Page 149 of Wreckage and Rain

"I'm going to be worse than Patricia."

"You aren't going to be worse than Patricia."

"I'm going to try."

We sit on the roof of our building in Lincoln Park in January, the wind off the lake in our hair, the city gold below us. Inside me a book is starting that'll tell the truth about a year of my life. On the parapet there's a thermos of cocoa Sarah taught me to make at fourteen. And next to me there's a man I married at twenty and almost lost at twenty-three and got back at twenty-four, the long way, with help from a bartender, a single mother, and a two-year-old who declared him Uncle Cowboy after a single afternoon of crayon work.

"Colt."

"Yeah."

"I love you."

"I love you."

"You're happy too."

"I'm happy."

"Tell me what kind."

He thinks. He has learned to think with the question. Not give the easy answer.

"The earned kind. The kind where I'm scared every day of doing it wrong and I don't let the fear stop me from showing up. The kind where I bought boots because a toddler told me to and I didn't hate myself for it. The kind where I'm a partner in a smallclean firm and the firm pays for our apartment and I'm no good at carving turkey but I'm going to carve a turkey at Thanksgiving in this apartment for your parents and Jake and Autumn and Sam and Dom and Marisol and Lucia, and I'm going to do it standing up in the kitchen with the bird and a knife and bad form and I'm going to be happy doing it."

"You're going to carve a turkey."

"I'm going to carve a turkey."

"That's the most Lowcountry sentence you've ever produced in Chicago."

"I'm incorporating my background."

I lean into him. Close my eyes. The wind comes off the lake and around the building. The cocoa is going cold next to us. And I am, for the first time in a long time, sure of every single thing.

Epilogue 1: Beginning

Sam

The club is dark in the afternoon. It's the only time it belongs to me. No dancers, no patrons, no music. Just me and the inventory and the smell of last night's bourbon worked into the wood.

I'm in the storeroom counting cases of spirits I already counted yesterday. It's just to keep my hands moving. My head has been useless for weeks, stuck on a woman in a campfire-colored coat who's been coming to my bar, standing too close, looking at me a beat too long, and making me want things I thought I had laid to rest a long time ago.

The front door opens. I know it's her before she's three steps in.

The footsteps come back through the club, past the stage, to the storeroom, and stop on the other side of the door. She doesn't knock. For a long moment there's nothing but a person breathing on the other side of an inch of wood, working up to something, and me on my side holding a clipboard I've stopped pretending to read.

I open the door.

She's right there. Hand half-raised, caught between knocking and leaving. And for once in three years I don't think. I get a hand around her wrist and pull her in. Into the dark, the bourbon-smell, the stacked cases of spirits. The door swings shut. I walk her back against it. I put my face near her shoulder and kiss a line up her neck. I bring my hand to her jaw, look her in the eye, and place my lips over hers. We kiss like we've been starving for each other and are finally getting fed.

When we stop, we don't go far. She pulls her head back and rests her forehead against my jaw, her hands flat on my chest. We're both breathing heavy. My heart is skipping beats and jumpingaround in my chest. She can feel it. She says nothing about it. That's its own kind of mercy.

"Sam." Low. Not quite steady.

"Yeah."

"What is this. Between us?"