All right, friends—you asked for it, I wrote it, and here it is. If you haven’t yet read Mrs. Nash’s Ashes, I must recommend doing that first or very little of this will make sense. If you have read, then I hope this brief update on what Millie and Hollis are up to a year after their trip to deliver three tablespoons of Mrs. Nash to Elsie in Key West is satisfying. It was fun to be inside Millie’s head again for a minute, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. So, without further ado…
Mrs. Nash’s Ashes by Sarah Adler - bonus epilogue
Gadsley, South Carolina - May 2024
Last time we traveled southbound on this particular road it was near-midnight, the headlights of my Volvo no match for the heaviness of the blue-black dark ahead. But now it's golden morning, soft light haloing the trees and a banner stretched across Main Street: GADSLEY BROCCOLI FESTIVAL & PARADE - MAY 25-26.
Over the last year, something in my biology changed, adapted, so that whenever Millicent looks at me it's a physical thing. I sense it now, those eyes the color of pre-blizzard skies—
“You know, there’s nothing wrong with just writing ‘gray’,” I tease. “It would help keep your word count down.”
Hollis doesn’t bother looking up from his phone beside me in the bed. “So would you talking less.” The corner of his mouth lifts ever-so-slightly before it trips, falling into a full smile before he can catch it. I nudge him hard with my elbow and he lets out one of his patented huff-laughs.
Since we left Key West last year, Hollis has continued writing about our adventures—“gathering his proof,” as he told me that evening on the beach. Except now, each night he hands over the big black five-subject notebook he picked up at a Georgia CVS on our way back home and I get to open it up and relive the day from his perspective.
And I also get to heckle him a little, which is great.
“Oh, please. As if you write down everything I say.” I made a hilarious joke about enemy Egyptologist trumpet players (they didn’t have a toot-in-common!) right before we entered town and that is certainly nowhere to be found in this recounting. I lean over and press my chin into Hollis’s shoulder. He has an email from his film agent about interest they’ve gotten in The Great Pyramids of Minnesota open on his phone screen. The success of Hollis’s book came slowly but when it hit, it really hit. Bestseller lists, television appearances, a much larger advance for his next project. When someone approaches us in public, it’s actually a toss-up now which one of us they recognized.
He closes out the email app just as a text pops up on the phone screen—Yeva, confirming our dinner plans with her and her new boyfriend when we pass through Miami on Monday on our way down to Key West to celebrate our anniversary (and give our regards to Mrs. Nash and Elsie).
“A lot has changed since last time we were here,” I say.
He reaches up with his left hand and combs his fingers through my hair in agreement. “Mustard Seed Room’s still pretty much the same though.” Hollis tilts his head toward the new Jesus paint-by-numbers beside the bathroom door. “Except there’s twenty-six of them now.” This one is Jesus helping someone steer a ship in a storm. I found the kit on Etsy and immediately knew I had to send it to Connie for Christmas.
My chin rest recedes as Hollis leans away to put his phone on the nightstand. When he finishes plugging it into the charger, he returns and wraps his arms around me, pressing our bodies together. “You ready for tomorrow?” he asks.
“I think so,” I say, momentarily distracted by the tickle of his breath on my neck. Ryan reached out back in December to ask if I would be interested in being the parade’s grand marshal again this year, and I immediately procured a green sequined halter jumpsuit in preparation. Hollis says it makes me look like a broccoli and a disco ball had a baby. I love it so much. “The high school’s marching band decided on ‘Call Me Al’ this year, by the way.”
“Fun,” he mutters disinterestedly, his lips brushing against my throat.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?”
He lifts his head. “I guess. Although I don’t really understand why you were so adamant about me doing the pie-eating competition.”
“Maybe I just really, really like to watch… you… eat,” I say, giving him an impish grin in between each slow, deep kiss that acts as an ellipses between my words.
“Such a weirdo.” He says it with a little shake of his head and the ghost of a smile on his lips. The affection in his tone makes my chest ache like always. I reach for him, but he takes my hand and threads our fingers together instead. He gives me a light squeeze before letting go.
“Hey,” I say, a little more petulantly than I mean to. “I meant ‘eat’ in the sex context.”
His gray-blue eye goes wolfish, the cognac brown one amused. “Oh, believe me,” he says, his accent slipping out as he forgets to restrain it, “I intend to devour every last crumb of you tonight, Mill. Gotta practice for tomorrow, after all.” Hollis drags the heavy black notebook back to my lap, where it’s still open to the page I abandoned. “But finish reading first.”
I don’t understand why he has to choose right now to have one of his (thankfully rare) insufferable writer moments, but I guess that reading about how much Hollis adores me before he shows me just how much he does won’t be too horrible of a sacrifice, and I get back to where I left off.
I sense it now, those eyes the color of pre-blizzard skies fixed on my profile as we stop in front of the large Victorian in the heart of town.
“What?” I ask.
“I was just thinking,” she says, “about how happy I am. How much I love you.”
Her words soften something calcified inside me, as they always do. Or maybe it’s more that they’re chipping away, slowly uncovering the real shape of my soul.
I take her hand and bring it to my mouth, planting a kiss on the pulse in her wrist. “I love you, too.”
And it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said, ever will say. My love for Millicent is the one thing in my life I’ve ever known inside my bones as a fact. One thing that I’ve never doubted for a moment, even when I didn’t know yet how to carry the weight of it.
We walk into Gadsley Manor and it hits me that the next time we walk through the front door, if I don’t somehow fuck it all up, the ring tucked away in my suitcase will be on Millicent’s finger—
“What.” I reread the words again, then look up and repeat, “What?”
Because Hollis isn’t beside me anymore. No. He’s on the floor, kneeling like some sort of tortoise-shell glasses and pajama pants-wearing cartoon prince.
Before he can say a word, I launch myself off the bed—which I forgot was so high up—and land pretty much fully atop him. He lets out a loud ooof. “Sorry, sorry!” I say. “And also yes! I’m saying sorry and also yes!”
“I haven’t even asked—”
But I kiss away the end of his sentence, then throw in another sorry, because I know I’m ruining whatever beautiful, romantic speech he’s been practicing in his head for days. Then I throw in another yes, in case I wasn’t clear enough before.
Hollis cups my face in his hands and kisses me, probably trying to get me to stop yelling sorry and yes over and over again. As our mouths part, he sighs heavily, closing his eyes. “This didn’t go anything like how I planned. Then again, few things involving you do.” The corner of his mouth kicks up. “They always wind up much, much better.” He pauses right before our lips meet again and murmurs, “At least once the smoke clears.”
His fingers thread up through my hair, and the tingling sensation that chases the warmth of his touch, paired with the feel of my body draped over all his most fun angles, is enough to make me forget for a moment what we were doing. So my heart goes gooey all over again when he gives me the full force of his smile and says, “Sometimes I look at you… and I’m overcome by the enormity of it all. Of just how much love I’ve learned I can feel and how it keeps growing by the day, constantly outpacing itself.” Hollis softly strokes his thumb over my jaw. “When I get scared, when I worry that I’ll run out of room, you smile at me or tell me a bad joke or point out something interesting I would have walked right past without noticing and… and it feels like being handed the keys to a new room in my heart that’s the perfect size to accommodate more.”
Tears well in my eyes. He used to think of himself as a haunted house, but I always knew he was a gingerbread one. And I like the mental image of helping him unlock new spaces in it. Or maybe not new, just forgotten.
“Our kids will probably need a ballroom at least,” I whisper.
Hollis’s eyebrows dip as he considers my words, clearly attempting to follow my thought process to parse out my meaning. It takes him a minute, but then he must get it because he says slowly, “Don’t worry. I suspect there’s an entire shuttered wing waiting for them.”
I lean in again, ready to demonstrate my appreciation for both his willingness to decode my apparent non sequiturs and for his ultra-sweet words, but he turns his head to the right, then the left, searching for something. “As I mentioned in the notebook, there’s a ring. But I have no idea where it went. It flew out of my hand when you tackled me.”
We don’t have to look far, since when we both sit up there’s a hard lump under my left buttcheek. I reach beneath me and pull out a velvet clamshell box. I open it, revealing an absolutely gorgeous sunstone haloed with diamonds. When we saw it in a local jewelry shop’s window a few months ago, I joked about how neat it would be to carry some extra sunshine around on my finger. Hollis must have seen past the jest to the rare materialistic lust in my eyes.
“This it?” I ask, holding it out to him, then snap the box closed right before he can reach inside.
“Millicent,” he growls, and everything inside me goes warm and liquid. “Do not Pretty Woman me while I’m in the middle of proposing to you.”
It is so hot that he gets most of my references now. “The middle? I’ve already said yes, dude. It’s done. You’re already stuck with me.”
“Good,” he whispers, crawling atop me, his hands on either side of my head. He stares down at my lips with such a hungry expression that I squirm in anticipation. “Because stuck with you is my absolute favorite place to be.”
Thank you for reading! A reminder that signed/personalized copies of Mrs. Nash’s Ashes are always available through my local indie, Curious Iguana. My second book, Happy Medium, is out on April 30th, and available now for preorder. If you love Millie and Hollis, I bet you’ll also love Gretchen and Charlie (and Everett the 1920s himbo ghost); I can’t wait for you to meet them! - xSA