Page 212 of The Song We Lost

I laugh harder while she beams at me proudly.

“I was thinking…” She steps closer again. “Maybe we go back to our roots.”

The softness in her voice hits me immediately.

“Bars nobody expects us at,” she continues quietly. “County fairs. Fundraisers. Little towns.”

I can already picture it. Just us and the music. Crowds because they want to be there instead of because somebody marketed them into it. Rachel planning routes around getting home quickly.

Around family and real life. Not the machine that almost destroyed us.

Bailey’s fingers slide slowly through mine again.

“Wanna go on an adventure with me, Luke?”

I pulled her against me immediately.

“I’ll follow you anywhere.”

Bailey laughs brightly then.

“Good,” she says.

Then before she can question it I throw her over my shoulder.

She squeals so loudly birds scatter from the trees nearby.

“Luke Carter!”

I grin carrying her through the front door while she laughs breathlessly against my back.

“What are you doing?”

“We need to christen our bedroom.”

Bailey laughs so hard she nearly falls off my shoulder. “We don’t even have furniture yet!”

“We’ve got a floor.”

“Oh my god.” she squeals.

I carry her down the hallway anyway while her laughter fills the house.

And somewhere between the grief and the healing and the years we spent losing each other…

I realized something. Love was never the hard part. The hard part was learning how to choose it every day.

And this time?

We finally were.

epilogue 1 - bailey

The first time I played the Canada Day festival in Hawthorne Ridge, I was fifteen years old.

The stage wasn't really a stage. It was a flatbed trailer that Thomas had borrowed, parked at the end of Main Street with borrowed speakers and a microphone that had seen better days.

I was terrified.