EPILOGUE
"Mom! Can I borrow your maroon velvet scarf?" Hannah asked, leaning out of her bedroom doorway.
"Sure! But I haven't seen it for at least six months," Rory realized. "You'll have to check the space savers under the bed in our room."
"It's April, Nannah, why do you need a scarf?" Logan laughed.
"I'm helping Maggie film a thing for her summer film school application – stellar best friend that I am, she roped me into being an extra, she told me to wear a dark scarf."
"Ahh Maggie, the Sophia Coppola of your junior class."
"Who?"
"I'm offended, Hannah," Rory said, shock evident on her face, "after all our movie nights and pop culture-athons, that you don't remember who Sophia Coppola is."
"Sorry," Hannah rolled her eyes, heading to her parents' room. "Don't forget I'm babysitting for Jess and Kathleen all weekend!" she called out as she pulled giant plastic containers out from under the king-sized bed.
"Wait, why all weekend, again?" Rory asked.
"I don't know, probably some romantic weekend away from their rambunctious nine-year-olds. I didn't ask. In any case, I'm heading out to their place right after school on Friday." After a few minutes of rummaging, Hannah gasped. "What the fuck is this?" she yelled.
"Hey!" Logan clapped back. "Language!"
"No," she shook her head, emerging back into the living room clutching a frame in her hand. She dropped it, face up on the couch between her parents. "You don't get to give me shit about my language when you've been keeping this from me all these years."
Rory and Logan felt their mouths go dry in the exact same instant as they registered what Hannah had tossed on the couch between them: their marriage licence.
"You fucking eloped in Salem and you never told me!" Hannah wanted to be angry, but she actually started to laugh.
Logan and Rory waited, to see if her laughter was genuine, or a gateway to rage.
"Why didn't you ever tell me?"
"Honestly?" Logan asked quietly.
"Honestly."
Rory sighed. "Your dad and I had been together for so long by then. Our life was settled. We never felt a need or desire to get married – honestly it made no difference to us, we didn't need it to solidify our family. But then after Jess and Kathleen got married we figured, 'We may as well just do it.' It was a purely pragmatic decision, Hannah – to make things easier, legally and on paper."
"My dad had just died," Logan clenched his jaw at the memory. "I know we haven't told you much about him, but that's on purpose – you don't need to know anything about him. But when he died, I had to sit in on meetings with lawyers to untangle clerical, bureaucratic things and it was one of the most… unpleasant things I've ever had to do. I came home from that experience and I told your mom I wanted to make sure that you'd never have to experience anything like that for any reason – we didn't want anyone questioning you in the face of… so we made it legal. We went to Salem and made a weekend of it, because, we figured – why the hell not?"
"Okay… but why didn't you ever tell me?" Hannah asked.
They both shrugged.
"Don't try and give me some crap excuse, like, you forgot, or something?"
"No," Rory shook her head, "we didn't forget. It just… wasn't important. We weren't more of a family after the fact than before and it just, didn't matter."
"Honestly, Nannah – we don't celebrate the anniversary, I don't have a ring. We didn't want a wedding, we didn't need one. We weren't trying to keep anything from you – we never wanted to make a thing of it, so we didn't," Logan explained. "I'm sure that answer is entirely anticlimactic, but it's the truth."
"Who else knows?"
"No one."
"No one? That's crap."
"Honestly, no one knows. We didn't tell anyone."
Hannah turned her attention to her mother. "Gamma Lorelai and Poppa Luke?"
"Nope," Rory shook her head.
"But you and Gamma tell each other everything."
"I didn't tell her this. And you can't tell her, Hannah. She'd freak out."
"Great-grandma? Lane? Dave? Jess and Kathleen? Paris?"
Rory kept shaking her head. "You certainly can't tell your great-grandma – it might actually kill her," she chuckled bitterly, "please, seriously, don't."
Hannah looked at her father. "Did you ever tell Shira? Or Aunt Honour?"
"No, I didn't," Logan said.
"Finny – Finn? Robert? Colin?"
"Nope."
"But… why not?" Hannah asked.
"It's way easier if no one knows, trust us," Rory answered. "People stopped prodding really relentlessly about our marital status when you were around five or six – because I think they just gave up. So, when we made this decision, we figured it was much simpler to just say nothing. We weren't interested in commentary from everyone we've ever known."
"Everyone had just stopped hounding us within that same year – we didn't want to open that can of worms, with a side of unrighteous anger because we did it without telling anyone. And you can't out us, Nannah," Logan said seriously, "we'd never hear the end of it."
Hannah broke out into a devilish grin. "You guys are totally serious."
Her parents nodded.
"That's kinda badass."
"Seriously with the language, Hannah," Rory sighed.
"Admit that it's badass."
"Fine, your parents are badasses. Now, ease up on the language," Logan said. "And also, you're sworn to secrecy, right?"
"Your secret dies with me," Hannah promised, kissing her mom and dad on the cheek. "Now I gotta go find that scarf!"
"Take this back into the bedroom with you," Rory said, handing her back the framed marriage license. "And bury it back under that bed!"
"Wow," Logan whispered when Hannah left the room, "so that just happened. We should have done a better job hiding that licence."
"Yeah," Rory laughed, "but we did get away with it for almost ten years, so. Plus, I think she might actually keep it to herself – did you see how impressed she seemed?"
Logan laughed. "Yeah, that bodes well for us, huh?"
"You realize if she elopes and we find out about it years later we we'll have no right to hold it against her?"
"As long as she doesn't elope before she's twenty-one, I think I can handle that," Logan smiled.
"Oh, you are so lying. You would not even be remotely okay if Hannah eloped in… five years – yikes."
Logan felt the blood drain from his face. "Yeah. I'm totally lying. When you put it like that, I don't even want to let her go to Brooklyn to babysit for the whole weekend. I'd much rather lock her in her room until she's thirty, to keep her from meeting guys like – like me, actually."
"That's all I'm sayin'," Rory laughed.