Epilogue
Oneyear later
Heather padded down the hallway, careful to step over the two creakiest floorboards. The floor was cold, and she wished she’d stopped to put on her slippers before coming downstairs. Too late now, she thought, wincing as she entered the kitchen and the chilled tiles pressed against the soles of her feet.
The kitchen was already flooded with sunlight, and as she stood at the sink waiting for the kettle to fill, she looked out into the back garden, where the grass was glossy with dew and the trees were still in the breezeless morning air. Last night’s dishes still clustered around the sink where she and Marcus had left them, too tired from cooking and serving and the solemn celebration to wash them right away.
The dinner had been Davo’s idea, Marcus had told her—though later, when she’d pressed him, he’d revealed it had been Davo’s therapist’s idea. The first anniversary of their father’s death hadapparently passed without much comment from Davo, but this year, he’d suggested they mark the date by getting together and having a family meal, perhaps with some of Richard’s favorite foods.
So Davo and Marcus had manned the barbecue together while Heather baked an apple crumble, supervised by Leanne. They’d sat around the table in Marcus and Heather’s living room, which once had been Richard and Leanne’s, and she listened while the three of them told stories about him. Some of them she’d heard before, some of them were new. Some of them had to be told twice because Marcus and Davo each remembered different versions of events.
Eventually, Marcus had turned in—since he’d enrolled in his physical therapy degree and started surfing every morning, he’d become dedicated to getting a full-night’s sleep, and Heather often came home from the Opera House to find him passed out and unwakeable. When ANB had offered him his job back last year, Marcus had taken a full week to make up his mind, and eventually decided he was ready to retire from dancing.
“I just needed to do it on my own terms, you know?” he’d said, the night he announced his decision. “Not because of injury or because someone else made me.” He’d decided he wanted to do what Shaz did—help injured dancers get back on their feet—and she’d been more than willing to help him apply to university programs for mature-age students.
The kettle started steaming, and Heather hurried to stop it before it whistled. She quickly heaped some coffee grounds into the French press, then seized two travel mugs from the cupboard. There were days when she missed the finger-numbing plastic cups of bodega iced coffee, milky and sweet and sweating in her hand, but she’d come to love their Sunday walks along the beach with their reusable mugs.
Once the coffee was ready, Heather padded back down the hallway and put the cups on the hall table before creeping back upstairs. Marcus was still asleep. On her nightstand, next to the clock reading 8:31AM, sat Bear, sagging and a little discolored butpropped lovingly against the wall, a reminder of what she’d been through to get here.
Heather crawled onto the bed and lay down behind Marcus, her head on his pillow, and breathed in the scent of him. He murmured contentedly and reached to pull her arm over him. His body radiated heat, and she resisted the urge to tuck her cold feet between his to warm them. For a while they lay there, Marcus somewhere between sleeping and waking, as Heather listened to his breath and the birds outside, wondering if she’d ever get used to the strange melody of Australian birdsong.
“I made coffee,” she whispered eventually.
“Mmm,” he hummed groggily. “I love you.”
“But you have to get out of bed to get it,” she added. This time, hismmmwas more of a groan. He rolled over to face her and opened his eyes, his face puffy and adorable in his sleepiness. “Let’s stay in bed.”
“We can’t, it’s Sunday morning. And you’ve got studying to do.”
“And I take that studying very seriously,” Marcus said, a little more alert now. He put an arm around her waist and lowered his head to kiss her shoulder as his hand traced down her lower back to gently fondle her ass. “I can study your piriformis, and your psoas, and yourischial tuberosity,” he said in a husky, would-be sexy whisper.
Heather laughed. “You can’t show up to your first PT final and write about all the ways you’ve groped your girlfriend.”
Marcus traced his hand down the back of her thigh, then up the inside, and she shivered.
“What about your adductor longus?” he asked, his fingers teasing the sensitive skin. He moved his hand even higher, and she whimpered. “Or your adductor magnus?”
“Please stop talking about ligaments,” she gasped, arching her back slightly.
“You’re right,” he said, slipping his hand inside her underwear. “There are much better things I could be doing with my mouth.”
When they finally got out of bed and reheated their coffee, they found Freshwater Beach almost empty, as it had been for most of their winter morning walks. Once the weather warmed up, the parking lot would be full by the time they arrived, the surfers unloading boards from their vans and families unpacking sun shelters and coolers from their SUVs. The kids’ surf lifesaving league would start in October, and on Sundays half the beach would be overrun by children in matching swimsuits—or cozzies, as she’d learned to call them—racing each other along on the sand and paddling frantically in the water.
But today, they had the beach mostly to themselves, except for the seagulls scuttling across their path, dipping their orange feet in the foamy shallows as the waves rolled and crashed. For a few minutes Heather and Marcus walked in silence, letting the coffee and the brisk morning breeze wipe away the last of their morning lethargy.
“I have a proposition for you,” Heather said, once her coffee was mostly gone.
Marcus raised his eyebrows inquiringly. “Proposition me.”
“My contract will be up next month, and Peter says he wants to have ‘a conversation about my future with the company.’”
“Right, and he’s going to offer you another year,” Marcus said, kicking a pile of dried seaweed out of their path. “He’d be an idiot not to.”
It had been a relief to them both to realize, halfway through the sold-out spring season, with Heather’s photo printed all over the banners that flew from the lampposts around the Opera House, that Peter would have no choice but to forgive her for publicly pressuring the company to eliminate Pas de Don’t and offer all the fired dancers their jobs back.
They’d already asked Leanne if they could stay in the Sand Castle house for another year, and she hadn’t objected. Since she’d found a physical therapist she loved around the corner and become a regular at Café Luxor, she wasn’t in any hurry to leave Marcus’s apartment.
“He will probably offer me another year,” Heather agreed, feeling her pulse quicken. But it wasn’t enough for her. She’d had the realization in company class a few weeks ago, as she stood at the barre with Alice and Justin and Katarina, listening to Alice tell some long, hilarious story about one of her brother’s ill-fated baking attempts: She belonged here now. She belonged on this beach, and in Marcus’s bed, and in a company full of dancers who liked and respected her, and who she liked and respected right back.
