says, tightening her arms around my neck. “And I have no doubt that we’re gonna get our happily ever after.”
Epilogue
Reagan
Five years later…
“Mommy, can I please have a big sword like the knights have?” Jack asks, his caramel eyes pleading with me.
“If Daddy says so,” I tell him, ruffling his hair while waiting for Gage’s decision.
“Sure, why not? As long as you promise to be careful with it,” Gage responds, kneeling down in front of our son.
“Promise!” Jack agrees throwing his arms around his daddy’s neck.
“I’ll take him back over to the knights if you want to keep browsing?” Gage says, standing up with Jack on his hip and placing a kiss on my cheek.
“Okay, have fun,” I agree with a smile.
Waving bye to my husband and son, who is his father’s spitting image, I walk farther down the row, looking for one tent in particular in the sea of vendor, until I finally spot her.
Wearing a burgundy dress, just like the one from years ago, I find Madam Tess sitting in front of her crystal ball.
“Hello, dear. Care for a free reading?” she asks, apparently not recognizing me. I guess she travels a lot and sees many faces, so I shouldn’t expect her to remember mine.
“No, thanks,” I tell her when I take a seat across from her on the same stool as before. Everything is perfect in my life, so I don’t want to chance a reading that will make me have doubts or any crazy worries. “I was just wondering if you still sell love potions?”
“Ah, I do, but you don’t have a need for such a thing.”
“I don’t?” I ask, playing coy.
“No. Your aura shows that you’ve already united with your soulmate.”
“That’s true,” I admit with a smile. “So I guess that means your love potion worked.”
“Of course it worked,” she replies with her own grin.
“I stopped tracking it years ago, though. Josie and I were going crazy and couldn’t deal with the constant worrying anymore. So why are Gage and I and Josie and Lawson still together if the potion stopped passing through different hands?”
“The power of persuasion is incredibly strong. And sometimes it only takes the idea of a phenomenon to make certain events happen.”
“So it wasn’t real? We just believed it was, so it worked for us?” I ask in surprise.
Madam Tess leans forward, and then whispers, “It was just Kool-Aid.”
“No way!” I exclaim with a bark of laughter. So, Josie was right. I paid this woman two hundred dollars for Kool-Aid. “Well, even so, thank you for the persuasion. Josie and I have been happily married for years,” I tell her as I get to my feet now that I have the answer to the question I’ve always wondered. “Good seeing you again,” I say with a wave.
“You too, dear,” Madam Tess replies.
Only once I’m halfway across the grassy field, heading for my two knights do I remember the way the liquid in the glass bottle changed colors, from blue, Josie’s favorite, to mine, purple, when we touched it. Turning back around, I walk over to Madam Tess’s tent again to ask her how she managed to pull that off, wondering if it was the same element that causes a mood ring to change colors. But when I get there, her tent is now empty. Her table and stools are gone too, along with her crystal ball. I look up and down the rows of tents and don’t see her burgundy dress. I even walk around behind the tent to see if she’s heading for the parking lot, there’s no sign of her. The woman just up and disappeared.
Wandering back to the knight’s stand, I find Gage and Jack sword fighting. It looks like we now have two swords instead of just one.
I love seeing my two guys playing together, and I love them more than anything. My life is perfect. I have a great job, taking photos when I travel around the country with Gage for his various reporting assignments, and we have Jack with us everywhere we go. Soon he’ll start school, and we’ll have to find a place to settle down, at least during the school year; but I think I’m ready to call one place home. I don’t care where it is, as long as these two are with me. So what if Gage and I ended up together because of a love potion? Real or fake, I’ll never regret that sip that gave us a lifetime of love.
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