Epilogue #2
We clink bottles. The Doberman relocates to Scott’s feet.
Somewhere in the house, Evie is rearranging her father’s birthday seating chart with the focused authority of someone who once reorganized a federal case from a hotel conference room, and I think about how thoroughly, delightfully incapable she is of doing anything halfway—a seating chart gets the same relentless precision as a federal indictment.
I find I don’t mind at all.
We’re twenty minutes away from her father’s house when she asks, “How’d things go with my dad?”
I flip my hand palm-up on the console. She fits hers into it without looking—a habit now, easy and without thought. I wait until her fingers have settled.
“I asked for your hand in marriage.”
The silence lasts approximately two seconds.
“You what?”
She’s smiling. Her grip tightens. Both good signs.
“He needed to know my intentions.”
“And your intention is to marry me.”
“One day. When you’re ready.”
“You didn’t think to ask me first? Before my father?” The annoyance is real—I can hear it threading through, even as she’s fighting a smile—but it’s competing with something else and losing. “Gabe. I’m not even religious.”
“Neither am I.” I keep my voice at the register that usually works. “But your father loves you. And because I love you, I love him. Tradition is important to him.”
I watch her process it. The slight tilt of her head. The moment she moves from reaction to analysis.
“If you don’t want to get married,” I say, “I can live with that. As long as you commit to spending the rest of your life with me. That’s what I need.” I squeeze her hand once. “What do you need?”
She’s quiet long enough that I know she’ll give me a real answer.
“The same,” she says.
Two words.
I’ve been trained to run calculations—threat assessments, extraction routes, the arithmetic of every situation I walk into.
But this is a variable I could’ve never accounted for correctly: the specific weight of her choosing this, choosing me, in the same quiet and certain way she decides everything that actually matters to her.
We drive in silence for a while, and it’s the kind of silence that doesn’t need anything added to it.
“Do you remember Palisades Park?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Can you drive there?”
I glance at the navigation. It’s between her father’s house and my mother’s. “It’s not out of the way.”
“Did you ever go there? Back then?”
“No.”
“Neither did I.” Her knee jiggles, like her foot is patting in time to the music on the radio. “Let’s go.”
I’ve no problem with a detour, so I take the turn. The road narrows and darkens as the tree cover thickens, the traffic dropping behind us. I find a pull-off along the ridge, and locate a spot overlooking the river. The water catches the moonlight, and the skylines low and soft on the far bank.
I kill the engine.
Evie is quiet beside me, looking at the view. Then she looks at the back of the SUV.
“Those seats fold down,” she says.
I turn to look at her.
She has the look she gets when she’s already decided something and is simply choosing the moment to say so—the slight lift of her chin, the look in her eyes that says she’s assessed the situation and reached her conclusion and would like to know if I have any objections.
I do not have any objections.
“We’re wearing good clothes,” I say.
“I’m aware.”
“Your father just asked me about my intentions.”
“Your timing has always been questionable,” she says, and she’s already moving to the back.
The seats fold flat.
We figure out the logistics of a rental SUV together, which involves less grace and more laughter than either of us would admit to in a professional context. Her heel catches on the center console. My shoulder—still occasionally problematic—makes its opinion known.
“Are you—”
“Fine,” I say. “Don’t stop.”
She laughs, really laughs, the kind that isn’t performative and isn’t careful, and I feel it somewhere structural—the same place I felt it the first time she laughed like that in front of me, before we’d moved in together, and I understood that I was in serious trouble.
I’ve been in serious trouble for a very long time.
I am completely at peace with that.
The park is quiet around us. The river moves in the distance.
Somewhere on the far bank, suburbia keeps running—indifferent, lit, continuous—and in here the windows are fogged and Evie is warm against my side and her hair is loose and she’s tracing something idle on my chest with one finger the way she does when she’s thinking.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.”
“You’re thinking something.”
A pause. “When you propose,” she says, “don’t do it somewhere my father chose.”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
“And don’t make it a thing. I don’t want—” She waves a hand that gestures at everything she doesn’t want, which I understand to mean: photographers, productions, any version of public that involves strangers looking at her face.
“Noted.”
“Something real,” she says. “Just—” She stops. Starts again. “Just like this.”
I look at the top of her head. The way she fits against me, her head on my shoulder, her breathing slowed to the pace of someone who has finally—finally—stopped working and allowed herself a vacation.
I think about a photo in my wallet that I’ve been carrying for fifteen years. A teenage Evie at a football game, laughing at something out of frame, completely unaware she would be saved in that moment in time.
She’s been in my pocket the whole time.
“Just like this,” I say.
She tilts her face up and I bend down and we meet somewhere in the middle, easy and certain, the way we do most things now that we’ve stopped making it complicated.
She used to dream about me from a distance—unreachable, half-remembered, gone by morning.
Not anymore. From here on out, when she wakes, I’ll be by her side.