Epilogue
Crew
The house feels different when Emmie’s gone. She’s like sunlight that fills a room—you notice when it’s gone.
There’s already a text from her: I’m going to throw up. The studio is SO BIG. I look insane. Do I look insane?
Then a photo. She’s standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling window with the Manhattan skyline behind her, wearing the blue dress she tried on at least six times last Tuesday before I finally sat down on the bed and told her she looked gorgeous in all of them, which led to a whole thing, which led to her being twenty minutes late to dinner with Sadie.
She looks beautiful. She looks like she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.
I type back: You look perfect. Stop doubting yourself. Go be famous.
Three dots. Then: I love you. Hug my baby.
I set the phone face-down on the counter, pour my coffee, and stand there for a moment in the kitchen that feels too big without her in it.
Murphy is on a stool in the corner, judging me.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
He blinks once, slowly, and looks away.
At 6:45 I walk down the hall to the small bedroom with the yellow curtains Emmie picked out and the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling we put up on a Saturday afternoon last summer. I push the door open.
Clementine is already half-awake, which is how she always wakes up — gradual, suspicious, like she’s deciding whether consciousness is worth the trouble. She’s four. She’s got Emmie’s honey hair and my gray eyes and the absolute refusal to be rushed that she apparently developed on her own.
“Hey, bug.” I crouch down next to her bed. “Time to get up.”
She blinks at me. Considers this information.
“Daddy,” she says. Very seriously.
“Yeah?”
“You have an important job to do right now.”
I look around the room. Nothing obviously wrong. “What’s that?”
She lifts the edge of her blanket and pats the approximately eight inches of mattress beside her. “You have to snuggle me.”
Something in my chest hitches. A sharp, quiet thing that feels like gratitude and disbelief all tangled up together.
I look at her. At her messy hair and her solemn expression and the little yellow blanket with the ducks on it that Linda sent from some boutique in Austin and that Clementine has never once slept without.
“That’s my important job?” I ask.
“Yes.” She pats the mattress again. “Come on.”
I am a six-foot-four special ops officer. But I’m also her daddy, so I wedge myself into the twin-sized bed without a second thought.
She immediately burrows into my side, tucks her head under my chin, and pulls the duck blanket up over both of us with the focused determination I’m pretty sure she gets from me.
“Okay,” she announces. “I had a dream.”
“Tell me.”
“There was a horse.”
“What kind of horse?”
“A purple one.” She says this like it’s obvious, like all horses of consequence are purple. “And it could talk.”
“What did it say?”
She thinks about this very carefully. “It said… that we should have pancakes for breakfast.”
“The horse said that.”
“The talking purple horse, Daddy.” A pause. “He was very smart.”
I press my mouth to the top of her head and stay there for a moment. She smells like the lavender shampoo Emmie uses on her hair at bath time.
Outside, the city is waking up. Somewhere in New York, my wife is about to walk onto a television set and talk about her cookbook to several million people, and she’ll be wonderful, and afterward she’ll text me forty-seven times from backstage the way she always does, breathless and relieved and already thinking about what to cook for dinner when she gets home.
Here, a talking purple horse has just made a compelling argument for pancakes.
This is my life.
I spent thirty years building walls around the edges of it, keeping everything controlled and measured and safe, terrified that wanting something good meant losing it.
And then Emmie Marshall showed, signed a seventeen-page contract without reading it, and absolutely dismantled every wall I’d ever built.
Brick by brick. Cookie by cookie. One mandatory cuddle session at a time.
I never thought I’d have this. Genuinely. I had filed it under not for me alongside optimism and trusting that things might turn out okay.
But here I am. In a too-small bed. With a daughter I’d protect with my life.
“I miss Mommy,” she whispers into the dark.
“Me too,” I admit, tugging her closer. More than is probably normal. But she’s my person. I feel like half of me is missing when she’s gone. “Clem.”
“Hmm.”
“Five more minutes. Then we get up and make pancakes.”
She pats my arm with one small hand. “Good job, Daddy.”
I close my eyes.
Five more minutes.
* * *