Page 61 of The Last to Know

‘I do,’ Ash whispers. ‘But. You know. It could be my home …’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. We’d have to figure it all out but … these past two months I have come to think that home isn’t really a place anyway. It’s a person. How I feel when I’m with you, CJ, it’s unlike how I’ve felt with anybody else ever. I thought I’d been in love before, but I was never fully myself. You see me. That’s really scary too, you know. I’ve been afraid. You have zero time for small talk or bullshit, and it puts the spotlight on me, makes me really examine what I think and feel and want. The way you challenge me, it feels like a kind of devotion, like you respect me too much to let me kid myself. I think that’s what I’m getting at. I’ve never been this respected, before. You insist I show up for myself, and I just want to do the same for you. However that looks. You and me. CJ and Ash. Together.’

‘Forever?’ CJ asks, because she has to, she wants to hear it, and with Ash she feels like it’s OK to get the reassurance she needs.

‘Forever,’ Ash says. ‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

And then they kiss, deep and meaningful, lips colliding, tongues dancing, a mark on their words, made with their bodies, yet another way to say,I do, I do, I do.

‘Mamãe!’ comes a voice, after a beat or two. ‘Miguel says we can go and get ice cream!’

The women pull apart, smiling, laughing, happy.

‘I could go for ice cream,’ Ash yells back to him. ‘Am I invited too?’

‘Of course!’ Jorge exclaims, clapping gleefully. ‘The whole family!’

CJ could melt. They walk up through the old town, Jorge holding her left hand, Ash holding her right, and she can’t believe it, can’t believe that they’re all here, that love can happen this way, in the end.

38

Ash & CJ, CJ & Ash

Six months later

Ash can’t believe she’s here, doing this, finally, against all the odds. From the back of her people carrier taxi with the blacked-out windows and a pleasantly silent driver, speeding along the motorway towards the first day of the rest of her life, Ashley Jane Davies feels that she can take her first deep breath of the day. The year. The past ten years. The biggest, most contented deep breath of her life, in fact. This is happening. She’s an official Lisbon resident, now. And she’s going to live, and love, every second. She plays with the two rings on the fourth finger of her left hand, the sparkling diamond engagement ring and the thick platinum wedding band. Who knew, with the way this year began, how it could possibly end? Life, she thinks, flopping back against the headrest, watching the world pass by. It doesn’t half surprise you.

Lisbon in December is the end of a promise and the start of an oath. It’s a serious month. The truth is up there in the sky. Blue, yes, but as anyalfacinhacan attest, the sky is nearlyalways blue in Lisbon. Ash has been schooled by CJ well. She knows that there’s pre-spring washed-out Tiffany blue, and thick late-October Yale blue, and the shy cyan blue of January, as if green and blue couldn’t decide on their annual leave and so compromised with a fifty-fifty split. A full and deep aqua-coloured sky is the purview of high summer, and cool, muted blue is the colour of today: everything at a slower pace, resting, recharging, taking stock of the past twelve months so that the next might be even better. Ash does not see how that could be possible, and yet she feels it, the deep-rooted knowledge of her gut and her heart, that forward movement will bear fruit. She has a wife, a son they do not apply the word ‘step’ to, and a brand-new business of her own. Mona’s appetite for showing other older women the transformative power of ‘travel without a fuck’, as she calls it, has given Ash’s work life a boost. Cool Cat Adventures – Ash refused to work in a company called Cougar Adventures, much to Mona’s dismay – will be the focus of her new year, now that she has finally left Bristol, and Midnight Whispers, and Willow, behind. This was her last trip back, the house now sold, the last of her things shipped or donated.

‘Maybe I’ll be setting up Cool Cat Adventures in Bali,’ Willow said to her as they had their emotional (but for all the right reasons) goodbye at the airport. Two friends, on different parts of their journey, headed to opposite ends of the world. For now, at least. ‘Who knows what trouble I can get myself into?’

‘Plenty, I should hope,’ Ash told her, wiping away her tears.

Her divorce had come through on the day Ash and CJ married.

‘A reason to celebrate for both of you,’ Mona said, raising a glass of champagne for them all: for Ash, and CJ, in the ways they have been bold and brave, but for Mona and Willow, too, for their daring as well. Love is, after all, as much about two people pledging their forevers as it is about knowing when to walk away in order to value yourself. Love is union, love is of the self, and love can also be shacking up with a younger man, and having multiple orgasms whilst vowing never to marry again. Love can be pursuit, too, like Luis. Ash has fallen into an easy rhythm with him, not quite as close as he and CJ, but close all the same. He says he uses Ash and CJ as his inspiration, his drive to keep searching. Ash hopes he finds what he is looking for. She hopes everyone can be so lucky. She is so pleased with her version of it all.

Her phone beeps.

Miguel and Todd would like to host us for dinner at their new place tonight, it says, CJ’s name at the top as WIFE.A sort of house warming for them, congratulations for you/us that you officially live in Lisbon now. Is that OK? You feeling it, wifey? I miss you!!

Ash has insisted on a taxi from the airport so that CJ can take Jorge to a birthday party. That’s what families do, after all: muddle through, people here and there, coming back together at the end of the day to talk about it all, eager to catch up on the parts of everyone’s lives they’ve missed in the past however-many hours. That might be Ash’s favourite part, actually. Night-time. Night-time when Jorge is asleep inthe room next door, CJ is curled beside her, and sleep pulls her in as her body reminds her that she is part of something.

She believed she would one day make a family of her own, and she has. It is every bit as good as she imagined.