42 | Epilog
TESSA
The Fourth of July felt like a different life.
Not because so much had changed—though it had—but because of how quietly it had happened. No dramatic turning point, no single moment where everything shifted. Just days accumulating into weeks, and weeks into the particular shape of a life I hadn’t planned but recognized anyway.
Melissa had called in August.
I’d answered, which I hadn’t expected myself to do.
The conversation was short. An apology that was genuine enough to matter and incomplete enough to sting.
She said she’d been in love with Theo since they were fifteen and had spent years convincing herself that managing the situation was the same as accepting it.
Part of me wanted to tell her exactly what I thought of her. That she was manipulative and selfish and that what she’d done had cost us twelve years we were never getting back. The words were there, ready, and she worked for every one of them.
But I didn’t say them.
Partly because she didn’t deserve that much of my energy. Partly because the truth was more complicated than rage—we should have talked after homecoming, Theo and I. We weren’t ready then. We are now. And Melissa, for all the damage she’d done, hadn’t been the only reason we’d lost each other.
So I told her I appreciated the call. Meant it, mostly.
I told Theo afterward that I wanted to find a way to forgive her eventually, because carrying it felt heavy and I was tired of heavy things. He said he understood. Left it at that.
Hailey was less philosophical about it.
She looked at me across the table one night and said, with great calm, that Melissa was no longer welcome in the group. Then she told Melissa the same thing—without any calm at all.
After that, the group got smaller.
But it got real in a way it hadn’t been before. Like Melissa had been a low-grade pressure on all of us for years—something we’d adjusted to so gradually we’d stopped noticing it was there—and without her, people relaxed into each other differently. Easier. Truer.
Charles disappeared with her. We heard later that he’d been seeing someone else the entire time. Nobody was surprised.
Nobody particularly cared.
The apartment was ours now.
Technically it was still his, but somewhere between July and December it had become something else—my books on the third shelf, my mug on the second, my toothbrush next to his.
I’d brought things up gradually from my old place: my favorite blanket, the lamp that cast better light for reading, the kitchen things I’d accumulated over years of living alone.
Including my ladle.
It was slightly too tall for the drawer it belonged in, which meant every second time I opened it, the handle caught on the frame and the whole thing jammed. Theo had suggested, twice, that we find it a different home. I had declined, twice. It was my ladle and we had been through things together.
He’d stopped suggesting.
I was thinking about the drawer when I pushed open the bedroom door.
And stopped.
The room was full of flowers.
Pink peonies, everywhere—on the nightstand, along the windowsill, arranged in clusters on the floor that I’d have to step carefully around. The afternoon light came through the curtains, pale and even, and caught every petal.
Theo was standing in the middle of it.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” I looked around. “What—”
I looked at him.
“I wanted to do it properly,” he said. “The first time was—”
“Perfect,” I said.
“In yesterday’s clothes. With a plastic ring from 1998.”
“It was perfect.”
“Tessa.”
“It was.”
He exhaled. Reached into his pocket.
The box was small. Velvet, deep green. He opened it and held it out, and I looked down, and my breath caught.
Rose gold band. And at the center—a diamond, pale pink and luminous, oval-cut, the color of something between a sunset and a seashell. The kind of stone that looked delicate until the light hit it, and then it was quietly, unmistakably extraordinary.
“The stone,” he said. “I wanted it to—”
“It’s pink,” I said.
“It’s pink.”
I looked up at him.
“I had it made.” A pause. “The jeweler thought I was insane when I described what I wanted. I showed her a photo of a plastic ring from a county fair and said—close to this, but real.”
I pressed my lips together.
“She was very professional about it,” he added.
I laughed—short, helpless.
He went down on one knee.
The peonies were everywhere around him, ridiculous and extravagant and exactly right, and he looked up at me with the expression I’d learned to read over the past five months—the one that wasn’t quite calm, the one that cost something to hold steady.
“I had a speech,” he said. “I wrote it down. I practiced it.”
“What happened to it?”
“I forgot it the moment you walked in.” He held my gaze. “I love you. I’ve loved you since we were kids and I’ll love you when we’re old and I don’t want to spend another day not being married to you.” A beat. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Obviously yes.”
He slid the ring onto my finger.
It fit perfectly.
I looked at it for a long moment. The diamond caught the December light and held it, pale pink and certain.
I pulled him up and kissed him, and his arms came around me.
He kissed me slowly at first—soft, unhurried, his hands on my face.
Then deeper, one hand sliding into my hair, the other pressing warm at my lower back, and I stopped thinking about rings or flowers or anything that wasn’t his mouth on mine.
His lips moved to my jaw. My neck. Lower—through the fabric of my blouse, warm and deliberate, tracing down to my sternum, my stomach, the curve of my hip through my skirt.
I exhaled sharply.
He dropped to his knees again.
His hands found the hem of my skirt and pushed it up slowly, and then his mouth was on my knee, my inner thigh, moving upward along with the unhurried patience of someone who had decided exactly how this was going to go.
My hand found his hair.
He pressed his lips to the inside of my thigh—higher now, close enough that my breath stopped—and then his fingers hooked into my underwear and drew it down, and I felt the cool air and then his mouth and made a sound that had nothing to do with dignity.
He took his time.
His hands gripped my hips, steadying me when my legs started to shake, my free hand finding his shoulder just to have something to hold onto.
“Theo—”
His hands slid lower. Not just steadying me anymore—his palms spreading warm across my ass, gripping, pulling me closer against his mouth in a way that made my breath leave me completely.
“Theo—” His name came out differently this time. Less coherent.
He made a low sound against me that vibrated through my whole body, and I gasped and my grip tightened in his hair.
His hands kneaded slowly, deliberately—holding me in place and touching me at the same time, like he had two separate agendas and intended to pursue both—while his tongue moved in slow circles that wound me tighter with every stroke.
“Please—” The word came out broken. “Please, I need—”
He pressed closer, his tongue moving faster now, his hands still gripping me, still pulling me against him like he couldn’t get close enough—
I stopped trying to stay quiet.
The pressure built—relentless, inevitable—my thighs shaking, my whole body wound tight, until it crested and broke and I came apart standing in the middle of a room full of pink flowers, his name on my lips, my fingers tight in his hair, his hands holding me through every wave.
Every one of them.
Then he rose—unhurried, certain, his expression deeply, quietly satisfied—and looked at me.
“Bed,” he said quietly.
I didn’t argue.
He guided me back until my knees hit the mattress, and I sank down onto the sheets among scattered petals, and he followed me down, his weight settling over me, his mouth finding mine again.
Then he sat back and reached for the buttons of my blouse.
One. Two. Three. His fingers were unhurried, his eyes on mine the whole time, like he was in no hurry to get anywhere and intended to be present for every second of the way there.
He pushed the blouse off my shoulders. Unzipped my skirt and drew it down and off.
Unclasped my bra with one hand—practiced, certain—and let it fall.
Then he stood and undid his own shirt. His trousers. Watching me watch him.
I stopped trying to be casual about it.
He came back down over me and his mouth found my throat—slow, deliberate—then my collarbone, then lower, his tongue tracing warm circles until I arched against him and his hands pressed me back down into the petals.
“I’ve got you,” he said against my skin.
“I know,” I said. “I know, just—”
His mouth moved back to mine and he kissed me deeply, his hand sliding down my stomach, and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pulled him closer and he pushed into me—slowly,
one long stroke—and I exhaled against his neck with the particular exhale that meant everything had found its right place.
He stayed still for a moment.
Forehead pressed to mine.
Both of us just breathing.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I answered.
His mouth curved.
Then he started to move.
Unhurried and certain, the rhythm that was ours now—learned and specific, built from months of paying attention.
His mouth at my neck, my shoulder, his hands moving over me with the focused intensity that still made my breath catch.
I matched him, my hips rising to meet his, my nails finding his back.
The pressure built—deeper now, harder, the careful control fraying at the edges the way it always did—his breath uneven against my lips, my fingers tight in his hair.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked at him.
His eyes stayed on mine as everything coiled tighter, as the rhythm built into something neither of us was going to hold back much longer, and I felt it coming—
I came apart with his name on my lips and my face pressed into his neck, my whole body clenching around him, and he followed a moment later—my name low and wrecked against my hair, his whole body shuddering before going still and heavy against me.
We lay there afterward in the pale December light. A peony petal had landed on my shoulder. Another was caught in his hair.
Neither of us moved to fix it.
“The flowers are going to be everywhere,” I said finally.
“Yes.”
“We’re going to be finding petals for weeks.”
“Probably.”
His hand moved slowly through my hair. I smiled into his chest.
A moment passed. The city outside was quiet—everyone somewhere warm, the streets briefly emptied of their usual urgency.
Then I shifted, propping myself up slightly to look at him.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
He looked at me. Something in my expression made him go still.
“Okay,” he said carefully.
I held his gaze.
“I’m pregnant.”
He went very still.
I watched him process it—the quiet, the way his expression moved through something too large to settle immediately. His eyes dropped briefly to my face, my stomach, then came back to me.
Then he smiled.
Not the careful smile. Not the controlled one. The real one—wide and unhurried, reaching his eyes, lighting his whole face in a way I didn’t see often enough and never got used to.
My heart started beating again.
“How long have you known?” he asked.
“Three days.” A beat. “I wanted to wait for the right moment.”
He pulled me back down against his chest, his arms tightening around me, his mouth pressing to the top of my head.
“I thought,” he said, “that I couldn’t be happier than I was five minutes ago.”
I waited.
“I was wrong,” he said quietly.
I pressed my face into his chest and felt him exhale slowly above me, and outside the December light faded and the city did what it always did—patient, indifferent, luminous—while we lay in a room full of pink flowers and figured out what came next.
Together.
The three of us.
THE END