Epilogue #2
“I see it! I see!” He scrambles for his phone, then stops himself, putting it aside. “No, wait - I want to watch. I want to actually see it.”
Maggie makes it three more steps before she tumbles into his arms, giggling at her own accomplishment.
“You did it!” Logan scoops her up, spinning her around. “You walked! Fran, she walked!”
“I saw!” I’m laughing and crying at the same time. “Maggie, you’re amazing!”
“Ma!” Maggie agrees.
“We have to tell everyone.” Logan’s already reaching for his phone. “Theo, Bree, the grandmas - everyone.”
“Take a breath. She just started walking. She’s not running marathons.”
“She walked, Fran. Our daughter walked.”
I watch him, completely overcome by a toddler taking steps across a porch, and I think about all the moments that led here. The courthouse wedding. The cold days and warm nights. The fire. The running. The long, slow work of learning to trust each other.
“I know,” I say. “I was here.”
He looks up from his phone, where he’s already typing a message to Theo. “What?”
“I was here. Present. Not checking the baby monitor or worrying about the market or thinking about anything else.” I smile at him. “Just here, watching our daughter walk for the first time.”
He sets down the phone and pulls me into a hug, Maggie sandwiched between us, still giggling.
“I love you,” he says against my hair.
“I love you too.”
“Da!” Maggie contributes.
“Yes, sweetheart. Da loves you most of all.”
***
Later, after Maggie is down for a real nap this time and the cottage is quiet, I find the test in the bathroom cabinet.
I’ve been putting off taking it, partly because I’m scared, partly because I wanted to be sure. The last time I saw two pink lines, I was alone in Bree’s bathroom in Marigold, still smelling of smoke, terrified of what it meant.
This time should be different.
“Logan?” I call.
He appears in the doorway within seconds. “Everything okay?”
“I think I might be pregnant.” I hold up the unopened test. “I wanted to find out together.”
His eyes go wide. “Together.”
“Together.”
I take the test, set it face-down on the counter, and we wait through the longest three minutes of my life. When the timer goes off, we turn it over at the same time.
Two pink lines.
“Together this time,” I whisper.
“Together,” he repeats, and then he’s pulling me into his arms, and we’re both laughing and crying and holding onto each other like we’ll never let go.
“Another baby,” he says.
“Another baby.”
“Maggie is going to be a big sister.”
“God help us all.”
He laughs, wiping tears from his cheeks. “We’re going to need a bigger couch.”
“We’re going to need a bigger everything.”
“We’ll figure it out.” He cups my face in his hands. “We always do.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We always do.”
***
We walk the fence line before dinner, the three of us, soon to be four.
Maggie toddles ahead on her new legs, clutching Logan’s finger for balance, making the “guh” sound at every bird and flower and interesting shadow. The farm spreads out around us, rows of flowers just starting to bloom, evidence of everything I’ve built.
At the gate, there’s a sign Logan made last month.
SALAZAR BLOOMS, it reads. EST. BY A WOMAN WHO WALKED THROUGH FIRE.
“I still can’t believe you let me put that up,” he says.
“It’s my story. I get to tell it how I want.”
“It’s our story.”
“Fine. Our story.” I lean against him. “But I’m the one who walked through fire.”
“You’re the one who walked through fire.” He kisses the top of my head. “And I’m the one who followed you through it.”
Maggie makes a sound that might be agreement or might be a demand for attention. Either way, she’s right, this moment is ours, all of us, this family we chose and built and fought for.
I think about the woman I was more than three years ago, standing in my father’s office, learning I was about to be sold to a stranger. I think about the woman I was in the fire, certain I was going to die. I think about the woman I was at Bree’s door, pregnant and alone and terrified.
And I think about the woman I am now, standing in my own field with a husband who loves me and a daughter who just took her first steps and another baby on the way.
The workshop runs out of the north building on the farm now, turning a profit, enough that Logan started a small apprenticeship program last year, teaching woodworking fundamentals to kids from both towns.
Tools and training, funded by what we’ve earned, not what we inherited.
Theo runs the family company now, and he loves it, thrives on the meetings and negotiations that used to make Logan miserable.
Harlan and Genevieve stay busy with him, which means they stay out of our lives.
Logan finished walking away from all of it, and the distance has held.
“What are you thinking about?” Logan asks.
“Everything.” I smile up at him. “And nothing. Just - this. Us.”
“Good thoughts?”
“The best thoughts.”
Maggie tugs at my jeans, wanting up, and I scoop her onto my hip.
“Ow! Maggie, gentle.”
“Guh!” she insists.
“That’s still not a goose.”
“Let her dream,” Logan says. “She’ll learn the difference eventually.”
I laugh, shifting Maggie’s weight, and we walk back toward the cottage together, past the flowers I grew, under the sky I’ve loved since I was a child, into the life I chose.
My happily ever after, grown by hand.
Chosen twice.
THE END