The Mischievous Mrs. Maxfield

A Sort Of Epilogue That Isn't Quite One

A/N: When I finished TMMM, I didn't really know whether I was going to write an epilogue for it or not. I wrote this as I was thinking of writing the next entry for Brandon's Notebook (which is the bonus material that lets us peek into his journal). I thought about where Brandon was at the end of the story and took him back to the beginning of it, when he was first realizing just how much his life was going to change after Charlotte stirred it up. It made me think of the past, the present and the future and led me here. So I wrote it in the same style as I did Virtue and Vice, the epilogue being from the perspective of the man who loved our heroine.

Hope you like it. 

***

“But Dad, there weren’t any dragons in this story!”

“The villains aren’t always going to be dragons, silly!”

I glanced at the two small, round faces peering up at me expectantly.

Even though their light brown hair varied slightly by the shades of gold in them, their eyes were the exact shade of aquamarine that I knew so well and loved so much.

And their uncanny similarity to their mother didn’t end there.

At six, both Skyler and Samuel, only four and a half minutes apart, already possessed the same irrepressible nature that made me sweat a little when I thought about the future. 

It was normal, I was told, to worry about the days when I couldn’t be there to help them up when they stumble and fall, but Charlotte would always just shake her head and tell me that the first thing our children needed to learn was how to pick themselves up and keep on going. The world would never be a perfect place, no matter how much money we had, and the only way to live was to know that and strive to be happy anyway. I believed her, of course, because if there was one person who could proudly declare such a thing, it was Charlotte whose many trials by fire only forged her to be the strong, beautiful person she was today. 

“Your sister is right,” I told Sam with a small smile. “Villains don’t always appear as you expect them.”

“Of course, I’m right,” Sky asserted with a haughty tilt of her chin as she crossed her arms and gave her brother a look that couldn’t mean anything else but I-told-you-so. “Princesses like me know these things.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “But they don’t know about space aliens or battleships!” He turned to me with those large blue-green eyes and nudged my thigh. “Right, Dad?”

I suppressed a sigh as I stared at the nearly-identical stubborn looks the twins gave me, both entreating me to take one side over the other.

I wondered now why I thought that today was a good day to tell them an old fairy tale I wrote about eight years ago which I still knew by heart. Maybe because while I was sitting here and waiting along with the restless crowd in front of Langdell Library, I thought it would be fitting to finally tell my children what a wonderful princess their mother was, even if they didn’t quite know it was her in the story. 

They were still too young to fully understand, even though Sky adored the princess and Sam thought the prince should’ve had a big, black horse that could fly. It may continue to be nothing more than a story to them and that was alright with me. Stories had a way of finding themselves back to you when it was time for them to serve more than just glimpses of life inscribed in pages. 

“Are they yours?” A woman who was seated behind me in a different table asked in a measured flirty tone, boldly reaching out to touch me on the arm.

She was attractive, somewhere in her mid-thirties maybe, and very professional-looking in some sleek kind of navy blue suit. She flashed me a coy smile when I finally looked at her. It still happened a lot to me but I’d learned in the last eight years that while women’s interest were often harmless because I hardly paid it any attention, it was safer to steer clear if I didn’t want Charlotte to get dragged to prison for seriously injuring some unwitting woman who didn’t know who they were messing with. Charlotte may have a giant golden heart but she had a temper, alright.