Epilogue
Sullivan
Three months later.
Havenridge yard is full of people.
Barbecue smoke. Speaker on the porch rail. The June heat is doing what June heat does in this part of Montana, which is hover at the edge of comfortable and remind you, hourly, that the air is thin.
I count the people on instinct. I do not move toward an exit. I’ve been working on it.
Seventeen, plus me, plus Tess.
It’s a familiar scene, an echo of the barbecue I attended briefly before leaving for Hollow Peak. Henry gave me the reason to leave, dressed up as a favor, but being Henry, he also knew I needed the space.
He’s at the refreshment table now with his wife, Shay. One arm is wrapped around her, the other cradles his baby son, Max, who’s sleeping on his shoulder.
Henry’s father, Ben, and his uncle, Jacob, are at the grill, having their usual argument about charcoal temperature.
Tom and Kitty are in the porch rocker, Kitty on his lap, laughing at something he said.
Daniel and Delaney are sitting on the porch step, his chin on her head.
Angus and Luna stand by the apple tree, Luna’s hand on his forearm, his arm around her shoulders.
Ethan and Jenna near the barbecue, his hand on the small of her back.
Tank and Jessie are by the apple crates, Jessie’s sketchbook open on her knee, Tank pretending he’s not obsessed with his flame-haired wife and failing. His best friends, Saint and Tex, are here too, wives in tow.
The Suttons. The Sutton wives. Tank, who is a Sutton in everything but bloodline.
Beckett, who runs the perimeter crew, talking to a younger guy I just met named Ridge, who’s new to the program and looks the way I looked the day I arrived, which is to say like a man with his back to a wall and the door in his line of sight.
I’ll sit with Ridge tomorrow. I’ve made an agreement with myself about that.
Tess is at the picnic table because Maggie made cornbread.
Tess and Maggie have been doing a thing for three months where Maggie teaches her one recipe a week and Tess teaches Maggie one technique a week, and between the two of them, they’ve generated enough baked goods to incapacitate the bunkhouse three times.
Tess is wearing a blue sundress, her hair around her shoulders.
Mine. All mine.
Tank wanders over to me at the porch rail, beer in one hand, being stalked by a soft baby goat called Baked Bean.
“Sullivan.”
“Tank.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the program?” Tank asks.
“Better than the first time.”
We watch the yard.
Tank takes a long pull on his beer. “You know, the day Jessie came up here, I made a decision in about forty-five seconds that I have not once regretted. And the deciding part of it was the easiest day of my life.”
He turns to look at me. “What I’m saying is—”
“Yeah, Tank, I know what you’re saying.”
He nods. He pats me on the shoulder. “All right.”
He wanders off, Baked Bean hot on his heels.
Jessie comes over a minute later, sketchbook under her arm, hair in a braid, and stands with me at the rail.
Jessie has been one of mine since the day a mare spooked at the lumberyard and an old episode caught me sideways.
Tank ran the four-count. Jessie handled the horse slowly, calmly, and without theatrics, and got the trigger out of my eyeline before the worst of it took hold.
She didn’t make a thing of it. She didn’t look at me differently the next time I came to the yard.
Then I left for Hollow Peak, and three months later, I came back with Tess.
Jessie folded Tess into Havenridge the way she once folded me, without asking what was missing, just filling it.
She took Tess up to the alpine lake the first weekend we were here.
She put Tess’s name on a flour-dusted apron in Maggie’s kitchen the third week.
She left a sketch on the dashboard of my truck last Tuesday—two pairs of boots inside a doorway, no caption, no signature.
“Six,” she says, knowing she’s one of the very few people who get to call me that.
Still, I can’t let it go unanswered. “Smudge.”
She frowns. “Don’t call me Smudge. Tank calls me Smudge. Don’t make me regret befriending you.”
I chuckle. The women in this place are kinder than I deserve and tougher than I expected, and I’ve stopped being surprised by either.
Jessie nudges my elbow. “Look at you attending a barbecue and speaking in more than grunts, you overachiever.”
I look at Tess, who’s still chatting with Maggie.
Jessie follows my gaze. “The right person makes a difference, huh?”
“Yeah.” My voice catches. “It does.”
Tess is calling me.
She’s at the picnic table, half a piece of cornbread in one hand, the other hand waving at me with the imperious flap that has been running my life since I first met her. Maggie is laughing, and so is Jenna. Even Delaney is laughing, and Delaney rations laughter.
“Sullivan Mercer,” Tess calls. “Get over here, I have a question.”
I cross the yard, weaving through the gaps, past shoulders, around chairs.
I’m no longer the man on the edge of these things. I’m a man going to answer his girlfriend’s question, and the ease of that still undoes me.
“Settle a debate,” she says, sliding over.
“About what?”
“Shay says Henry asked her to marry him on a porch, and Jenna says Ethan said the words ‘I need to marry you’ on a porch, and I say it’s fundamentally cheating that all the Sutton men have asked their women to marry them on porches and there is now an unfair pressure on you.”
“Mm.”
“I’m saying”—Tess’s mouth twitches—“that I would like to officially declare a moratorium on porch proposals in this family.”
“Mm.”
“Henry, would you back me up?”
“Tess, I’m cooking.”
“Henry Sutton, you are a coward.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maggie wipes her eyes. “She fits in so well.”
“She belongs,” Jenna agrees.
Maggie places the damp tissue in her pocket. “She’s one of us.”
“She’s family,” I say.
The table goes quiet.
Tess glances at me, hesitation on her features. It’s that little pause a woman gets when something she’s secretly wanted for ages is finally said out loud, something she hadn’t dared to ask for.
“Sullivan.”
“Yeah.” I set my beer down. I don’t know why. My hands want to be empty.
“Don’t make me cry at a barbecue.”
“Okay.”
“It’s tactically unsound.”
I look at her. The yard behind her, the smoke off the grill, all of it falls out of focus. All I see is her.
“There are seventeen people watching.”
“Eighteen, with you.”
“Sullivan.”
“Tess.” My voice is rough. “Walk with me for a second.”
She gets up because she always does. She slips her hand into mine, and I lead her out from the yard, around the side of the house, past the apple crates, toward the path that goes down to the creek.
Behind us, Tank asks loudly, “Where are they going?”
“Tank, sit down,” Jessie replies.
Maggie chimes in. “Eat your cornbread, Tank.”
The creek path is fifty yards from the house, running between two stands of birch that Tess spent her first weekend here identifying by leaf shape. She goes beside me without question, her hand in mine, her sundress swishing seductively as she walks.
She doesn’t ask where we’re going.
I stop at the bank, where the ground is solid and the creek is steady and unhurried. I turn to face her.
Tess looks up at me, and the afternoon light hits her glasses.
“Sullivan.” Her voice is careful. “Your face is doing a thing.”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Give me a second.”
She gives me three.
She stands in the afternoon light with her hands at her sides and her glasses slightly crooked on her nose, which is where they always are, which is where they always will be. Patient as she was on that porch step. Patient as she has been about everything that matters.
“Tess.”
“What’s happening, Sullivan?”
I didn’t bring a ring. I planned to do this in a room with a stove and a kettle and a blue mug, the way she’d remember it. The way I’d been turning it over in my mind for two weeks. I’m not in that room. I’m at a creek.
Her hand is in mine, and the Sutton family is roughly thirty yards behind me. I stood at the picnic table, said the word “family” and truly meant it. The moment is now.
“Tess Carter.”
“Sullivan Mercer.”
I smooth my thumb over the back of her hand.
“You showed up. You waved at a cabin you didn’t know was occupied.
You threw Tupperware at a stranger’s back.
You fell through your own porch step and laughed at it.
You gave me a porch step to fix, and I’ve been fixing things in your name since.
I would like, please, to keep fixing things in your name.
I would like to keep being a man with a list. I would like—”
Tess squeezes my hand, tears sliding down her cheeks. Her smile is the clearest, most certain smile I have ever seen on her.
“Sullivan—”
“I’m not done. I’ve spent a significant portion of my life believing I was the kind of man who’s safer at a distance. I made my peace with that. Or I thought I had.” I hold her gaze. “And then a woman arrived with a box and a stand mixer, and I ran out of things to tell myself.”
The creek flows on, steady and unbothered. A bird calls among the birches.
“I would like to ask you to stay forever,” I say gruffly. “And I’d like to do it simply, Tess, because everything I love about you happened to me in simple ways, and I would like to keep that pattern.”
“Is that—” She stops, then starts again. “Sullivan Mercer, are you…”
“I would like to be your husband.” My voice cracks.
A sound comes out of her: half-laugh, half something she’s swallowing back.
“Yes.”
There it is. One word, and the ground beneath me is different.
“Tess.”
“Yes, Sullivan.”
My hands tighten on hers. I don’t have to ask her to say it again. She reads me anyway. And then she gives it to me freely.
“Sullivan Mercer, I am going to marry you. I’ve been planning to marry you since you came down the ridge with your bad-attitude flannel and my Tupperware. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
I pick her up the way I imagined when I drove the access road this morning. She wraps her legs around my waist and buries her face in my neck. Holding her with both hands at the small of her back in the green and gold mess of light through the trees, I press my cheek to her hair and breathe.
“I don’t have a ring,” I murmur.
“I don’t need it.”
“I'll get you a gold one in town.”
“Sure,” she agrees, and I can feel her smiling.
I set her down.
We walk back up to the house, and the yard sees us coming.
Tank stands so fast that he spills his beer, and Jessie elbows him to sit back down.
Maggie’s mouth slowly forms the smile of a woman who’s had a hand on the future of every man at the table for forty years and is allowed, today, to enjoy a small win.
Tess holds up her left hand.
There is no ring on it yet.
Nobody needs one.
“Yes,” she calls, her voice clear across the yard. “I said yes.”
The yard erupts.
Tank is yelling. Jessie is laughing. Henry takes his hat off, presses it briefly to his chest, then puts it back on his head and goes back to the grill because Henry is, at his core, a man who congratulates by feeding people.
Maggie comes to me and takes my face in her hands. “Welcome home.”
I cover her hands with mine. “Thank you, Maggie.”
She kisses my forehead and releases me.
Across the yard, Tess is already surrounded by Shay, Luna, Kitty, Delaney, Jenna—a small, delighted half-circle of women around her empty left hand. She’s glowing. She catches my eye over their heads, and the glow only intensifies.
Tank materializes at my shoulder. “I knocked over my beer.”
“I saw.”
“Couldn’t be helped.”
“I know.”
A pause.
“Good man, Sullivan.” He pats me on the back, hard enough to mean something, then goes to salvage what’s left of his drink.
I stay where I am for one more second. Look at the yard. The smoke off the grill. The light going long and gold across the grass. Seventeen people, not counting Tess, not counting me, and I’m not standing near the exit.
Then I move toward my future wife.
That night, we walk back to our cabin under the apple trees, the second-to-last of the four guest cabins.
It’s small. One room with a stove, a kettle, and a blue mug and a white mug now sitting on the windowsill where they belong.
The bed is queen-sized with a white comforter.
A small picture is taped to the wall over the headboard. Two pairs of boots sit by the door.
And it has a porch, where we sit in the warm Montana dark. Tess is wearing the daffodil sweater. I’m in my flannel. The glow from the main house is a soft yellow square through the orchard.
“Sullivan?”
“Mm?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
A pause.
“Tess.”
“What?”
“Did you ever think,” I say roughly, “on the porch step, that this was where it was going?”
She tucks her head under my chin. “I had a very small suspicion.”
“How small?”
“Tupperware-sized.”
“Mm.”
“Did you?”
“No,” I say honestly. “No, I did not.”
“And now?”
I tighten my arm around her. “I’m exactly where I was going.”
She sighs contentedly.
“I love you, Tess.”
“I love you, Sullivan.”
I’m home.
Thank you for reading!