Epilogue
WALDEN
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
The ring has been in my sock drawer for three weeks.
Not because I'm nervous. I've cut wood on a screaming table saw since I was eighteen, pulled a flatbed through mountain roads in January, buried the woman I married at twenty six. Nervous isn't really in my vocabulary anymore.
But Hattie Bloom deserves better than a sock drawer proposal from a man with sawdust in his hair. Cora got a sunrise proposal on the ridge behind the mill. She said yes before I finished the question, then made me start over because she wanted to remember the whole thing.
So the ring waits. A simple diamond from the jewelry store in town, where the owner didn't even blink when I walked in because apparently Patty Cole had already called ahead.
"Wal, the coffee maker is doing the thing again."
Hattie's voice carries from the kitchen.
Our kitchen. Because four months ago she packed her apartment in Reno, loaded a moving truck, and drove three hours into these mountains with two suitcases, a dead succulent she insists is just resting, and a cardboard box labeled UNDERWEAR COLLECTION (INAPPROPRIATE) that she made me carry inside in front of Patty Cole's parked car.
Patty hasn't stopped talking about it since.
The coffee maker is not doing a thing. The coffee maker is fine. Hattie just doesn't press the button hard enough because she's used to her old single serve machine that responded to a gentle suggestion. Mine requires commitment.
"Press harder," I call from the bedroom, pulling on my boots.
"I AM pressing harder."
"Press like you mean it."
"I MEAN IT VERY MUCH, WALDEN."
Maple lifts her head from the foot of the bed. Her tail wags. It wags every morning now, full and real, because Hattie sings in the kitchen and drops scrambled egg pieces on the floor and calls Maple "my best girl" in a voice that makes the dog's entire body vibrate with joy.
My dog is not the only one vibrating.
Hattie got a teaching position at Whisper Vale Elementary in October.
First grade, because they didn't have a kindergarten opening, but she said first graders are just tall kindergarteners with better handwriting.
She walks to school every morning because the town is small enough for that.
Comes home smelling like markers and hand sanitizer.
Tells me about her students over dinner while sitting on my counter, bare feet swinging.
Our counter. Our dinner. She corrects me every time.
Walking into the kitchen, I find her standing at the coffee maker in one of my flannels, bare legs, hair wild from sleep. The flannel hangs to mid thigh. She's pressing the button with one finger like she's poking a sleeping animal.
"You gotta commit." Reaching around her, I press the button with my palm. The machine growls to life. "It respects force."
"Your coffee maker has toxic masculinity."
"My coffee maker makes excellent coffee if you stop being polite to it."
She turns in the circle of my arms, chin tilted up, green eyes still soft from sleep. Freckles across her nose. Dimples already forming because she can't look at me without smiling, and I'm starting to suspect that's going to be true for the rest of our lives.
"Good morning." She rises on her toes, presses a kiss to my jaw.
"Morning." My hands settle on her hips. The flannel is warm from her body. "You sleep okay?"
"Mmhm. Except Maple took the entire left side of the bed."
"That's her side."
"It's MY side."
"It was her side first."
"Walden Kirby, are you choosing the dog over me?"
"I'm choosing diplomacy."
She laughs, and the sound fills the kitchen the same way it fills every room in this house.
Every corner that used to be quiet. Every silence that used to feel permanent.
Hattie Bloom walked into my life through a wrong number and turned the volume up on everything, and I can't believe I ever thought the quiet was something I wanted.
Cora's photo is on the mantel. The one I showed Hattie the day I drove to her school.
It stays because Cora is part of the story, and Hattie has never once asked me to move it.
Once, I caught her talking to the photo.
Telling Cora about a student who ate glue.
"You would've loved this kid," Hattie said to the picture, and I stood in the hallway with my heart cracking open in the best possible way.
Holly Pearce still drops off pie every Tuesday. Now she drops off two slices. Hattie has joined some kind of Tuesday coffee thing with Holly and a woman named Piper who does vintage furniture. I don't ask questions.
"So." Hattie takes her coffee mug, wraps both hands around it. She's doing the thing where she looks at me sideways while pretending to look at the coffee. "I need to tell you something."
"Okay."
"And I need you to not freak out."
"I don't freak out."
"You freaked out when Marcus sent me a birthday card addressed to 'Miss Bloom and the Big Lumberjack.'"
"That wasn't freaking out. That was concern about a five year old knowing my dimensions."
"He's six now. He had a birthday."
"Hattie."
She sets the mug on the counter. Takes a breath. Both hands pressed flat on the surface behind her, which is her tell. She braces against things when she's about to say something she's been holding.
"I'm pregnant."
The kitchen goes still. Coffee maker gurgling. Maple's nails on the hardwood. My own pulse in my ears, suddenly very loud.
"Seven weeks," she says. "I took the test yesterday while you were at the mill. Then I took two more because the first one seemed too fast." Her eyes are wet. Green, bright, terrified. "Say something."
The sock drawer. Three weeks. A ring I've been waiting for the right moment to give her, and the right moment is standing in my kitchen in my flannel telling me she's carrying my child.
"Don't move."
"What?"
I'm already down the hallway. Sock drawer, left side, under the wool pair I never wear. The box is small, black, been sitting there since I drove to town on a Tuesday while she was at school.
Back in the kitchen. She hasn't moved. Her hands are still on the counter, tears tracking down her cheeks, mouth open.
I drop to one knee on the kitchen floor.
"Oh my god," she whispers.
"You told me once that you fell for me because of the needy letter Q." Opening the box. Simple diamond, thin band. Right for her hands, which are small, always warm. "I fell for you because you texted me about underwear at 6:47 in the morning and made me laugh for the first time in two years."
"Wal."
"Marry me, Hattie."
She slides off the counter onto the floor with me. Both knees, hands on my face, tears everywhere.
"Yes." Kissing me between words. "Yes. Obviously yes."
The ring fits. Because Patty Cole gave me her size, which Patty somehow knew, which I've stopped questioning.
Maple trots in, investigates the situation, licks Hattie's face. Hattie laughs through her tears, holding up her hand so the diamond catches the morning light through the kitchen window.
"We have to tell Tessa," she says.
"We have to tell my brother."
"We have to tell Marcus."
"Marcus is going to write a report."
She laughs, and I pull her into my lap on the kitchen floor. Her arms around my neck, the flannel riding up, the coffee getting cold on the counter above us. My hand settles on her stomach. Flat still, nothing to feel. But something is there. Something we made.
Forty years old. A widower, a sawyer, a man who lived in silence for two years because he forgot what his own laughter sounded like. And now the kitchen is loud with it.
Wrong number. Right woman. And she's staying.