Epilogue
One Year Later
Iwake the way I’ve woken most mornings this past year, which is slowly, and warm, and held.
There was a time, a whole long season of my life, when I woke alone down a hall behind the second door, in a room someone had very kindly made up for the stranger they’d married, and I would lie there in the grey enormous quiet of a penthouse that didn’t know my name and listen to the city forty-one floors below going about its business without me.
I got very good at that kind of morning.
I had practice. I have decided, this year, that I never want to be that good at anything ever again.
Because this morning there’s an arm across me, heavy and certain, and there’s the slow warmth of him at my back, and there’s his mouth at the curve of my shoulder, unhurried, careful in the particular way he’s been careful with me for months now, as though I’m something he has been told to handle gently and has decided, privately, to handle more gently still.
He thinks I’m still half asleep. I let him think it.
I lie there in the circle of my husband and let myself be loved the way the very rich and the very lucky get loved, slowly, with the whole morning ahead and nowhere either of us has to be, and I do not cry, though there was a year I’d have cried at less than this, and I think my heart, my poor scolded much-discussed heart, has never in its life beaten quite so well as it does in the safe slow keeping of his arms.
Afterward he holds me a while longer than he needs to, which is its own kind of language, the one he learned late and speaks now better than he speaks any other, and only when the morning has properly arrived does he let me go and tell me, against my hair, that he’ll make breakfast.
He makes breakfast now. Trey Flint, who once let a cup of coffee go cold on his desk rather than spend one more second of attention on it, stands in our kitchen most mornings and makes me eggs I’m allowed to eat and fruit cut the way I like it and the good tea that still isn’t sold in this country but arrives anyway, by the case, because some things about him will never change and I’ve stopped wanting them to.
The team is fine, by the way. I should say that, since it caused us so much trouble.
The Waymakers are his, properly, cleanly, the board his own now and Raymond’s chair filled by someone who has never once gambled anything he couldn’t afford to lose.
Trey runs it the way he runs everything, which is beautifully.
He also, I have noticed, would hand the whole gleaming thing to the first person who asked if I so much as frowned at it, and that, more than any vow, is how I know.
We eat at the long table by the windows with the bridges laid out cold and far below, the same view that swallowed two mourning strangers a lifetime ago, and when I’ve finished he takes my plate and sets it aside and leans down and kisses me, slow, the kind of kiss that has a whole marriage folded up inside it.
And then my husband, the cold one, the ruthless one, the most photographed coldness in the city, gets down on one knee in our kitchen.
Not to me. Lower. He settles himself in front of the curve of me that has lately stopped being subtle about itself, the curve that has its own room being painted down the hall as we speak, the second door, the one that used to be mine, and he rests one hand against it with a tenderness that closes my throat, and he speaks to the small impossible person we were told to be so careful about and chose anyway.
“You look after your mummy in there,” he tells our son, very seriously.
“That’s your one job. And when you’re out here with the rest of us—” a pause, and I can hear the smile arriving in his voice, the rare one, the one I get to keep “—you make absolutely sure no other man gets close to her. That’s a Flint family tradition. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
I laugh. I can’t help it, it comes up out of me helpless and undignified, because of all the men in the world to set a guard on me it would be this one, the one who nearly lost me to his own jealousy and has clearly decided to start the next generation early.
He straightens, unrepentant, that warmth still sitting in his eyes where a year ago there was nothing but weather.
“Don’t forget your promise,” he says.
“I won’t.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
And I look up at my husband in the kitchen of a home that took us a year and very nearly both our hearts to build, and I give him the words I gave him once before in a judge’s chambers when I didn’t yet know what they meant, the words I have meant with everything in me every day since.
“I’m yours, Mr. Flint.”
He bends and kisses my forehead, and then my mouth, and then, because he’s who he is, the curve where our son is busy growing into his first impossible job, and when he answers me his voice is rough with the only thing he was ever truly afraid of, which was this, which was happiness, which was having something at last that he could not bear to lose.
“As am I, Mrs. Flint.”
Thank you for reading The Hockey CEO’s Rejected Wife.