Epilogue Caleb
ONE YEAR LATER
The coffee was already brewing when I came downstairs.
Elena was still asleep. I'd left her there with the blankets kicked off like always, her hair spread across the pillow, one hand curled under her cheek like a child.
The dogs hadn't moved from their spot by the fireplace.
The house was quiet in that early morning way, just the tick of the old radiator and the coffee maker gurgling in the kitchen.
I poured a cup and went out to the workshop.
The shelves were still clamped to the workbench. Pine, sanded three times, edges rounded smooth. I ran my hand along the grain, feeling for splinters. Nothing sharp for small hands to catch on.
Elena thought I was building storage for the garage.
I'd told her that two weeks ago when she'd found the lumber in my truck.
She'd nodded, kissed my cheek, gone back to whatever she'd been doing.
She trusted me, trusted that when I said I was building something, I was building something that mattered.
She didn't know about the spare room upstairs, the one I’d said was meant for a home office. She didn’t know about the measurements I'd taken, or about the morning light that came through the east window. The kind of light a child should wake up to.
I picked up the sandpaper and kept working.
The wood was soft under my hands.
I thought about Elena standing in that doorway someday, hand on her stomach, finally understanding.
She'd cry. She cried when she was happy, I'd learned that.
Learned the way her voice went quiet when she talked to the dogs, that she burned toast because she got distracted reading, that she hummed when she was concentrating.
Always off-key, always the same three notes.
I learned that sometimes she still went somewhere in her head I couldn't follow. But she always came back, always reached for my hand.
I'd spent two years rebuilding this house.
Stripped wallpaper and refinished floors and replaced every window.
My grandmother's house, empty so long it had started to rot.
Now it had new bones. Now Elena made coffee in the kitchen and left her boots by the door and hung her jacket on the hook that used to be my grandmother's.
Now it was ours.
The back door opened and I looked up. She stood there in my flannel shirt, bare legs, hair falling out of the knot she'd tied it in. She was holding her coffee cup in both hands.
She didn't say anything. Just looked at me, at the shelf, and at the careful way I'd rounded the edges.
Then she smiled, small, like she knew something but wasn't saying it yet. She turned and went back inside. The light was coming up outside now, gray turning gold.
I ran my hand along the wood once more and followed her inside.