I can hardly disagree. I thread my fingers into her hair and scratch lightly, and she purrs in pleasure. This isournightly ritual, and it’s one role I never tire of playing. All day long I share her, and every night, my world shrinks down to this swing and the night air, when she belongs entirely to me again.
I love her like this—relaxed, languid, and content, the stressors and demands of everyday life receded, washed away like the tide going out. Her curls spill across my lap, wild as the marsh grasses, an unruly tangle she long ago stopped trying to tame. Her face is bare of makeup, her skin sun-kissed and faintly freckled, the moonlight softening the angles the camera loves almost as much as I do. She’s stunning in this undone state, more herself than anywhere else.
“Do you hear that?” she says, and I take in what we affectionately call the Seafolly soundtrack, the Lowcountry chorus of crashing waves and rustling palmetto fronds and chirping cicadas echoing in the night air. “Silence. Peace and quiet.”
I hum, saying nothing. I know the particular exhaustion ofparenthood well enough myself—the chaotic days, the never-ending messes, the overstimulation of being touched and tugged in every direction—but I can’t bring myself to wish a single moment of it away.
I’ve had a lot of time to contemplate the quiet. As a kid, I spent entire years steeped in silence, wishing alternately for more friends, for a present father, for my mom to come home from work before it got dark, for a sibling that never materialized. I had to grow up fast, help my mom, be the man of the house. Bustling film sets were a welcome reprieve from my loneliness. After Scarlett left and my mom passed, my world, which had briefly been full of light and color, went dark again. I spent the years after trying to fill the void they left, dulling my pain with anything that would distract from their absence. Though she tries, Scarlett can’t really understand what it was like for me. And how could she? She grew up in a house bursting with people and laughter and love, where quiet was a pipe dream, the stuff of family jokes. She doesn’t know how suffocating the silence can feel when it’s not chosen, when it’s all you have.
Now, my life is loud. I revel in the racket and silliness, which is probably why I’m such a hopeless disciplinarian. I’ll take squealing over silence ten times out of ten. To me, the clamor of our lives isn’t chaos at all—it’s proof that I got everything I always dreamed of. Noise is my greatest blessing. It means I’m not alone anymore, and that’s all I ever wanted.
“You know what I was thinking?” I say, changing the subject.
“What’s that?”
I push off lightly, keeping us rocking at a steady pace. “Ten years ago I tricked you into coming back here for the reunion.”
“Tricked me, huh?” she says, laughing. “Maybe I wanted to come back.”
I scoff. “You didnotwant to come back.”
“Of course I wanted to come back. I just needed a little nudge.”
It’s a familiar fight, as comfortable and well-worn as a pair of old slippers. “Hmm,” I say, like I’m not fooled. “And now you’ve been here ten years.”
“Ten amazing, blissful years,” she confirms with a smile that crinkles her eyes, then tugs on my arm until I bend down to kiss her.
After that fateful summer ten years ago, it didn’t take long for us to make some big moves. As I’d promised, I tagged along while she filmedThe Ingenue, hopscotching from Venice to Barcelona to Corsica, and saw to all her off-camera needs. I ran lines with her, rubbed her feet, kept her fed, gave her the intimate, (ahem) hands-on attention she swore had become a crucial part of her process. I fulfilled that last duty with all the dedication and diligence it demanded. What can I say? I’m a giver.
It was after one such prep session that she rested her head on my chest, venting about an issue she was having with one of the other actors, and how hard it was to balance navigating the situation as a producer without jeopardizing her working relationship with the costar.
I grimaced in sympathy. “That’s a tricky one,” I told her as I went to grab us a couple bottles of water from the kitchen of our beachside bungalow. The sound of the sea drifted in through the cracked window, warm Mediterranean air wafting through the villa. No matter how far we traveled, the ocean always seemed to find us. “For what it’s worth, I think you’rehandling it the best you possibly can, considering everything you’re juggling. I have a couple of ideas, but if you’re just venting and want me to listen, I can do that too. Just let me know how best to support you.” I twisted the cap off one of the bottles and placed it on her nightstand, then noticed the way she was looking at me. “What?”
She was staring at me with a strange, softly rapt expression, like she was seeing me for the first time. My heartbeat stuttered, my body sensing something my brain hadn’t yet caught up to. And then, very deliberately, she slid her hands from beneath the covers, took the ring she hadn’t taken off since the day I gave it to her, and moved it from her right hand to her left.
Time flatlined, and I swear my heart did too. I closed my eyes, certain this was some freakishly realistic dream, then opened them. She was still there, flushed and beaming. The love of my life, the woman I once thought I’d lost for good, was sitting in front of me, offering me forever.
I knelt down, took her hand, and brought it to my lips, pressing a kiss to her ring finger. “Are you sure?”
Her blue eyes, bright as seaglass and brimming over with love, didn’t waver. “Very sure.”
I sealed my lips to hers, wrapping her in my arms, my chest aching with happiness and adrenaline. I wanted to freeze this moment. I wanted to go back in time and tell the Ryder from ten years ago to hang in there, that the hell he was living through would one day turn to joy so immense he could barely contain it inside his skin.
I finally broke the kiss, keeping her pinned beneath me. “When?”
She giggled, breathless, her curls splayed across the pillows. “Whenever you want.”
“Is tomorrow too soon?”
I kissed the laughter off her lips, swallowing the sounds until they dissolved into sighs, then moans.
We eloped a week later, right there on a secluded stretch of Corsican sand, and didn’t tell a soul until we went home to celebrate Christmas with her family in Indiana. Aside from Kendall, I was meeting them all for the first time, and I worried they’d feel blindsided by our whirlwind courtship or concerned about my past baggage. To their credit, her parents’ shock lasted all of three seconds—long enough for me to stumble through an apology for not asking permission—before they folded me into their brood like I’d always been a member. By the end of the week, I’d been drafted into three family group chats and was officially an Everhart, complete with a lifetime of inside jokes to catch up on and more siblings than I knew what to do with.
When filming wrapped onThe Ingenue, Scarlett sold her house in California and moved to Seafolly. I think she was nervous at first, unsure if life in a small town would allow us the privacy we wanted, but she needn’t have worried. Rebuilding after the storm didn’t just restore the town, it bound it together in a way nothing else could. The people of Seafolly claimed us as their own, as protective of our family as we were of the town. (Or perhaps they just didn’t want to see us spend another ten years apart; our real-life happily ever after was good for tourism.) Either way, I was glad she wanted to make a life here, in the place that had always felt like ours. To me,Seafolly was hallowed ground—it had given me everything. There was nowhere I’d rather raise our family.
Still, once the world caught wind that Scarlett and I were back together, the interest in our relationship was, shall we say,intense. The press frenzy was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before—and I’ve shared a set with Tom Cruise. We tried to stay out of the spotlight, but our silence only seemed to fuel increasingly outlandish fan theories, sending the #HoldMe diehards into overdrive. And while we valued our privacy, we also felt grateful. After all, it was their devotion toThe Lost Letterthat had helped us find our way back to each other. Scarlett always said love stories mattered because they gave people hope and reminded them that happy endings were possible, so why not let others share in ours? It was in that spirit that we finally gave everyone what they’d been begging for: an on-screen reunion.
Rekindledwas our gift to the fans: a second-chance romance about a pair of feuding exes forced back together for the destination wedding of their best friends. It was our reel-life redemption arc—we traded angst for hijinks, barns for beaches, and heartbreak for a happy ending. The script was whip-smart, the banter effortless, the Hawaiian shoot a tropical dream. With Jase playing the groom and Kendall working her makeup magic behind the scenes, the whole production felt like a family affair. (I still don’t know what went down between those two during filming, but I suppose that’s their story to tell.) As for Scarlett and me, eight weeks of filming with her in a bikini meant we came home with more than just memories. Nine months later, Noah was born.
