Epilogue #2
Mom was out of her seat and across the kitchen so fast her napkin was still settling on her chair. I heard the embrace — Mom's particular sound of joy, the one she reserved for people she loved fiercely and hadn't seen in too long.
And then she walked into the kitchen, and the floor dropped out from under me.
Jessica Williams. Smaller than I expected — petite, barely reaching my shoulder, even in the heels.
Red heels, ridiculous, completely wrong for a ranch house, and completely right for a woman who'd never once in her life dressed for the room she was in.
Long dark brown hair falling past her shoulders, ruby-red lips, and a face that was — Christ. She'd always been pretty.
She wasn't pretty anymore. She was strikingly, absurdly, unfairly beautiful in a way that made my brain go blank.
A dress that belonged in Manhattan, not Copper Creek, and a smile that belonged everywhere.
She scanned the table. The smile was already enormous, but when her eyes found me, it went nuclear.
"Well, Hunter Blackwood." She planted herself in the kitchen doorway — hip cocked, arms crossed — and looked me up and down with the complete absence of subtlety that had been getting her into trouble since the fifth grade. "As I live and breathe. You grew up nice, cowboy."
The table went quiet. Every Blackwood eye in the room moved to me.
"What the fuck," I said. Under my breath. Not under enough.
"Language, Hunter," Mom said. She was beaming. Actually beaming. The blue dress. The extra place setting I hadn't noticed. The way she'd been smiling all afternoon like she had a secret she was physically in pain from keeping.
She'd done this. Of course, she'd done this.
Jessica pushed off the doorframe and walked toward the table, and the room rearranged itself around her the way rooms always had — people shifting, energy lifting, the volume going up just because she was in it.
She hugged Maggie. She hugged Sophia. She shook Dad's hand, and he did the two-handed hold, which meant he remembered her, which meant Momma had been talking about her, which meant this had been in motion for a lot longer than tonight.
She stopped in front of me. Close. The perfume hit me — something expensive, something that smelled like cities and late nights and a life I'd never lived. Her eyes were the same. Brown, bright, daring me to react. They'd been daring me to react since we were twelve years old.
"You going to say hello," she said, "or just stand there looking like someone hit you with a shovel?"
"Jessica."
"That's all I get? Jessica? " She tilted her head.
The smile was wicked. "Twelve years and the best you've got is my name?
God, you're still terrible at this." She reached up and straightened my collar — my clean shirt, the one Mom had put on the hook, the one I'd pulled on ten minutes ago — and her fingers brushed my neck, and I felt it in my spine.
"You look good, Hunt. Really good. It's annoying. "
She'd called me Hunt. Very few people called me Hunt.
And it never hit quite as hard as when she did.
It started a lifetime ago, when we were kids who spent every day together, and she was the loud to my quiet and the chaos to my calm and the only person who'd ever been able to pull words out of me without trying.
"Sit down, everyone," Mom said. "The food's getting cold."
Jessica sat. Across from me, because of course, Mom had set the place across from me. She caught my eye over the bread basket and winked, and my stomach did something it hadn't done in a very long time.
I sat down. Picked up my fork. Didn't look at her.
Looked at her.
She was already looking back. Still smiling. Still daring.
Shit.
Mom passed the rolls. The table erupted into noise and conversation and the particular Sunday dinner chaos that meant everyone was home, and everyone was fed, and everything was as it should be.
Maisie was telling Jessica about peninsulas.
Clay was watching me from across the table with a grin he wasn't even trying to hide.
Callie elbowed him, and he grinned wider.
Mom was pouring wine and humming and looking at me with the satisfied expression of a woman who'd just played her next card and knew exactly how the hand would go.
I ate my dinner. I didn't say much. I never did.
But I could feel her across the table the way you feel a weather front moving in — the charge in the air, the shift in pressure, the certainty that something was about to change and there wasn't a damn thing you could do to stop it.
The porch light was on.
It was always on.
THE END
Thank you for reading Whiskey Skies !