And me? I was what an unreliable narrator should be. Sadder but wiser and happier too. More skeptical, more injured, more in love. More tied in. Neither tragic nor comic. Not a happy ending exactly and certainly not a sad one. Ambiguous. With an emphasis on the why rather than the what, the what having been fairly clear all along. With an emphasis on the love rather than the anger, there being hefty helpings of both, this being family after all, but with love winning out in the end because that’s what it means to end. That’s how you know you’ve come to a close for the moment—because you’ve found the love again. You’ve reclaimed it, or it has—they have—you. This is why, finally, there are so many weddings at the ends of books. Not because the weddings are so much ends themselves but because it’s hard to go forward with the story after that much love. It’s too trite to use words to talk about it. It’s too momentous and extraordinary to return from to the mundane and the everyday. It is astonishing that after all the evidence and warnings to the contrary, such a leap of faith is possible. It asks us all what if you could love and be loved this much? In words, in spirit, in person even, it’s almost hard to believe. But believe it we must, we do, and so in the end, with our family, with our friends, with the ones who are both, with the ones we parent and choose to parent, with the ones we kiss on the mouth, with the ones we take in, with the ones who leave us, with the ones who come back, with the ones we remember, we make the leap. In the end, we leap; we always do.