Epilogue
Five years later
Logan
The fence along the north boundary held tight when I tested the top rail. Cedar posts, set thirty inches deep, tamped and leveled and sealed against rot. I’d replaced the whole line two summers ago, and the wood had weathered to a silver-gray that looked like it had always been there.
I kept walking. Tova moved beside me at her own pace, which had slowed over the past year or so.
Her muzzle had gone white and she didn’t chase the birds out of the pasture anymore, but she still made the morning walk with me every day.
She’d position herself in whatever patch of sun was closest to wherever I was working, and I’d step over her four or five times before lunch.
The barn came into view as I crested the slight rise past the east paddock.
It was a damn good barn. Better than the one it replaced, if I was being honest. Fresh white paint, green trim that Lark had picked because she said it matched the original. The sign above the doors read PAWSITIVE CONNECTIONS in clean, even letters.
Lark had let the kids from the pediatric program paint it, which meant the S leaned slightly to the left and the O in CONNECTIONS was a little too big, and she’d told anyone who suggested fixing it that they could take their opinion and feed it to Clarence.
Because the most important thing about that barn was that it had been built in love.
Clarence was still alive. He was nearly fifty years old and knew twenty-three curse words now and had zero intention of dying before he’d learned the rest. The cats had shifted over the years, the way cats did, but Princess Whiskers was still on her top shelf drinking her filtered water and judging everyone who walked through the door.
Al Pacacino? One could only wish that spitting motherfucker would go gently into the good night. Duke, still around too.
I stopped at the far edge of the property where the land sloped toward the tree line.
The access road was down there, overgrown now.
Lark had asked the county to gate it off permanently, and they’d done it the same month the verdict came in.
Carter Hollis got four years. His family’s lawyers had earned their money, and minimum security was a country club with a fence around it, but he was out of our lives and that was the only part that mattered.
The grants had been reinstated once the paper trail surfaced. Every door Carter had closed reopened when the people on the other side learned they’d been manipulated.
It didn’t happen fast. It took eighteen months of phone calls and documentation and Lark sitting across from foundation boards explaining what had been done to her without ever once asking for pity. She’d presented facts, answered questions, and let Pawsitive’s work speak for itself.
Isaac’s loan had been paid back in full, with interest, because Lark had insisted on the interest even though Isaac had tried to refuse it twice.
She’d mailed the final check with a photo she’d found of Gimbal wearing a birthday hat, and Isaac had called laughing so hard he couldn’t talk for the first thirty seconds.
Life was pretty damned good.
Tova caught a rabbit yesterday. She didn’t know what to do with it once she had it, so she just held it in her mouth and looked at me like I was supposed to handle the next part. Lark had to pry her jaws open. The rabbit was fine. Tova was insulted.
Sometimes I talked to Reid in the early light.
There was no schedule to it, no ritual. Some mornings, I’d walk past this spot and just keep going.
Other mornings, I’d stop and say whatever I had to say, out loud, the way I would have said it if he’d been leaning against the fence post beside me with a beer he shouldn’t be drinking at six in the morning.
Tova’s ears twitched at her name. She was lying in the grass a few feet away, chin on her paws, watching me with those brown eyes that had seen me through every nightmare for five years.
The nightmares still came. Not every night, not even most nights.
But when they did, she was there before my hands had time to clench, her weight settling across my chest, her nose at my throat, steady and patient until I came back.
Other dreams had taken the nightmare’s place.
Dreams about fence posts and feeding schedules and a woman who still couldn’t receive a compliment without changing the subject.
Dreams about a boy with his mother’s green eyes who’d said Tova before he said Dada, which Lark brought up constantly and I would never hear the end of.
“You’d like it here,” I told Reid. “You’d give me shit about the alpaca and you’d let Clarence bite you because you’d think it was funny, and Lark would have you on a horse inside of a week whether you wanted to be on one or not.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and looked at the mountains. The ridgeline was sharp against a sky that was turning from gray to pale blue, and the light was starting to hit the tops of the cottonwoods near the guest cabin.
“I’m sorry I was angry at you for so long.
I understand it now better than I did. I don’t agree with it, and I’d give anything to have you standing here, but I understand that the dark got louder than everything else and I’m sorry I didn’t hear it in time.
” I let that sit for a second. “I forgive you. And I miss you like hell. Every single day.”
Tova got up and pressed her head against my thigh. I dropped my hand to her ears and scratched the spot she’d been offering me since the night Lark put her in my cabin under the flimsiest excuse in the history of excuses.
“Come on, old girl. Chores.”
We walked back toward the house. The farmhouse was still yellow, still cheerful. The heat worked. The hot water worked. Everything worked, because I’d spent five years making sure of it, and because the woman who lived there had finally let someone help her keep the place standing.
I came around the side of the barn and saw her.
Lark was on the porch in one of the rocking chairs with a coffee mug in her hand that said WORLD’S OKAYEST RANCHER, which Beckett had given her, and she refused to drink from anything else.
Her hair was twisted up in the same knot that had never once in five years stayed where she put it, and the morning light caught the auburn and turned it copper.
My wife still took my breath away. I’d stopped being surprised by that somewhere around year two and had just accepted it as a permanent condition.
She’d be wringing out a mop or arguing with the vet on the phone or covered in mud up to her elbows, and my chest would do the same thing it had done in the coffee shop when she’d laughed at her own chaos and handed me a flyer.
Our Reid was on her hip, two years old and built like a small, determined tank.
He had Lark’s green eyes and my jaw and an opinion about everything that he expressed at full volume whether or not anyone was listening.
He was currently telling Lark something urgent about the chickens.
I caught the word chicken three times and no twice, which was the general shape of most of his speeches.
Lark looked up and saw me. The smile started slow, the way it always did when she spotted me across a distance, building from something private into something that reached her whole face.
“Your son has complaints about the chickens,” she called.
“He’s your son when he has complaints. He’s my son when he does something impressive.”
“Well, your son put his boot in the toilet this morning.”
“And he did it impressively.”
She laughed. Reid looked at me and pointed at something only he could see and said a word that might have been horse or might have been mud or might have been something he’d learned from Clarence that we’d be dealing with later.
I climbed the porch steps. Leaned down and kissed Lark, coffee and morning air and the faint smell of the lavender soap she’d been using since before I knew her.
Reid grabbed my ear, which was his version of a greeting.
I took him from her and settled him on my hip, and he immediately began explaining the chicken situation to me with the same intensity and hand gestures his mother used when she was making a point she considered important, which was all of them.
Tova climbed the porch steps behind me, walked to her spot beside the rocking chair, and lowered herself down with a long exhale.
I stood on the porch of a cheerful yellow farmhouse with my son in my arms and my dog at my feet and the woman I loved reaching for my hand, and the morning stretched out ahead of us the same way it had yesterday and would tomorrow, ordinary and extraordinary and entirely ours.
I’d driven into this town with a duffel bag and no plan and a noise in my head that never stopped. A woman had handed me a flyer and a purpose and a dog I didn’t ask for, and I’d spent five years building something I didn’t know I was allowed to have.
I was home.
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