Epilogue
Annie
“Did you get the keys?”
“Yup.”
“The lockbox code?”
“Twice.”
“And you confirmed the property lines?”
I stop halfway across the hall and look at him.
Morning light slips through the wavy glass by the front door, laying pale stripes across his jeans and the scuffed floorboards. The old staircase I fought for rises behind him, solid now but still marked by every nick and gouge it collected before either of us was born.
“The survey came back three days ago, Reed. Nothing has moved since then.”
He leans against the newel post with his arms folded, looking entirely unconvinced.
“I checked it,” I say.
“You were headed back to check it again.”
“I was headed back because I forgot my coffee.”
He points to the cup in my hand. “That’s your coffee.”
I look down at the blue mug.
“I knew that.”
“Of course you did.”
I pass him on my way back to the dining room. He catches my free hand and draws me close enough to kiss my forehead.
“You’re nervous,” he says.
“And you’re kinda cute,” I say, reaching up and pressing my mouth to his.
He lingers, then pulls back, looking down at me. “Kinda?”
“Didn’t want you to get a big head.”
The house around us barely resembles the wreck I first stopped to photograph.
The bones are all there and the character of the place is firmly protected, but now it’s livable.
The floors are fixed, the original wood salvaged where possible.
We even managed to keep the windows, despite the insane cost of keeping them.
The scorch marks still run along the molding near Maybelle’s old workroom. I argued to keep those too. A house that survives a fire shouldn’t have to pretend it was never burned.
Reed’s boots sit next to mine. Two of his jackets hang beneath the camera bag I keep meaning to move, while my lenses have taken over most of the cabinet in what was supposed to be our breakfast room.
His laptop shares a table with my research books, and we’ve both become skilled at leaving coffee cups in places we forget until the coffee has long gone cold.
A work schedule is pinned by the kitchen door: three historical tours today, a private group tomorrow morning.
Next Friday’s haunted-history tour is already full.
There’s a note under the reservation list reminding the new guide that documented accounts and local folklore are not the same.
Maybelle Crane spent a century being called a witch.
I won’t let us turn her into a ghost story now that people are finally listening.
Through the kitchen window, the herb garden stretches behind the house in neat but uneven rows. I did my best to replant the herbs and botanicals from Maybelle’s notes, using county records, interviews, and basic research on what nineteenth-century midwives might have grown in the area.
On the wall beside the window hangs a framed cover page from the first magazine that published my Maybelle essay. Beneath it is the brass sign that usually sits near the entrance during tours:
HOLLOW COUNTRY HERITAGE
FOUNDED BY ANNIE MONTGOMERY DILLON
I pick up my coffee from beside the contract for the Hollow Country book.
My editor wants two more chapters and a new set of photographs from the boardinghouse we’re buying today.
The first part of the advance paid for the structural assessment, and print sales will help with the roof.
The rest will come from grants, donations, and the amount Reed and I agreed Hollow Country could risk without turning every building I love into another piece of his inheritance.
A car door closes outside. A moment later, our weekend guide lets herself in through the kitchen and calls, “Go. I’ve got the ten o’clock group.”
“There are twelve people,” I tell her. “And the new brochures are?—”
“In the front room. The register has change. Nobody goes upstairs without me. I know.”
Reed takes my bag before I can find another reason to linger. “We’re leaving,” he says.
“Fine,” I say, but it’s half-hearted.
Outside, the restored porch boards creak beneath our feet.
The sound is quieter than it used to be, but it’s still there.
I lock the door and glance back through the glass.
Despite the tour groups coming through, the house is ours in all the ways that count.
Reed’s hat hangs from the banister, and there’s a photograph of us framed and taking up space on the table near the entryway.
Reed rests his hand against my back. “Ready?”
“Yes,” I say. Then I sigh. “No.”
I look at him.
“You’re going to think I’m silly,” I say.
“Probably not.”
“It’s just…starting a new project almost feels like cheating on Maybelle.”
To his credit, he doesn’t laugh or even give me a look that suggests I’m being ridiculous. Instead, the look he gives me is so tender that a lump settles in my throat.
“Maybelle’s going nowhere,” he says, reaching up and brushing a strand of hair behind my ear.
“She’ll be right here when we get back. And besides, since you’re so adamant that the money for this has to come from Hollow Country’s proceeds, you can rest easy knowing that whatever this place eventually earns can help save the next one. ”
“Stop making sense,” I say, letting him lead me to the car.
“It’s what I do best. Sometimes. Occasionally. Maybe once a month or so.”
He opens the truck door for me.
I navigate. Reed drives.
We stop at a diner outside Newport where the coffee burns my tongue and the biscuits come with plastic tubs of grape jelly.
Reed eats half my breakfast after saying he wasn’t hungry.
Beyond town, the road narrows. The river slips between the trees, disappears, then finds us again at the next crossing.
I tell Reed I need five minutes at an abandoned filling station with faded red pumps. He pulls over without checking the time. Five minutes turn into fourteen, and he holds my lens case while I photograph sunlight spilling through the collapsed awning.
Years ago, we drove roads like this just to see where they led. Then Stanhope filled every space in our calendar. Somewhere along the way, we started treating it like the most important thing in both our lives and stopped leaving enough room for each other.
His phone rests facedown in the console now.
Stanhope still exists, but a professional management company handles daily operations.
Reed attends quarterly meetings remotely and lets attorneys manage what can’t be delegated.
He sold two lesser properties that had cost more to maintain than they ever gave back.
The foundation dinner survived his absence last year and has continued surviving it.
Catherine hasn’t returned to the house or to her former authority. Lexi hasn’t reappeared through some forgotten social doorway. Reed chose that separation before he knew whether I’d ever choose him again, and he’s kept choosing it since I did.
Sometimes I still find that remarkable. Not because Stanhope was a better life he gave up for me. It wasn’t. I see now that Reed spent years confusing inheritance with obligation. He had to learn that owning something didn’t mean letting it own him.
Back on the road, he reaches across the console and squeezes my knee. “You got quiet.”
“I’m all right.”
He glances at me, then returns his attention to the curve ahead. “All right.”
My hand settles over the pocket of my jacket.
I took the first test four mornings ago.
I took another that afternoon because the line was faint enough that I could convince myself I’d imagined it.
The third came the next morning, and yesterday, a blood test confirmed what the plastic sticks had already told me.
I haven’t used the word baby, even inside my own head.
I know that a positive test doesn’t automatically mean a baby, especially for me. I also know what hope can cost this early. So I’ve kept this secret for four days, which almost feels like a betrayal. But I know once I tell Reed, we’ll both begin to hope.
Yet, there’s something about this one…
We pass through another small community. The road begins climbing toward the ridge where the old Bellweather Boardinghouse has been sitting empty for twenty-three years.
“Can we pull over?”
“Here?” Reed asks.
“There’s a turnout ahead.”
He signals even though no one is behind us and guides the truck onto the gravel. Old oaks shade the pull-off. Beyond them, ridges overlap beneath the morning haze, and somewhere below, a creek moves over stone.
Reed turns off the engine and waits.
My fingers are clenched around the edge of my jacket. I force them open.
“I’m pregnant.”
He goes completely still.
Silence fills the space between us. I watch his face change slowly, hope, then fear, then hope again. His eyes slide to my stomach, then return to my face.
“Are you sure?”
“Three tests. And bloodwork yesterday.”
His breath leaves him.
“It’s early,” I say. “Very early. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
He nods.
His hand moves across the console, then stops short. I close the distance. His arms come around me carefully, and I press my face into his neck, breathing in the warmth of his skin and clean cotton. His hold tightens only after mine does.
Neither of us says anything.
His forehead rests against mine when we draw apart. A tremor runs through him, and I feel it where his fingers hold my arm. I’m shaking too.
“How long have you known?” he asks.
“Four days.”
His eyes search mine. “You’re scared.”
“I needed a little while when it was only information.” My throat tightens. “Before it became hope.”
Reed brushes his thumb beneath my eye. I hadn’t realized I was crying.
“You know I’m with you every step of the way,” he says.
I nod because I know it without him saying it.
“I have an appointment Tuesday.”
“I’ll clear my schedule.”
“You have a meeting with the structural engineer Tuesday.”
“He can meet with Jackson.”
“Reed.”
His jaw is already set, ready to take charge and shield me.
“Don’t start treating me like I’m fragile,” I say softly.
“I’m being practical.”
“You’re already planning how to keep me off the job sites.”
“The third stair gave out under you at the boardinghouse last week.”
“The tread split. That wasn’t my fault.”
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it was.”
He starts the truck, but his hand finds mine before he pulls back onto the road. He brings it to his lips, and my breath catches.
We drive several miles before Maybelle’s name begins to jostle around in the back of my mind. I look out at the trees and count backward, then I do it again.
“No.”
Reed glances over. “What?”
“I’ve just realized something strange.”
“What is it?”
I tell him when the pregnancy must have begun.
By then, we were living at Crane House full-time, and the garden had been planted for months.
I think of Maybelle’s letters: women who climbed that ridge after doctors, husbands, and families had decided nothing more could be done, and the birth announcements that came later.
The old belief that Maybelle’s place brought luck to women who had run out of hope.
Reed understands at once. For several seconds, neither of us speaks.
“I don’t believe in that,” I say firmly.
“I didn’t say anything.”
I turn toward him. He’s trying not to smile.
The fine hairs along his forearm are standing upright.
So are mine.
“There is something else,” I say.
Reed’s fingers tighten around mine.
“This is going to sound strange, especially this early, but part of me keeps thinking about Crane House.”
“Thinking about it how?”
I hesitate.
“If this continues, and if everything is healthy…I think I might want to have the baby there.”
He looks at me for one startled second before returning his eyes to the road. “At home?”
“I didn’t say for sure,” I say, already preparing counterarguments in my head.
“It’s just a thought. Just a…feeling. I wouldn’t go into anything without weighing all the evidence.
I’m not trying to create a reenactment of the eighteen-eighties with my birth plan.
We’d have a doctor involved. There would need to be a hospital plan, too.
And, of course, everything we’d do would be safe. ”
“How fast could we get to a hospital if we needed to?”
“All things we’ll consider if we get there,” I say, and actually manage to smile.
“Who would be there?”
I smile despite the pressure behind my eyes. “We have months to figure it out.”
“Months,” he repeats.
And I can hear it.
Hope.
Belief.
That’s as far ahead as either of us goes.
The turnoff appears a few minutes later. Reed slows, and the Bellweather Boardinghouse comes into view beyond a stand of pines. The old sign hangs crooked above the drive, its last letters faded nearly white.
Soon, Hollow Country Heritage will own this, too.
Another story to tell.
Reed squeezes my hand. Ahead of us is another house, and inside me, maybe, another beginning.
I let both stay unexplained.