Page 61 of The Call of Azure (Unexpected Love #3)
Epilogue
Liam
Mar and Gabriel whispering and giggling with their heads together usually terrifies me. While I know I'm a bit more anxious than most people, I think this particular fear is justified, now that the two of them have decided that conspiring against the rest of us is one of their favorite pastimes.
Last Christmas, Gabriel convinced her to make a batch of “special brownies” since I still wouldn’t give in to his “special” custom Girl Scout cookie suggestion.
Thank God I didn’t eat one, so I didn’t end up either floating around the room petting everyone or stuck in the past for hours on end.
Everyone else had them though. No one was upset about it, but it did make for an…
interesting…holiday. In April, they ganged up on Ken and convinced him that he needed goats.
Mar wanted to try her hand at goat’s milk soap and cheese, and apparently, Gabriel has always had a weird fixation with goats being a part of happy ever afters, even though he’d never even seen one in person until they showed up at Ken’s house.
The dozen or so times they escaped in the first few weeks, only to be found eating Jayce’s roses and every single plant in Ken’s early spring garden, were slightly chaotic, and I was grateful we live downtown so we didn't have to deal with the cleanup. It worked out in the end though. We all went out for a weekend and built them a nice, big, sturdy goat pen and little barn, and Mar’s soap really is great.
Still, the two of them scare me just a little when they get together.
Not today though. Today, the sight is one that I stand and study carefully, committing the way they interact to memory, in the hopes that the moment will always be with me as Gabriel adds a few wispy gold chains to the bright magenta scarf holding back Mar’s hair.
When Ken asked her to marry him, there was a terrifying moment when Gabriel and I realized that in a complex, roundabout way…
that would make us stepbrothers. So we'd convinced Ken to officially, unofficially unadopt Gabriel so that Mar and I could have him instead.
Not as brothers, for god's sake, what is wrong with you? But one day, the wedding we attend won't be Ken and Marigold’s. One day, it will be Gabriel’s and mine.
And on that day, I'll be her son, and he'll be her son-in-law.
Today though…today, the two of us will walk her down the aisle together, and somehow…
in a move that I will never completely understand, fate or magic or the universe, or whatever other intangible forces might exist to explain how we could have ended up here, both Gabriel and I will have finally found the big, chaotic, colorful, absolutely absurd family that we’ve each always longed for.