Epilogue

Grato

Four Months Later

Winter in London hasn’t disappointed.

Next month, I start design courses at the University of the Arts, but I moved a few weeks early to get acclimated before the holidays. It turns out, not only was my Rose Festival portfolio impressive, I have international fans who remembered my Chicago exhibit from last summer. “What have I been telling you?” Mr. Cartwright scolded. “You were only a failure in your own mind!”

I scoffed at him. “So, you get a fiancé and suddenly, you’re not in the salty Envy Club?”

“Grant, sometimes being negative is more deluded than being positive. You are loved.”

I am loved.

With those three impossible words, I renewed my passport, hugged my family at Vero Roseto goodbye, and flew to England to face my next chapter. For the holidays, Mr. Cartwright took his new fiancé on a European vacation to his favorite winter destinations—skiing in Switzerland, Babbo Natale street festivals in Italy, and the Santa Lucia crowning in Norway. This left him with a cozy, vacant English home during the weeks I’m waiting for my dorm to open.

Sometimes, the universe curses you; sometimes, it pulls you up.

Mr. Cartwright lives in an attic apartment in Camden Town (I refuse to be one of those Americans who move to London and call it a “flat”). Most stunningly, his apartment is the floor above his own bookshop café: Books, Bindery & Brekkie.

I don’t have to manage anything, thank God. He employs a trio of booksellers who keep the business running downstairs while I dress mannequins upstairs. Although, the smells from the bookshop’s bakery have me frequently descending the spiral staircase connecting the apartment to the shop to snatch another treat. I’m less of an employee and more of a bodega cat.

The day before Christmas Eve, the booksellers hang a sign letting people know we’ll reopen in the new year. And as the sun sets on Books, Bindery & Brekkie, I shut the store lights and ignite the downstairs fireplace. Outside, the market is emptying as other stores shutter, their lights dotting the indigo winter dusk. It’s so beautiful, but the quiet solitude finally hits me.

I’m on my own, grown and far from home.

I need to stop confusing independence for loneliness.

Over the next hour, I bake the store’s famous sugarplum cake by candlelight. The vibes are cozy, my cussing is noisy, but the cake is a masterpiece. In fact, I’m sliding a moist, warm slice into my mouth when Ben McKittrick walks through the door along with a tinkling of bells.

Fastest swallow of my life. (Of the cake!)

Ben lingers in the doorway—tall, handsome, and bundled snugly. The last time I saw him was at Mama Bianchi’s Halloween Haunt. In just two months, his rust-colored hair has grown longer and curlier, a whirling lion’s mane peeking beneath his knit cap. The cold air has stung his pale cheeks blood-red. I can’t even smile, I’m so stunned with happiness.

“Hey, shopgirl,” Ben says, his Scottish accent pronounced from his time back home. He raises a frost-white rose, and both it and his fingerless mittens make me too weak to stand. “Got you a new rose. It’s not the magical kind, but just to be safe, maybe don’t make any wishes near it.”

Blushing, I laugh. “It’s beautiful. But we’ll keep it away from me.” Behind the counter, I raise my plated cake, exquisitely sugar-dusted. “I made you cake.” Following a devilish impulse, I lick stray powder from my thumb. “Want some?”

“Depends. Is it just us?”

I nod. “For the rest of the holiday.”

“Then it’s cake time.” Ben returns my wicked energy with a grin and latches the door. With that, Books, Bindery & Brekkie becomes a holiday hideaway where Ben and I can be alone in warmth, luxury, and…other things. Clutching his rose, he pulls me close with fearsome power. His two-day scruff claws at my lips as he refuses to do this tenderly. I’m just as starved. I pull him toward the stairs—but on our way, Ben backs me into a shelf of self-help titles, sending a few books toppling off the delicate display. Ben always did have a more aggressive approach to self-improvement.

I snatch his knit cap and cast it to the floor. Ben’s ruddy mane unfurls like a camping tent taken out of the bag. My greedy fingers plunge into his hair, and as I pull on his tangles, his lip curls like an angry dog. We kiss, his lower lip swallowing mine as a familiar scent greets me. Not his body spray. Not lawn work. Not even sweat. It’s…sour. Vaguely repellent. A touch of odious biology.

It’s the smell of Ben’s desire.

I’m so nasty, I missed this smell more than anything. Ro-mance isn’t just sugarplum cakes.

As Ben pins me against the shelves, we breathe heavily on each other, just breathing, until I say, “Take me upstairs.”

The night fades into a blur of soothing warmth and stimulating pain. It’s just us and the growing blizzard outside. I’m free of my depressing history, free of my anxious future, engulfed—for the first time in my life—in a beautiful present.

When I got accepted to UAL, Ben encouraged me to say yes. My decision helped him make his own: he wanted to return to Scotland. Our long-distance relationship could be doable!

I was terrified—still am.

But we’re jumping into our futures together. Miles away, but together.

The next morning, the blizzard outside hits so hard, the air itself has body. Through the whiteout, I can barely see Ben’s frost-colored rose sitting in a vase by the window.

Waking up next to Ben is shocking. Not that I thought he’d leave in the night, I’m just not used to this alien feeling of security. As Ben’s bare shoulders stare at me from under our silver, pelt-like quilts, I fight the urge to beg him to stay forever. The moment Ben is back in my arms, I mentally count the days until he goes away again. Which would come first—the rose’s death or Ben’s departure?

Acid rises in my throat. Tears could easily begin, but I look at the rose, then back to Ben’s curls and long, delicate neck. For now, both he and the rose are here, beautiful and powerful. I don’t cling. He isn’t mine to keep, and I’m not his. Ben McKittrick—the boy I thought my curse had stolen—is back. He could’ve stayed in Scotland. He could’ve met someone new. It’s an exhausting journey traveling south to London, but he did it for me. I focus on that instead of fear.

In the end, the Wishing Rose did as we asked.

We didn’t wish to be kept together forever. We wished for the one thing Ben and I needed most—the missing notches in our puzzle-piece hearts that kept us from clicking into place.

We wished for trust.

It didn’t grow overnight. Trust, like Vero Roseto, needed to be planted, tilled, and nurtured daily, ritualistically, even when I didn’t want to—even when the job was hardest.

But our trust bloomed, and my trust is as good security as I’ll ever get.

“I’m hungry,” Ben whispers beneath the pelts.

Kissing his neck, my sneaky hand travels south. “Me too.”

He smacks my wrist. “Food first, beast.” Ben’s torso, contoured precisely to mine, squirms until he faces me. My lion. We dress in Mr. Cartwright’s silk robes. After descending the spiral staircase, we weave through the bookstore’s sections: rare first editions, the children’s department, the mess we made of self-help. My sugarplum dream sits under a glass cake-saver dome. Beyond it is a giant kettle. Ben turns it on and readies two mugs as I carve two healthy slices of cake.

As my boyfriend hunts through various flavors of tea, I spin the frost-white rose around in my hand. It’s so precious, I just want to keep staring at it. I must be staring too long, because Ben eyes me anxiously. “What are you doing over there, wish-maker?” he asks.

As I gaze at the still-dewy petals, my mind flips through five years of trauma like pages in a book. Hutch, Micah, my first go-round with Ben—all the boys the last rose cost me. Yet this rose feels like a sign that the loop of my curse is finally closed for good. In a way, the rose took away my boyfriends. In another way, the rose is why I’m here with Ben, my love of loves, spending an unforgettable week in a blizzardy bookshop in a magical city where I’m about to begin my future.

Shockingly, my heart rate is normal. My breath hasn’t stopped.

It doesn’t hurt anymore.

In fact, I didn’t realize until just now that I haven’t thought about any of my exes in months. They are finally where they belong—in someone else’s story.

“I’m not wishing,” I say. “There’s nothing else to wish for.”

Holding Ben’s white rose, I don’t look up. I don’t want him to notice my tears. Grateful tears. I have everything I want, and at last, I realize I have it while I still have it. In my mind, Aunt Ro—dressed as Mama Bianchi—approaches, ready to hand me a glass of Grato.

The End