He grins. “Paraphrasing.”
The knot is unbraiding, unsnarling in me, reaching upward through my throat and rooting down through my stomach as he goes on.
“Nora Stephens,” he says, “I’ve racked my brain and this is the best I can come up with, so I really hope you like it.”
His gaze lifts, everything about it, about his face, about his posture, about him made up of sharp edges and jagged bits and shadows, all of it familiar, all of it perfect. Not for someone else, maybe, but for me.
“I move back to New York,” he says. “I get another editing job, or maybe take up agenting, or try writing again. You work your way up at Loggia, and we’re both busy all the time, and down in Sunshine Falls, Libby runs the local business she saved, and my parents spoil your nieces like the grandkids they so desperately want, and Brendan probably doesn’t get much better at fishing, but he gets to relax and even take paid vacations with your sister and their kids. And you and I—we go out to dinner.
“Wherever you want, whenever you want. We have a lot of fun being city people, and we’re happy. You let me love you as much as I know I can, for as long as I know I can, and you have it fucking all. That’s it. That’s the best I could come up with, and I really fucking hope you say—”
I kiss him then, like there isn’t someone reading one of the Bridgerton novels five feet away, like we’ve just found each other on a deserted island after months apart. My hands in his hair, my tongue catching on his teeth, his palms sliding around behind me and squeezing me to him in the most thoroughly public groping we’ve managed yet.
“I love you, Nora,” he says when we pull apart a few inches to breathe. “I think I love everything about you.”
“Even my Peloton?” I ask.
“Great piece of equipment,” he says.
“The fact that I check my email after work hours?”
“Just makes it easier to share Bigfoot erotica without having to walk across the room,” he says.
“Sometimes I wear very impractical shoes,” I add.
“Nothing impractical about looking hot,” he says.
“And what about my bloodlust?”
His eyes go heavy as he smiles. “That,” he says, “might be my favorite thing. Be my shark, Stephens.”
“Already was,” I say. “Always have been.”
“I love you,” he says again.
“I love you too.” I don’t have to force it past a knot or through the vise of a tight throat. It’s simply the truth, and it breathes out of me, a wisp of smoke, a sigh, another floating blossom on a current carrying billions of them.
“I know,” he says. “I can read you like a book.”
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
THERE ARE BALLOONS in the window, a chalkboard sign out front. Through the soft glare on the glass, you can see the crowd milling around, toasting with champagne flutes, talking, laughing, browsing.
To the uninitiated, it might look like a birthday party. There is, after all, a little girl with strawberry blond waves—newly four years old—who has stolen a cupcake from the tower of them at the back of the shop, and now runs in dizzying figure eights around the legs of the adults, knocking into chairs and shelves, purple icing smeared around her lips.
Or the crowd could be celebrating her lanky older sister, with the straight, ashy bangs, who has finally, after some struggle, learned to read. （Now she spends almost every day folded up in the green beanbag chair inside the children’s book room with a book in her lap.） Or it could all be for the baby on the pink-haired woman’s hip. She crawled for the first time just nine days ago （albeit backward, and only for a second）， and you’d think she’d won the Nobel Prize, from the screaming on her mom and aunt’s video call. （“Do it again, Kitty! Show Auntie Nono how you’re the most agile, athletic baby of all time!”）
There’s cause to celebrate the pink-haired woman’s husband too. After weeks of trailing along with the local Catch-and-Release Club, he finally caught something early that morning, while the mist was still thick across the river—even if it was just a very large bra.
The cupcake-thieving four-year-old darts through his legs and runs smack into the tall older man using the cane. She giggles as he rustles her hair. Someone pats his arm and congratulates him on finally retiring. “More time to clean the gutters at home,” he says.
Maybe everyone’s here to honor the woman with the sweet, crinkly eyes, who moves in a cloud of weedy jasmine—two of her paintings have just been accepted into a group show.