Chapter 10
Ayear later…
Raemy Miller loved every single season in Wild Rose Point, but fall most of all. It reminded her of how they’d started. It felt like new starts and new possibilities—though that was probably because she still followed a school-year calendar.
She’d started teaching at the school in one of the larger towns nearby in September of this year, once again with the third graders she loved, and she already felt as if she’d been teaching at the school forever.
Plus there are fishless lunches, she made sure to text Marissa. We have strict rules about the use of the microwave here.
Oregon sounds hideous. I hate it, her friend texted back.
Raemy loved her little cottage, right there on the beach.
She had loved the long, gray, blustery winter, cuddled up next to the fireplace with the ocean making noise outside.
She’d loved the storms and the rain. In spring, she’d tended the explosion of flowers—especially roses, though there were plump hydrangeas and bright fuchsia too—and had sighed over the flowering cherry and plum trees in town.
Inside the cottage, she had managed to pack so many lighthouses and whale plaques, and every possible beachy item she could find, that even she was starting to wonder if there was more to life than macrame renditions of the waves.
Right now, it was perfect.
She and Noah had yet to spend a night apart, and she loved that for them.
They were talking about moving in together, though not into this cottage.
And not into his house, either. It made sense, they’d decided, that his grandfather’s house should stay what it was: a safe place for veterans who needed it.
Tank had no desire to move on and was more than capable of taking a lead role in the operations. He had, in fact, been asking to take on a role like that for a while.
“About time a man was recognized for his contributions around here,” he said to Noah when they told him. He’d said it like he was joking, but Raemy didn’t think he was.
“He wasn’t,” Noah agreed later, while they lay on the couch in the living room of the cottage together, watching the fire dance behind its grate. He’d laughed, but more at himself than at Tank, Raemy thought. “It’s clearly past time I made this more of an organization and less…me.”
“I agree wholeheartedly,” Raemy said, kissing him in the crook of his neck, because he loved when she did that.
Seamus would have loved all of this, Raemy liked to think. She felt like she knew the old man now, through his grandson. And through all the photos and stories Noah had shared with her over the course of the past year.
And if she wasn’t mistaken, she was making a lot of headway convincing the love of her life that not everything had to be an act of penance.
She knew that he’d believed her last year, that night in the inn where they’d started truly being them. But it was over the course of the year they’d shared here that she got to watch it really take root.
His parents had come to visit and she’d loved them immediately. More importantly, they’d loved her.
Noah’s father was, as expected, a quiet and thoughtful man. He preferred to listen rather than talk. He spent hours a day reading, and swore by the practice, claiming it was singularly responsible for his excellent health. Raemy, a big reader herself, could hardly argue.
His mother liked her morning runs and her pickleball, refused to sit still for so long at one time, and claimed that the fact they were opposites was why they’d been happily married for so many years.
“Everyone expected that Finnegan would marry one of those academic types,” Tracy Kendrick had said with a laugh, looking over at her husband. “But he gets that at work.”
“And I happen to play a mean game of pickleball,” Finnegan had retorted.
He had walked with Raemy one morning and had confessed that he and Tracy hadn’t really known what to expect when Noah had told them that he had someone special in his life.
“Honestly,” he had said. “We were concerned.”
“I understand,” Raemy had replied at once, not the least bit offended. “Given the space he was in, you must have worried about his ability to make a good choice.”
Finnegan Kendrick had smiled, looking grateful. “I’ll admit that we did.”
Raemy, who refused to accept that she ought to feel awkward in any circumstance, nudged the man that she certainly hoped was going to be her future father-in-law with her elbow.
“Not to worry,” she told him with a grin. “I chose him.”
When she’d relayed this conversation to Noah later, he’d laughed.
Because he did that more and more all the time and not only while he was naked. He’d laughed and laughed. He’d kissed her all over her face, and twirled her around the tiny kitchen in her cottage, and said, “You did choose me. Thank God.”
Today it was coming up on Halloween again, a good full year and change since she and Noah had finally settled things between them.
Her parents had been in town for a while now.
They were back from their very long cruise, filled with stories of all the places they’d seen, and were very interested in Wild Rose Point.
They’d been in town nearly two weeks and were already talking about maybe buying a condo out this way so they could always visit for as long as they liked.
Raemy didn’t want to jinx anything, but she was pretty sure that her father and Noah had not decided to just...
go for a drink randomly this evening. She could read Noah pretty well by now.
And she hadn’t even been snooping, not really, but she had seen a very small box in the bedroom he almost never slept in back at his house.
If she had to guess, she was pretty sure that he was asking her father for his blessing.
She stood outside her little cottage, hugging herself. It was a cool evening. Her sweet, funny mother was inside, crocheting with yarn that she’d gotten at the local yarn shop. The tide was coming in and Raemy could smell the rich, salty air. She liked it against her face.
As it darkened, she could see the lights of this little town she’d adopted as her own, gleaming out into the ocean. And she could glimpse the sea stacks out there in the water, keeping watch. Guarding her—and the rest of Wild Rose Point—as they went about their lives.
She didn’t think that she’d ever been quite so happy in all her life.
Raemy tilted her head back and looked up at the stars.
“That’s all because of you,” she said, because the stars were William, and William was the stars, and she was absolutely certain that he was the one who had brought her here.
To this place that felt more like home than anything she’d ever experienced before.
To the man that she loved so much that it seemed impossible she’d ever not loved him or not lived with him.
“I hope you shine on us forever,” she whispered.
When she closed her eyes, it was almost like she could feel her younger brother beside her again. Swinging his arm over her neck for one of those hugs of his that quickly turned into headlocks.
Because love never went anywhere. Love was never wasted, and never lost.
Which wasn’t to say it would stay in the same form, but once a person understood it, and understood that it was everywhere—in the stars, in the birds, in the rocks that stood stalwart in the ocean and the sweep of the waves across the sand—it was easier.
And with her eyes shut, she could see her future tumbling there before her like the waves on the beach.
She and Noah would probably buy that house they’d been looking at, just a little ways up from the cottage. It needed love, but they had that to spare, and better yet, a whole lot of veterans who needed something to do with their hands.
She had third graders to teach, and someday soon, maybe sooner than later, she would say her vows to Noah Kendrick, former Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he would say them back, and there would be babies.
And at least one of them, she knew, she would name for her brother. So there would always be a piece of William walking on the earth, breathing deep into his bones. And living.
Living, breathing. And made of love.
“Raemy.”
She turned at that voice that she would know anywhere and smiled, because it was Noah. He came around the side of the cottage and he took her in his arms.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
Raemy wrapped her arms around his waist and smiled up at him. “You found me,” she replied. “You’re good at that.”
And she knew before he stepped back and reached into his pocket.
This was their moment. This was the story they would tell their children.
This was where the rest of their life began, right here on a windswept terrace with this big, beautiful man on one knee and their future sparkling before them, brighter than the stars and wider than the sea.
Raemy couldn’t wait to get started.