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Starting now.

10

Ayear later…

Raemy Miller loved every single season in Wild Rose Point, but fall most of all. It reminded her of how they’d started. It felt like new starts and new possibilities—though that was probably because she still followed a school-year calendar.

She’d started teaching at the school in one of the larger towns nearby in September of this year, once again with the third graders she loved, and she already felt as if she’d been teaching at the school forever.

Plus there are fishless lunches, she made sure to text Marissa. We have strict rules about the use of the microwave here.

Oregon sounds hideous. I hate it, her friend texted back.

Raemy loved her little cottage, right there on the beach. She had loved the long, gray, blustery winter, cuddled up next to the fireplace with the ocean making noise outside. She’d loved the storms and the rain. In spring, she’d tended the explosion of flowers—especially roses, though there were plump hydrangeas and bright fuchsia too—and had sighed over the flowering cherry and plum trees in town. Inside the cottage, she had managed to pack so many lighthouses and whale plaques, and every possible beachy item she could find, that even she was starting to wonder if there was more to life than macrame renditions of the waves.

Right now, it was perfect.

She and Noah had yet to spend a night apart, and she loved that for them. They were talking about moving in together, though not into this cottage. And not into his house, either. It made sense, they’d decided, that his grandfather’s house should stay what it was: a safe place for veterans who needed it.

Tank had no desire to move on and was more than capable of taking a lead role in the operations. He had, in fact, been asking to take on a role like that for a while.

“About time a man was recognized for his contributions around here,” he said to Noah when they told him. He’d said it like he was joking, but Raemy didn’t think he was.

“He wasn’t,” Noah agreed later, while they lay on the couch in the living room of the cottage together, watching the fire dance behind its grate. He’d laughed, but more at himself than at Tank, Raemy thought. “It’s clearly past time I made this more of an organization and less…me.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” Raemy said, kissing him in the crook of his neck, because he loved when she did that.

Seamus would have loved all of this, Raemy liked to think. She felt like she knew the old man now, through his grandson. And through all the photos and stories Noah had shared with her over the course of the past year.

And if she wasn’t mistaken, she was making a lot of headway convincing the love of her life that not everything had to be an act of penance.

She knew that he’d believed her last year, that night in the inn where they’d started truly being them. But it was over the course of the year they’d shared here that she got to watch it really take root.

His parents had come to visit and she’d loved them immediately. More importantly, they’d loved her.

Noah’s father was, as expected, a quiet and thoughtful man. He preferred to listen rather than talk. He spent hours a day reading, and swore by the practice, claiming it was singularly responsible for his excellent health. Raemy, a big reader herself, could hardly argue.

His mother liked her morning runs and her pickleball, refused to sit still for so long at one time, and claimed that the fact they were opposites was why they’d been happily married for so many years.

“Everyone expected that Finnegan would marry one of those academic types,” Tracy Kendrick had said with a laugh, looking over at her husband. “But he gets that at work.”

“And I happen to play a mean game of pickleball,” Finnegan had retorted.

He had walked with Raemy one morning and had confessed that he and Tracy hadn’t really known what to expect when Noah had told them that he had someone special in his life.

“Honestly,” he had said. “We were concerned.”

“I understand,” Raemy had replied at once, not the least bit offended. “Given the space he was in, you must have worried about his ability to make a good choice.”

Finnegan Kendrick had smiled, looking grateful. “I’ll admit that we did.”

Raemy, who refused to accept that she ought to feel awkward in any circumstance, nudged the man that she certainly hoped was going to be her future father-in-law with her elbow.

“Not to worry,” she told him with a grin. “I chose him.”

When she’d relayed this conversation to Noah later, he’d laughed.

Because he did that more and more all the time and not only while he was naked. He’d laughed and laughed. He’d kissed her all over her face, and twirled her around the tiny kitchen in her cottage, and said, “You did choose me. Thank God.”