Keeping Secrets in Seattle

Epilogue


Gabe

Violet kept her job working at The Funky Fox after Lizzy made her the salon floor manager, and she moved her things into my apartment on Queen Anne Hill two weeks after her birthday. During our first year together, we spent our nights watching movies while lying in bed eating kimchi and bulgogi, making love until we were dizzy, and talking until the sun filled my bedroom in the morning.

It was everything I’d ever envisioned our life together to be. Maybe even more.

One year later, on Vi’s twenty-seventh birthday, I asked for her hand in marriage. We were at a Mariners game, and I proposed to her on the JumboTron during the seventh inning stretch. She cried, and we were joined shortly thereafter by both of our families, who’d been sitting several rows behind us. It was tacky, and exactly what Violet had always wanted.

We were married in a tent in our parents’ backyard on Halloween night. Five months after my proposal. Seventeen months after moving in together. Ten years and five months after breaking up in the hallway of Wallingford High. Twenty-one years and two months after laying eyes on each other on the playground of our grade school.

I quit working at the ad firm and opened my own graphic design company a few years after we were married. It didn’t pay as much, but my priorities changed once Vi came back into my life. Love, family, home…those are the things that really mattered. I make enough to provide for my own, and not much extra. I’m okay with that, because I get to lie next to Violet every night. It doesn’t feel like a sacrifice when her pulse beats against my chest in the dark.

We started our family three years after our wedding. We had our son, Teague, on Violet’s twenty-ninth birthday, followed by our daughter, Penelope, a year and a half later. Our children are the most beautiful and amazing of all our accomplishments, and both Vi and I have their names, and each other’s, permanently decorating the skin above our hearts.

We ran into Alicia when we were leaving a restaurant with the kids a few years ago, where she’d been arguing with a man twice her age in the parking lot. She didn’t say a word to us as we’d passed. She just looked down at our sleeping kids and grimaced. The last I heard was that she’d married an older man in southern Oregon, who was as wealthy as he was unkind. Guess that upgrade hadn’t panned out so well after all.

Cameron Hakes was convicted of sexual assault in California, and is serving a nine-year sentence now. Violet and I spent plenty of time in therapy dealing with our feelings about Cam. The pain never goes away completely. It was like a broken bone that had healed but ached whenever it rained.

I still marvel at the sight of my wife, holding one of our children on her hip, her wild hair a mess, and mismatched socks on her feet. She is the most exquisite creature I’ve ever seen. There are nights when I sit up in our bed watching her sleep, her bare back exposed as she lies on her stomach in a deep slumber. Her hair across her shoulders and pillow, her lips pursed as she dreams, the colorful tattoos across her arms and back telling the story of her life.

She is my best friend.