sit in the silence and press my palm harder against my belly and breathe.
The drive to the cabin has never felt this long. Eventually the gravel crunches under my tires and I see the hummingbird feeder swinging from the porch eave. Garrett kneels in the garden with his back to the driveway.
Seedlings. A row of them, the starts he picked up at the nursery in town last week, tender green shoots cradled in his hands while he transfers them into the soil.
His fingers work around the root balls with a delicacy that shouldn't be possible for hands that size, each plant settled into its hole, the dirt pressed firm around the base.
My door opens and shuts, my boots hit the gravel but he doesn't look up. He heard me pull in. He always hears me. But the seedlings need planting and he'll finish what he started because that's who he is. Steady, deliberate, present in whatever he's doing.
I stand at the edge of the garden. My shadow falls across the row he's planting and he pauses. His head lifts.
His eyes find mine. Brown, deep-set, the lines around them softer than they used to be, the permanent tension between his brows eased into the face of a man who sleeps through the night now.
Dirt streaks his forearms. A smear of soil marks his jaw where he wiped his face.
The sun catches the gap on his right horn.
I reach for his hand. His fingers close around mine, dirt-warm, engulfing, and I lift it and press his palm flat against my belly.
He goes still.
His eyes change. I've seen him angry, scared, shut down, gentle. I've never seen this. His whole face breaks open and what comes through is raw and too big for his expression to hold.
His hand covers my entire belly. His fingers spread, spanning hip to hip, the heat of his palm soaking through my shirt and into my skin. I watch his face break open.
He leans forward. His forehead presses against my stomach, the weight of his skull resting against me, his horns curving up on either side of my body, and the purr starts.
Deeper than I've ever heard it. A low vibration that rolls up through the soles of my boots from the ground itself, as if the sound travels through his knees and into the earth before it reaches me.
I feel it in my spine. In the base of my skull.
In the place below my navel where a cluster of cells that has already begun the work of becoming a person.
He stays there, on his knees in the garden with his forehead against me, purring against the life we made together.
My fingers trace the curve of his right horn.
My other hand rests on the back of his neck.
The sun warms my shoulders through my scrub top and the garden smells like basil, turned earth and him.
Woodsmoke, leather, the clean mineral scent of his skin that I breathe in every night with my face pressed against his chest.
The tears come, and I let them fall.
I came to Nightfall Cove because my car hit a deer and my apartment flooded and a minotaur who doesn't talk carried me out of a ditch in the rain.
I stayed because he carved me a bird and cooked me breakfast and let me touch the parts of him nobody else had ever been allowed near.
None of it followed the plan. The plan can go to hell.
I stayed. For the first time in years, I stayed.