Page 112 of Snake

Cox turned and headed toward that fancy damn staircase.

Epilogue

two springs later

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Autumn smiled when she saw the Welcome to Signal Bend! sign and its cheerful steam train coming around a bend, where a bright signal light showed the way. Once she’d thought that sign ridiculously cutesy, but now she loved it. For her, that sign was more than a welcome. It was a welcome home.

Well, in spirit, at least. And in truth someday.

Indianapolis would always be her hometown; Pom and Pops lived there, as did Ida and her fiancé, Rand. Ida and Rand now owned her schoolhouse condo. A rented rowhouse in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis was Autumn’s current address. But Signal Bend was the place that felt most like home these days.

Entering the town proper, Autumn grinned as she passed the completed and fully occupied Signal Bend Pavilion. As always (when she was alone in the car), she waggled her fingers in a tiny wave. It was dumb, but that property felt like her actual child, and she was proud.

As a last minute change, they’d decided to sacrifice some parking in the middle of the lot and installed an outdoor play area, and that had been probably the best decision of the whole project. It was constantly busy, and it drew parents into the shops.

Exterior construction was almost complete on Phase II, The Pavilion Inn; they were planning an August grand opening. Hyatt had signed on to brand the inn with one of its boutique labels. Autumn considered that a major coup, but she’d had to work all her rhetorical muscles to get the Horde and Signal Bend on board. They’d been adamant that the property only house regional businesses, as originally planned. No franchises.

She’d done an actual, full-bore business presentation in the Keep and repeated it at a town meeting, convincing everybody that an anchor like Hyatt would secure all the smaller tenants, and that Hyatt’s approach to their boutique lines was local-culture forward.

She’d been right because she knew her business. She’d convinced them she was right because they all trusted her now. Being the so-called ‘old lady’ (she was trying but did not have high hopes of that ever not sounding weird) of a Horde patch was like a Teflon coating of trustworthiness in this town.

These days, she really was completely in charge of the Heartland Homesteads project. They had two additional satellite offices established, in Detroit and Cincinnati, and a new Homestead in development at each. Autumn had hired the leads at both locations years ago, as agents for her team. They still reported to her, but now they had their own shows to run.

Both were women. She hadn’t selected intentionally for that, she’d selected for the most qualified candidate, but she was delighted to bring more women into leadership.

Her title hadn’t changed, she was still VP of Commercial Development, but a lot had changed for the better at MWGP. Chase’s father had fully retired, and Chase had become CEO. Malcolm Pitt, formerly a fellow VP with Autumn, was now their president. Malcom was a good egg.

Philosophically speaking, it wasn’t great that Chase was still failing upward, but practically speaking, it was fantastic. He’d climbed high enough to be out of everyone’s hair. As CEO, Chase barely came into the office anymore. Like his father, he saw the job of CEO as primarily face time: he entertained bigwig clients. He took reports at a monthly management meeting and threw in his two cents, but he mainly let Malcom deal with the daily operations of the company and focused on perfecting his golf game.

As Autumn herself now only rarely came into the Indianapolis office, she hadn’t had to deal with Chase for almost two years, but after the corporate reshuffle she’d seen the whole company breathe a sigh of relief. For so many years, she’d been so focused on the path before her, making sure nothing blocked her way or sent her in the wrong direction that she hadn’t fully understood how toxic Chase had been to everyone. What she’d told herself was ‘annoying but manageable’ conduct, and ‘inappropriate but not illegal’ acts had truly been sexual harassment, sexist discrimination, intimidation, and retaliation.

She’d told herself a lot of lies to keep her path forward clear. Not only at MWGP but in her life generally. Lies like I don’t need romantic love; friends and family is enough. Like I’ve worked my whole life to thicken my skin, now nothing can hurt me. Like I work so much because there’s nothing else I’d rather do. Like I’d only ever live in a city.

Like I’m not attracted to some dumb hick biker.

A lot of lies in that last one—or mistakes, anyway. She wasn’t always sure whether she’d been lying to herself or just wrong. Ida said it was all part of the same thing: Autumn’s deeply ingrained habit of making a path toward wanting what she could see was possible rather than finding a path to the thing she actually wanted, whether she could see it was possible or not.

It was true; most of Autumn’s thirty-six years had been spent appreciating what she already had and determining what was possible before she tried to want anything else. Even her career path had been forged not because she had a burning love of real estate but because she’d been good at math and business classes and had taken a real-estate law course because it was the single remaining available business law course the semester she’d needed to fulfill that requirement.

As a kid, she’d wanted to be a history or math teacher. Or a marine biologist.

She loved her work, and she loved being good at it, but she’d taken the path she could see to its end. Autumn had never felt blind faith in anything but her fathers. She’d always needed to see, or at least be able to imagine in realistic detail, the goal.

But almost two years ago, she’d taken a reckless leap off a cliff in the dark, she’d jumped despite the bright red warning sign, and that had panned out brilliantly.

These days, she and Cox decided what they wanted and went for it.

For Autumn, that change of perspective had been liberating and occasionally a little angsty. She’d discovered a real enjoyment of the slower pace of country life, but occasionally worried that if she indulged in lazy days too often, she’d lose her edge in business. But she was figuring out that it was, in fact, possible to balance work and life when work was not your life.

The change in Cox was ... monumental.

It hadn’t come quickly or easily, but Cox had discovered a will to live, not simply to exist but to live fully—to want things, to plan for things, to hope for a future full of wants fulfilled, plans met, and dreams achieved. He’d even tried therapy, at her behest, but only made it a month before he declared that therapy was ‘too much chitchat.’ But he’d promised to ‘work his shit out’ some other way, and he’d kept the promise. Cox always kept his promises.

Mainly he talked things out with Autumn, and she was happy to be his sounding board. There was no better way to know a taciturn man like hers than to listen when he had something to say.

They hadn’t seen each other in nearly a week, the longest they’d allowed themselves to be apart since they’d decided they wanted to be together. She could not wait to be in his arms again.

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