We lay there for a while not moving, her heart slowing against mine.
“Married sex,” she said finally, into my collarbone. “Ten out of ten.”
“Would recommend,” I said. “Would definitely sex again.”
“How soon?” She lifted her head and looked at me.
I thought about it seriously, because she deserved a serious answer. “Give me four minutes.”
She laughed, face crinkled up, and put her head back down.
Outside the cabin, the mountain was quiet. Through the small window I could see a strip of sky going deep and clear over the valley, stars showing up now that the fireworks had faded. Somewhere below us, what remained of our family would be finishing dessert or starting arguments or both, in that particular Kingman way where you couldn’t always tell the difference.
Up here it was just us. Our cabin. Our mountain.
My wife’s breathing went slow and even against my chest, and I held her, and I thought about my mother fleeing this same room afraid of a dog big enough to be a bear, and my father carrying her in out of a blizzard and how the line from that night ran straight to this one, through eight kids and a lot of years and more love than I had words for.
It was enough to keep. More than enough.
I pulled the good blanket up over us and let the mountain and our love for each other do the rest.
EPILOGUE – BEST WISHES
KELSEY
The thing about marrying into the Kingman family was that the party never really ended. It just changed venues.
The intimate ceremony on Bear Claw Mountain had been ours. Sixty people, one snow globe, one reindeer, and the best night of my life. The reception the following evening in Aspen was something else entirely. Three hundred guests, a venue the size of a small country, a paparazzi situation outside that Ciara Mosely Willingham had described to me as “contained but spirited,” and the very reasonable question of whether Declan and I had enough left in us to show up to it.
We did. Barely.
I was in a the mini dress, white, shorter, made for dancing — and Declan was in a fresh suit and we had managed approximately fou hours of sleep between us, which I felt was frankly heroic given the circumstances. We arrived to the kind of reception entrance that reminded me I was, in fact, still Kelsey Best, because three hundred people losing their minds at the sight of you tends to do that.
Declan kept his hand at my back the entire way in. He always did. It was the thing I had stopped noticing and then started noticing again, the way you do when you realize something has become as natural as breathing.
The venue had been transformed. Penny had insisted on carrying the winter theme forward, so even in July there were fairy lights in every surface, white and silver everywhere, and the whole room smelled faintly of pine. The woman who had spent the summer saving the world in the number one movie of the season was at a table near the bar, wearing a Best Kingman jersey over her gown, which was a sentence I was going to need a moment to process. The man who had just finished shooting a superhero franchise was dancing with his wife near the back, also in a jersey.
“Is everyone wearing a jersey?” I asked Penny, who had appeared at my elbow with a glass of something sparkling and the expression of a woman who had pulled off something extraordinary and knew it.
“Not everyone,” she said. “Some people put the plushie on their head instead.”
I turned and looked. She was not wrong.
The mini Wiener the Pooh plushies were everywhere. In hands, on tables, tucked into jacket pockets with their little flower girl dresses peeking out. The resemblance to the actual Wiener the Pooh — who was in attendance, in her flower girl dress, sitting in her own chair at the family table with the dignity of someone who expected to be seated and fed peanut butter treats — was, I had to admit, uncanny.
Jules and Penny had outdone themselves.
“Where did Penny go?” Declan said.
“Penny has been at your elbow for thirty seconds total since we walked in,” I said. “She’s everywhere and nowhere. She’s in her element.”
Declan nodded with the respect of one professional for another.
We were barely twenty minutes into the reception when the lights dimmed and a screen dropped at the far end of the room. A card appeared on it, in Jules’s handwriting:
For everyone who couldn’t be there. An accurate historical document. — Jules
The crowd settled into curious attention.
