Epilogue #2
He grunted in frustration and pushed me out the shower door. “He’s not going to be there. Judd is taking him to Costco again. I don’t know what’s so exciting about a barrel of pretzels, but they seem to go through a lot of them.”
I snorted as I reached for a towel. “You know that a ‘Costco run’ is a euphemism, right?”
“It is?”
I patted his arm. “I’ll explain it to you when you’re older.”
We joked back and forth while getting dressed, collecting the triple batch of brownies Trace had made earlier, and loading up in Trace’s truck. He held my hand on the short drive to the lodge, updating me on a promising applicant for the director of operations role at SERA.
“Clay Dennison sent him,” he explained. “The guy’s been in leadership at Colorado Parks and Wildlife for several years.”
I wondered idly if the candidate would be the kind of man I could set Rosie up with. I’d pay good money to give her a taste of her own medicine by giving her new love interest a hard time.
“Speaking of Clay,” Trace said, with that particular tone in his voice that indicated it was a serious topic. “He sent me an update on Jake’s situation.”
I blew out a breath. “I already heard about it from Shay. He agreed to the three years. She’s devastated, but she said she understands.”
“It was a lot of charges, baby. He’s lucky with three. The prosecutors only agreed to the deal because of you.”
I nodded. “She knows. It’s still three years without her brother in her life.”
He squeezed my hand before letting go and running his hand over my hair. “She’s doing okay. Has lots of friends already at MTSU. I’m sure he thinks three years in prison in exchange for her getting a college degree in the recording industry is well worth it.”
I huffed out a laugh. “I hope she finishes. She’s going to be singing at every open mic night she can in hopes of getting discovered.”
Trace turned down the long entry drive to Marian Lodge. “She knows she needs to keep her grades up to keep the scholarship. What she decides to do from here is on her.”
Trace had kept his promise and introduced her to my father.
He’d controlled his emotions admirably, considering how much he hadn’t controlled them when hearing about our experience in Hush.
In the end, he’d agreed to help her find a scholarship to a decent college in Nashville because I hadn’t just inherited my musical talent from him; I’d gotten his bleeding heart, too.
Shay had barely been able to breathe in his presence, but had quickly become even more of a Jude Marian fan after that.
“Look at all the cars!” I squawked. “Shit, we’re late if everyone else is already here.”
“Yes, well, maybe you shouldn’t have told me about thirteen-year-old Wolfe’s Trace-awakening,” he grumbled. “Made me feel like a god. Like a bronzed god shining in the sun.”
I turned to stare at him. “Oh my god, that’s what you got from that story?”
He shrugged. “Took me a long time to get the story out of you. And then I wanted to fuck about it. Sue me.”
“I was a child!”
He threw the truck into Park and turned to stare at me. “After all this time of you begging me not to see you as a child, and now you want me to think of you as a child?”
“I was literally thirteen!”
He flapped a hand in the air. “Not in my version. In my version, you were a very precocious eighteen-year-old just seeing a bronzed sun god for the first time. And the god even has DIY skills.”
I yanked open the truck door. “Says the man who had to read the instruction manual for a Command Strip three days ago,” I muttered as I jumped out and moved to the back door to grab the tray of brownies.
“It’s different adhesive on each side. Explain to me how that makes sense.”
“Hurry up. Gabe’s flying in from Alaska, and I can’t wait to hear how his trip was.”
We continued to bicker until we stepped into the large entry space of the lodge. There were clusters of sofas and chairs in various spots around the room, but they were all empty. As always, when it was a family event, the party was in the back, in the giant kitchen and family room combo.
Trace reached for my elbow to stop me before we reached the door to the kitchen. “Wait.”
I turned to face him with concern. “You okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just… we’re not here for a family dinner. It’s also to celebrate something.”
I looked at him funny. “Okay… Celebrate what? For who? I thought we were trying to fit one last family dinner in before your next cohort starts next week.”
While Trace had cut way down on the amount of time he spent in the backcountry with his SERA students, he was still a very active, hands-on instructor.
It was the reason he was hiring an operations director, so he could keep working with the students and instructors himself.
The upside to his long trips away from me was the epic sex when he returned.
“It is, yes. Kind of,” he said. “But…”
I made a little circular motion with my hand to get him to move this along.
Dad and Papa had come to town to spend some time with us, and I wanted to make sure they knew how excited I was to have them there.
Papa had struggled with all of my news this summer, and we were finally in a better place now.
Even though we’d seen them only a few weeks ago at my official retirement dinner from the foundation, I still wanted to run in and grab a hug from each of them before the night got too chaotic.
Trace stepped back and ran his fingers through his hair. “Jesus, fuck. Okay. Just… just remember you made that jackass hand motion right before I proposed to you, okay?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“Chickie, come!”
Foster Blake’s hound dog came trotting down the hallway from the open kitchen door, where the noise had suddenly quieted.
I glanced at her and snapped my eyes back to Trace, who’d suddenly sunk down on one knee.
“What?” I said again, stupidly.
Trace grinned up at me while motioning Chickie into a sit right next to him. Around her collar was a bright red ribbon, as if she were being gifted to me. It wasn’t until I looked more closely that I realized there was something tied to it.
Something shiny.
Trace took a breath. “I wasn’t sure you’d want everyone’s eyes on you when I did this, but I was very sure you’d want to share our news with your family as soon as possible.”
“Our family,” I murmured.
His grin widened as he nodded. “Our family. And I thought what better way to propose than a search and rescue dog carrying your ring. Because I need you to know, Wolfe Marian, that wherever you go, I will follow. And if you’re ever lost, I will find you.”
The tears came immediately. “I know,” I whispered.
He fumbled the bow on the ribbon until he could slide the ring off and place it on my finger.
“And that’s not the only thing I need you to know,” he continued, holding my hand in his.
“I have loved you most of your life. I have loved you from your gap-toothed Cub Scout days to your pimple-faced awkward stage. From your prickly teenager years to the moment you turned up on the wharf, lost and questioning everything. In all that time, I watched you grow and mature, learn who you were and what kind of man you wanted to be. And then I got to see you embrace a new path, bring music and joy to people through the foundation, and then music and joy to people through your own songs. Even though I didn’t know it was you at the time, I watched you bring love and understanding into people’s lives as Fletcher Coe.
I was one of those people. I am one of those people. ”
I sniffled and whispered. “You know the answer is yes, right?”
He pressed a smiling kiss on the back of my hand. “I do. But I’m not done yet.”
I laughed wetly through my tears as he continued.
“I watched you become a man, confident and brave. Creative and exceptional. And now it would be the greatest honor of my life to walk beside you as an equal, growing and adventuring together from here on out. I love you with everything I am. You are the very heart of me, Wolfe Marian. Will you marry me?”