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“Aren’t we Sly’s family?” Katie asked. I swallowed my embarrassment at her presumption. She’d only voiced the very thing I wanted with my whole heart.
“Of course you are,” he said. “And I would love to take you both to brunch with the rest of the family.”
“You sure?” I asked him.
“I’m sure,” he said. “And Katie, you better get ready.”
“For what?” She tilted her little head up to meet his eyes.
“Well, one day soon I’m going to have to ask you a very important question.”
“What’s the question?”
“I’ll ask you for your permission to ask your mother to marry me.” Sly met my eyes over Katie’s head briefly, and then looked back at Katie as my heart exploded inside me.
“Ask her now!”
“I think it’s a little soon for that,” he said. “But I’m going to ask her soon, okay? If it’s okay with you.”
“It’s okay with me,” she told him. “Maybe ask her tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” he confirmed.
My head was spinning as we got ready to go to brunch. Sly had to go back to his own cabin to get dressed, so we went with him. And as we walked up the stairs to the lodge for brunch, the word family played on repeat in my head.
Katie and I had lost so much—her dad, kind of, and then my parents all in the course of a year. I’d given up on the idea of her ever getting to have a real family. But now, here we were. And as we stepped into the space where Zara and Beck, Zara’s parents, and Sly’s parents all greeted us with enormous smiles and hugs, it felt an awful lot like coming home.
“I love you, Clara,” Sly whispered in my ear.
“I love you too,” I told him.
And soon, we were laughing together, surrounded by waffles and whipped cream, and the faces and hearts of the people I loved most in the world.
EPILOGUE - SLY
THREE MONTHS LATER
“Here you are again, always pushing the rules,” Cade Simpson said, his arms cross over his chest and what I thought was a frown on his face beneath his enormous beard.
“She’s not a puck bunny,” I told him, gesturing toward the blonde at my side.
“She’s also not a wife or a fiancée or a serious girlfriend.” He winked at her, and my date for the evening giggled.
“Your beard is giant,” she said, earning a squinty-eyed look from Cade.
“I like it this way,” he told her.
“Can I touch it?”
He sighed and knelt on the concrete next to the pool in Mizzoni’s backyard, and Katie reached out a tentative hand and touched his beard.
“It’s soft,” she said, sounding surprised.
“Of course it is,” he agreed. “I take very good care of it.”
“Like a pet,” Katie suggested.
“Yep, that’s Simpson’s face weasel,” I confirmed.
