Epilogue
Gabe
Six months later
“Is this it?”
The wrought iron gate is open, but that’s only one reason I’m second-guessing myself.
The house I remember—the one I spent summers in and out of as Scott’s friend, as the boy who pretended not to watch Evie do her homework in the game room—was stucco.
Modest, by Thompson standards. Whatever this is, it isn’t that.
Evie looks up from her phone. “Oh. Yeah. He tore down the old house and built a new one.”
“Are you serious?”
“Said it was cheaper to start from scratch than renovate twenty thousand square feet.” She sighs in a way that contains an entire argument she’s already had and lost. “Don’t ask.”
We pull through the gate and down the drive. The circular fountain is still there—same stone basin, same spray arc—which is the single element I recognize. I pull up alongside it.
“Some things survived.”
Evie grins. “Remember when we’d jump in that?”
“Your dad would say there’s a perfectly good pool in the back.”
“A pool in the shade. Too big to heat.” She tilts her head. “I bet the new pool has the same problem.”
I park in front and take in the house while she’s still talking. Stone facade, arched windows, a front door the color of a federal building—gray, oversized, flanked by topiary. It looks like someone described a French chateau to an architect who had never left DC.
It is, without question, the most expensive home I have ever stood in front of.
I keep that to myself.
The door opens before we reach the top step.
Mr. Thompson comes out first wearing jeans and a crewneck sweater in a way that still somehow reads as a power move.
A black Doberman is at his heel. Behind him, Scott appears with the easy, unhurried quality of a man who has had six months to adjust to his father’s new place—a birthday gift Mr. Thompson gave himself, apparently, and one Scott has clearly already claimed a favorite chair in.
After everything passed, and before Evie returned to work, the two of us visited him in New York. For all his griping via text, in person, he was fine. Supportive even. Like I suspected he would be if I made it clear how serious I am about his sister.
Evie steps forward and her father pulls her in; not a handshake-and-shoulder pat, but a real embrace, the kind that lasts long enough to mean something. His eyes are glassy when he releases her.
I’ve never seen that. Not once, not in all the years I spent orbiting this family as a kid, catching Mr. Thompson only in passing—leaving for a business trip, arriving late to a dinner already underway, a voice on the phone Evie’s mother would go quiet for.
He was never a person I knew, so much as a fact about Evie’s life, mostly relayed secondhand, mostly unflattering.
I built the rest of him out of what my mother said and what Evie didn’t say, and it hardened into something I never thought to question.
His emotion alters the version of him I’ve been carrying for as long as I can remember.
I extend my hand. “Mr. Thompson.”
He grips it firmly. “Gabriel.” He pauses, giving the moment purposeful weight. “Thank you for bringing her home.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I settle for, “Yes, sir,” which is the safest response to most things he’ll ever say to me.
It’s our first visit to her father since we moved in together.
She initiated the move—told me it was silly for me to keep paying rent on a three-bedroom apartment when I spent every night at her place.
And I concurred. Three bedrooms had been a poor decision to begin with, but I wanted a room to lock my guns and a home office.
In her place, I’ve created both those spaces in her basement.
Scott claps me on the back. “Flight okay?”
“Good.”
“You look annoyingly rested.”
“You look exactly the same.”
He grins. It’s the same grin he had as an incorrigible teen—the one that showed up right around the time his parents split and his dad stopped saying no to him. The one that preceded every decision his sister would have vetoed if she’d been asked. Still the same.
The tour takes twenty minutes. There is a lot of gold. Not subtle gold—not gilded frames and warm lighting—but ceiling medallions and inlaid floors and a chandelier in the entryway that I estimate, conservatively, weighs more than my car.
I watch Evie take it all in with the diplomatic neutrality of a woman who has cross-examined federal officials and is not going to let a chandelier get the better of her.
“Dad,” she says, in a tone that covers a great deal of ground with very few syllables.
“I designed it myself,” he says, with the satisfaction of a man who has never needed anyone’s approval and has somehow still managed to want it. “The first home without a wife’s opinion. Every single room is my design.”
Evie blinks once, which is her version of a very loud response.
I look at a gilded ceiling rose in the dining room and think: she has never, not once, decorated anything without a reason.
Every object in her townhome is either functional or meaningful.
This house and my girlfriend are the same person’s creations, and I cannot reconcile it, and I decide to find that funny rather than alarming.
“Two rooms,” her father says, pointing at me as we pass the guest corridor. “My house, my rules.”
“We’re staying at his mom’s,” Evie says smoothly.
“Good,” he says, as though he’s won something.
Scott catches my eye behind his father’s back and mouths, “Don’t.”
I would never argue about a guest room, but when Mr. Thompson inquires about my mother, I’m careful to avoid any mention of my mother’s late best friend, who is also his ex-wife—if that’s even what Scott meant when he mouthed don’t.
In the afternoon we settle by the pool. The curved design is edged in pale stone with water so blue it looks rendered. The Doberman has decided I’m acceptable and is now lying at my feet. Scott and Evie have gone inside to supervise the caterer for tonight’s party.
Mr. Thompson and I sit in the shade and let the quiet be what it is for a moment.
“You were the friend I worried about,” he says.
I look at him.
“Of all the boys who came around. You were the one who saw her.” He chuckles, but it’s private—the kind of laugh that contains something he’s been sitting with for a long time. “I knew. I worried.”
I keep my voice level. “I treated her with respect. She was Scott’s little sister, so I looked out for her.”
“You treated her like she was worth watching,” he says, with the precision of a man who has spent his career reading people.
“That is not the same thing. And I am not complaining.” He pauses.
“I liked you best, of all his friends. Even then. You were careful. You paid attention.” Another pause. “You paid attention to her.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I don’t do anything. I let it sit.
He’s quiet for a moment. The Doberman shifts against my feet. In the distance, I can hear the caterer rattling something metallic and Evie asking a question in the focused, precise way she asks everything.
“Things are different now,” he says. “Young people live together first. My parents had an arranged marriage. I had a very bad marriage.” He says this without self-pity. “I cannot blame my daughter for doing things differently.”
He sounds resigned, but there’s more than that underneath it. This is not a man who needs to share any of this with me. He’s choosing to. That distinction matters.
“Mr. Thompson.” I lean forward. “I love your daughter. And I would like—” His eyes meet mine, sharp and immediate, and I feel the sentence reroute itself before I’ve consciously decided anything. “With your permission, I hope to one day marry her.”
He’s still for a moment.
I hadn’t planned it. But I understand in the space of a breath that this is what he needed—not the information, but the form of it. The acknowledgment that some things don’t have to change just because everything else has.
He leans forward and takes my hand in both of his and shakes it once, firmly.
“You will love her,” he says. “You will take care of her.”
She can take care of herself better than most people I’ve worked with, including people who carry firearms. But I nod. “Yes, sir.”
He sits back with the settled look of a man who has accomplished something.
“I see how she looks at you. Always has, you know. Even then.” He rests an ankle over his knee. “When will you propose?”
“I haven’t—” I stop. “I don’t have a timeline.”
He considers this. “When she says yes—and she will—you call me. First. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Evie steps out onto the deck. “Dad? We have questions about the seating.”
“Coming, my evening star.” He pushes to his feet without hurry, and the nickname lands on her the way it always seems to—like something she pretends to find embarrassing and actually finds endearing.
She glances at me as he moves past her into the house. It’s a quick look, a check-in, the particular question she asks with her eyes when she wants to know if I’m all right without making a thing of it.
I answer with a nod.
She holds my gaze a beat longer than necessary. Then she follows her father inside.
Scott comes down the steps with three beers, one for each of us, apparently unconcerned that his father doesn’t drink beer—or at least, not that I’ve ever observed.
“Does your dad drink beer?” I ask.
“No.” He shrugs. “Felt wrong to bring two.” He hands me a bottle and lowers himself into the chair his father vacated. “How’d it go?”
I take a pull from the bottle. “Fine.”
Scott looks at me the way he’s looked at me since we were twelve and discovered girls—like he’s reading something I didn’t say. “You asked him, didn’t you?”
I don’t answer.
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “She’s going to give you such a hard time.”
“I know.”