I feel Nathaniel step beside me. When I look up at him with watery eyes, the affection I see on his face is unmistakable. He doesn’t rush me. He simply lets me be, as if this moment is exactly where he had always intended for us to land.
“She’s yours,” he says softly. Then, with a tilt of his head, he adds,“Something small. Something that snores.”
I recognize the echo of my words from years ago immediately. They carry a different weight now—a promise kept.
My heart feels impossibly full, stretched to its limits. I wonder if anyone has ever loved another person the way Nathaniel loves me. I wonder if there will ever be a language large enough to hold what I feel in return. All I know is that this life, this man, and this tiny, snorting bundle in my arms, feels like more than I ever knew to ask for.
I turn toward him, still holding the puppy close, her warm little body tucked beneath my chin. My eyes sting, my chest full in a way that feels almost unbearable.
“Thank you,” I say, my voice unsteady but certain. “For bringing every dream I ever had to life…even the ones I didn’t know I was allowed to have.”
Something in his composure slips. Instead of standing over me, Nathaniel lowers himself, crouching until we’re eye level. His hand comes up to my face, his thumb brushing away the tears at the corner of my eye.
“You’re allowed to have any dream you want,” he says with conviction. “So if you really want to thank me…then keep dreaming, Olivia.” His gaze holds mine, unwavering. “You never have to limit yourself with me. Whatever new dreams you have—big, small, or absolutely reckless—I hope that I make you feel brave enough to reach for them.”
Then his voice deepens, steady and sure. “I promise that I will want you in every version of the life you imagine for yourself. However you want it…whatever you want from it…I’ll find a way to give it to you.”
My breath catches. I smile anyway—soft, full, a little wobbly around the edges.
“Deal,” I tell him. “As long as you tell me what your dreams are too. I want to help make yours come true too.”
He lets out a quiet laugh, indulgent and intimate, the kind he never offers anyone else. He’s looking at me like I’m the axis everything else turns on.
“Baby…” He cups my jaw and rests his forehead against mine, sighing with contentment. “You already did. Every day since you married me, I’ve been living it. A life with you is the only dream I have now. As long as I get to keep that, I’m happy. There’s nothing more that I could want.”
Once again, I’m at a loss for words. There’s nothing clever or eloquent I can offer in return—nothing that could match that kind of devotion. So I say the truest thing I know.
“Nathaniel Anthony Caldwell,” I whisper, “I love you so much.”
He answers without hesitation, certainty woven into every word. “Olivia Marie Caldwell, I love you too.”
He leans in and kisses me—slow, sure, sealing the life we’ve built and the one waiting just beyond this moment. I kiss him back, the puppy pressed between us, and I know, with a joy that feels endless, that he was right—we’re home.
epilogue 2
NATHANIEL — 12 YEARS LATER
From the marbleterrace of our villa in Capri, I watch the sun ease toward the horizon, the Faraglioni cutting clean silhouettes against the coastline. The water below catches the light and breaks it into molten gold, as if the sea itself were glowing from within.
Late-spring warmth clings to the air, salt-tinged, softened by the sweetness of bougainvillea climbing the stone behind me. When the breeze shifts, it carries citrus from the lemon trees in the garden.
From the cliffside, I hear the steady rush of waves breaking against the rocks far beneath us. Everything feels suspended in this moment—held between day and night, and the sense that I’ve arrived exactly where I’m meant to be.
The space has been arranged in a way that feels unmistakably Olivia.
A semicircle of chairs curve toward the open sea. Olive branches and white flowers edge the railing. A string quartet waits off to one side, instruments resting in practiced hands.Nothing here calls attention to itself. Everything exists in harmony, folded into the landscape rather than set apart from it.
This ceremony is exactly as I would prefer it too: intimate, intentional, with Olivia at the center of it all.
We’re not here to reenact a wedding, but to celebrate what has carried us through a decade: our commitment to choosing each other every day, every season, through every fault line we’ve crossed and rebuilt. Today, we will renew that vow.
Dusk descends and lanterns bloom to life one by one along the railing. As the light thins, I’m struck by the surreal realization that not even ten years of marriage have dulled the anticipation of seeing Olivia.
Then the quartet shifts.
The first measures of “On the Nature of Daylight” unfurl in a slow, aching swell of strings. Conversation fades without instruction, instinctively sensing the threshold that we’ve reached. I find myself standing straighter as the music settles in, my attention sharpening. The hush that follows is complete, shared, reverent.
I turn toward the garden path. Everyone collectively holds their breath for the moment I already feel in my bones—she’s coming.
