Epilogue Delia
The living room looked different at the tail end of dinner, warm lamplight on faces I’d come to know over six months of Tuesdays and Fridays and the occasional Saturday night.
Where the abstract piece used to hang on the far wall, there was a framed photograph now.
The carnival. Six kids mid-stride across the ice, legs bent and arms out, the rink lights catching the blades.
I’d forgotten someone was even taking pictures that day until Roz handed me the print in April.
Grant’s phone wasn’t on the coffee table. It wasn’t on the kitchen counter either. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it sitting out like that, the way it used to, screen-up and always within reach. He checked it when it rang. He answered texts when he had a minute. Then he put it away.
Marcus was talking about a supplier contract that had closed the week before. “Grant kicked it to me in June,” he said. “Told me to handle the whole thing. I thought he was testing me, but he just signed off and let me run it.”
“Promotion by delegation,” Roz said, grinning. She had her daughter with her tonight, a quiet teenager who’d spent most of dinner listening and eating seconds of everything.
“Something like that,” Marcus said.
I refilled water glasses and brought out the berries I’d cut earlier.
The deed had closed in early March. My name on every page, my savings and carnival money covering the ask, his name nowhere.
I owned the Ashbury outright. I hadn’t made a ceremony of it.
I’d just signed the papers and put the folder in the drawer under the coffeemaker where I kept the utility bills.
Grant leaned back in his chair, one hand resting on the table, and looked at Marcus. “You should’ve seen what she did to get that building past the city,” he said.
I shook my head. “We don’t need to rehash that.”
“Yes, we do.” He didn’t raise his voice.
He didn’t have to. His tone was warm and sure and completely unbending.
“The city tried to condemn it. She hired a structural engineer out of her own pocket, sat through four separate hearings, and made them prove every word. Then she turned around and ran seventy hours of ice a week while the repair crews were still finishing the mechanical room.”
“Grant,” I said.
He kept going. “She’s got two skaters training there now who placed nationally last season. One of them’s headed to regionals in the fall.”
Roz raised her glass. “Damn right she does.”
I felt my face go hot, but I didn’t look away.
I just sat there and let him say it, let him mean it, let the room hold it without me trying to make myself smaller.
Walt, who’d been quiet most of the night, nodded once from his seat by the window.
Tyler, who’d come straight from the rink and still had his staff shirt on, grinned and reached for another roll.
It was after ten when we cleared the last of the dishes. The guests filtered out in pairs, Roz squeezing my shoulder on her way past, Marcus shaking Grant’s hand and saying something about Monday’s production meeting. The house went quiet.
“I need to check the schedule,” Grant said. “I think I wrote Tyler in for a double on Thursday, but I’m not sure the math works with Walt’s reduced hours.”
“You want me to come with you?” I asked.
“If you don’t mind.”
We drove the ten minutes to the rink in comfortable silence.
He unlocked the front door and flipped on just enough lights to see by.
The building smelled like it always did.
Cold air and old wood and the faint bite of refrigerant from the machine room.
I stayed in the hallway while he went into the office.
I heard him stop moving.
I stepped into the doorway.
He was standing beside the desk, next to the shelf where my gear bag used to sit for seven years, holding a small box.
The lid was already off. Inside, resting on tissue paper, was a pair of skates.
Impossibly small. Fitted properly. I’d taken them to the Linden Street counter in July and stood there while the same man who’d done mine twenty years ago checked the sizing twice and told me they were ready.
Grant looked at the skates. He looked at me. His face went white.
Then his knees gave.
He didn’t sit down. He just went down, one hand catching the edge of the desk, the other still holding the box. I crossed the office in three steps and got my hands on his shoulders. He was shaking.
“When?” he said. His voice cracked on the word.
“January,” I said.
He pressed his face against my stomach, careful even now, and made a sound I’d never heard from him before. Not a sob. Something deeper. I put my hand in his hair and held him there and didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything that needed saying. He already knew.
It took him a full minute to get his breath back. When he finally looked up at me, his eyes were red and his face was wet and he didn’t try to hide either.
“You will never say my name again and not be answered,” he said. The words came out broken and low and absolutely certain. “Not once. Not ever. I swear it.”
I pulled him up. He came to his feet slowly, still holding the box like he was afraid it might disappear. I took his face in both hands.
“I know,” I said.
He set the box down on the desk, careful, and kissed me. Not desperate. Not apologizing. Just kissing me because he wanted to and because he could.
We were the last two people in the building.
I watched him check the thermostat in the machine room and write the number on the clipboard that hung by the door.
Then he came back and took my hand and we walked to the front together.
He locked the door from the inside. My building.
My choice. The world on the other side of it instead of me.
“I’m going to hold the temperature,” he said quietly. “That’s a guarantee.”
I smiled. “I know you will.”
We stood there in the dim hallway for a moment, his hand warm in mine, the hum of the refrigeration unit steady and low beneath our feet.
Then I looked back toward the machine room, toward the clipboard on its nail by the door.
A number every two hours. Decades of entries. Somebody’s handwriting on every line.
Some of the lines are mine.
Some of them are his.
THE END