Lavender Haze

Epilogue - A Year Later

In the year we spend together, River keeps all of his promises – he gives me everything I want, and in return, all he asks of me is knowing me, fully.

I almost convince him to admit he believes in soulmates now, but if anyone is as stubborn as me, that's River St. James, and he'd let me pluck the hairs off his armpits one by one with a tweezer before admitting he might have been wrong about something.

Not sure what it says about me, but that's one of the things I love the most about him.

He's finally worn me down and convinced me to let him whisk me away for two weeks on the trip of a lifetime – Italy.

He's colluded with not only Daniel and Rafael to make this happen, but my mom too. I've made him promise we'd put alarms on our phones a three in the morning every day just so I could call Sunset View and check on mom, but even that has deterred him – he said, "I didn't expect anything less. Has anyone ever told you you're a control freak?" Which made me snort because it takes one to know one, like I pointed out to him.

I'm finishing packing, and by that, I mean that every item of clothing I've ever owned is strew on our bed, the floor, and every other surface in our room – not sure how, but a scarf wound up on the curtain rod. It still gives me a certain thrill to define this place ours.

Let's be clear, by all mean, this is River's apartment in Tribeca – he's the legal owner, after all, and he bought the place ages before I was part of the picture – but onec I slept over, and he simply refused to ever let me leave again. That was three months ago.

I scan, not for the first time, the outfit I'm wearing for my very first flight on a private jet. Nothing too fancy – it'll take over seven hours to reach our destination, and I'm not one of those socialites traveling in miniskirt and stilettos. Not sure who needs to hear this, but it's impossible to comfortably lounge in a miniskirt.

I rifle in my bag for our passports, but they're not in here, which results with the rest of my belongings scatted on the floor. A tube of ChapStick rolls under the bed and I silently mourn its loss. I find tampons and my AirPods and a several packs of mints; a travel-size toothbrush, something like two thousand bobby pins and even more scrunchies; I find a pack of peanuts that expired in 2019. Still no passports. Anxiety spreads in my chest.

"Riv!" I yell, hoping he'll hear me from the living room.

"Reid!" he shouts back.

"I lost the passports!"

There's a long pause. "No, you didn't. They're in the pocket of my jacket."

Relief floods me so quickly, it makes me light-headed. My eyes move frantically around the room, trying to locate this jacket.

Ah.

There it is, buried under two layers of silky blouses that haven't made the cut. I pluck it off the back of the chair, dust it off, and slip my hands in every pocket my eyes land on.

"On a second thought," River's voice floats from the hallway. "You don't need those right this second. You need to learn to cope with the fact that you hate your passport picture, and that even with my connections, there's no way you're getting a new one in the next three hours."

I roll my eyes at the jacket as if River were wearing it right now and keep searching for the passports until my fingers close around something and I pull the offending object (very clearly not the documents we need to leave the country) out.

My heart does this funny thing, then, when my eyes identify the Tiffany's box in my hand. It stutters. I think a breath hisses out of me, but I can't be too sure because my heartbeat is pounding so loudly in my ears is like being back at a college party with Raf, trying to talk over the deafening music.