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EPILOGUE
Oliver
Twelve months later…
Today is the grand opening of the Love, Lilly café. I watch with pride as Lilly works the room, charming everyone she meets, and I take in all that she has achieved. Here, today, she is surrounded by family and friends, everyone who loves her, and she is confident in who she is, soaking in the praise and adoration from everyone around her. Lilly has changed so much from that girl I picked up stranded on the side of the road just over one year ago.
As I watch her, I think back over the past year that I have been lucky enough to call her mine. The first few weeks of dating Lilly were as close to bliss as possible. We spent every spare moment together; Amy told us we were nauseatingly inseparable. My bosses at work were not thrilled when they noticed I was spending fewer hours at the office in the evenings and on the weekends, and as a result, my much-sought-after promotion went to someone else. And I could not find it in me to care. After spending so much of my adult life working towards something more, it felt good to enjoy my life in the here and now.
And enjoying it I have been. After the first month of being with Lilly, with her spending every night at my house, I convinced her to leave her apartment and move in with me. Lilly, Amy and I were all thrilled with this decision, Johnny not so much. Amy was especially happy with this move, as she had her best friend and an expert baker as her roommate.
A month after Lilly moved in, my parents decided to sell our family home and split the profits between me and Amy, to buy ourselves somewhere to call our own. Lilly and I, after much deliberation and many open-house inspections (because we needed to find a place with the perfect kitchen, you see), found a cute two-bedroom town house with a small yard, close to where Amy purchased her own place. Lilly has loved attempting (unsuccessfully) to grow a veggie garden, and she is now begging me to get a rescue puppy. So far, I have held firm in my decision to not get one, but as is the case with Lilly, she and I both know she will get her way eventually.
Over these past few months, Lilly has also been working hard to turn this Love, Lilly vision into a reality. Her inaugural pop-up café was a roaring success. Because of her popularity on social media, hundreds of people attended the first session, causing her to run out of food to serve by lunchtime. By using the income from the weekly pop-up café and the money she was making from sponsorship deals on Instagram and TikTok, about six months ago, Lilly resigned from that awful real estate office, and from then had been focusing on opening a full-time brick-and-mortar Love, Lilly café and bakery. In true Lilly form, when she went in to quit her job, she did so in style, telling her awful bosses where they could shove their job while also leaving behind a platter of cookies for them to enjoy.
And as for me, I have been spending every day feeling forever grateful that I can now call her mine. A few days ago, she found her old New Year’s resolution to-do list and with a laugh showed me item number four—where she had replaced “get over little Oliver crush” with “stay in love with Oliver forever.” And so it seems fitting, that here, today, on Valentine’s Day, I make this a reality. I nervously pat the engagement ring in my pocket and hope she will say yes. And that I will be lucky enough to spend the rest of my life loving Lilly.
