A small pause for effect.
“Knottingley Ever After.”
“Knottingley,” Rémi repeats, from the doorway, with the precise distinct enunciation of a man making sure he has heard the word correctly.
“Knottingley,” Matteo confirms. “As in. Knot. With a K. The literary subgenre of our entire existence. Pucking and knotting and presumably ever-aftering, in roughly equal measure.”
“Cute title,” I find myself saying, mildly.
“Oh, Cap.” Matteo locks the Kindle, slides it carefully back into the pouch of her hoodie against her sleeping body, and looks at me over the top of her head with an expression I am going to remember for a long time. “It is more than cute. She deserves that. The whole back-cover blurb. Bonded and adored and unsubtly knotted in a cabin or a barn or whichever genre-appropriate locale the writer has cooked up. A genuine, on-the-record, Omega-edition happily ever after.”
Rémi, with Iris cradled against his chest, dips his chin a single degree. Confirmation.
I nod silently from my wingback. Some kind of agreement passes between the three of us without anyone needing to put a name on it, and Rémi turns, carefully, and carries her up the hallway toward the back wing of the house and her converted storage-room door, and the cedar-and-toasted-sugar warmth of the living room follows him in his wake.
Matteo lowers himself back onto the couch in the spot Iris just vacated.
Neither of us says anything for a minute.
Omega-edition happily ever after.
The phrase lands in the small private chamber of my chest and stays there, and I sit with it. I sit with the fact that the woman now being carried up my hallway is reading, on the side, the genre I have personally watched two cousins and one auntie devour their way through, and that she does it not because she is some breathless romantic but because she, like every other woman the publishing industry has been quietly serving for thirty years, has been desperate for someone to write down the version of her own life where the ending is one she is allowed to keep.
Connor never got his happy ever after. He got nineteen years, a series of bad doctors’ prescriptions, a couch in a basement none of us could reach him on, and a final phone call I will not, until the day I die, stop replaying.
We three are still here. We are, somewhere between four winters ago and tonight, still here, and a small pink-haired Omega has just chosen, in her sleep, to put her head on a defenseman’s shoulder.
Everyone in this story deserves the version of the ending the books promise. Iris deserves it. Rémi deserves it. Matteo, God help me, deserves it. I deserve it.
Even Coach Declan, the King of Avoidance himself, deserves it. Even the man who taught me what a healthy pack looks like by being, for two seasons, exactly its inverse.
It is just sad how hard life makes the simple animal arithmetic of getting there.
Matteo, beside me, picks up a marshmallow Rémi has left on the table. Tosses it. Catches it. Looks at the dark hallway she disappeared into. Looks at me.
“We are going to give it to her, Cap.”
“Mm.”
“Omega-edition.”
“Yeah.”
“Knottingley ever after.”
I almost smile.
Almost.
CHAPTER 17
Pinkafied
~IRIS~
“All right.”
I plant myself at the entry to the common room with the latest exhibit pinched between my thumb and forefinger, held aloft for the jury.
