Disclaimers:

We don't own any characters although it would be nice to borrow them sometime.

This is not really a science fiction, so the effects of any future technological advances are minimized - for all we know, Katie could have cloned Jessie.

Rating: A couple of love scenes, but nothing really smutty

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CHAPTER 15: Epilogue

Jessie and Katie did not live happily ever after. That only happened in fairy tales. But they lived as happy as anyone could be. Not always happy, not always dreaming and gazing at the moon, for that wasn't possible. But they looked forward to everyday because everyday was all they had at the moment.

Jessie did not readily, magnanimously, miraculously forget Katie's philandering 20 years. Once in a while, they would meet some gorgeous attractive woman in some UN or Harvard function, and a tinge of jealousy would still invade Jessie's heart. But that was normal, she thought. Because the moment she stopped feeling jealous, that would also be the moment she would stop loving Katie. And she would never stop loving Katie. Not ever. Every person who had actually made it to Katie's heart had to be there at precisely the time they were. Their presence was necessary because they helped Katie realized that she had really only loved one person in her life.

They still went to the cabin every chance they got. Once in a while, Zoe or Eli or Grace and their families would join them there. The kids loved their Aunt Katie because she was the coolest skier they had ever met. They did not know of course that Katie learned some fancy moves from a former Olympic skier girlfriend. Their Aunt Katie looked like she was born with skis surgically attached to her feet – and she equally kicked butt on a snowboard.

Rick and Lily and Karen had visited them several times. Katie always made sure that she and Rick go to a Red Sox game when he's in town so Katie could mouth off the pathetic statistics of the White Sox. At least the Red Sox was not at the bottom of the feeder, and of course, Rick hated that. During the football season, Rick, Katie, and Eli formed their own league with only the New England Patriots, the Chicago Bears, and the NY Giants all stacked against one another. Katie had designed this statistical score card model that could download sports information directly from the NFL web site and compared every single play the three teams made over the weekend. On Tuesdays, Katie would email them each team's respective Katie Composite Score and Rick was never happy to see how his Bears languished, although he thought that Katie's scorecard model was pretty nifty. Every 2 weeks, the winner with the highest score stood to collect from the losers and Katie made a small fortune from Eli and Rick's unfortunate teams.

And when Jessie gave birth to Karen Elizabeth Sammler-Singer the following year, Katie thought she was on top of the world, because she had never seen a more beautiful baby in her life. She thought she could not be any happier until Erick Michael Sammler-Singer came 3 years later, and she could not wait to get another pair of Red Sox season tickets to go with these two Red-Sox clad tykes. The identity of the father was not a known nor discussed fact outside of their closest circle, but it was one of Katie's older brothers, a scientist at NASA who also happened to be gay. Both kids had Jessie's eyes and Katie's lips and their parents' brains and hearts. And soon enough it was time to sell that one-bedroom condo on Beacon Hill for a larger home in Cambridge's Avon Hill district right outside of Harvard Square.

But whenever Karen could fly in from Chicago to baby sit, Katie and Jessie still spent a few days in Katie's flat in London by the River Thames. Katie would never sell that flat because she had bought it for Jessie when Jessie was just a distant memory, and she would keep it for Jessie long after the world had forgotten about them.

When they attended Katie's 25th high school reunion in Sinclair, they were greeted with a spontaneous applause as they walked hand-in-hand into the ballroom and danced to Billie Holiday's "God Bless The Child". Of course only after Katie bribed the DJ and recanted her previous collateral pledge - her first born. Sarah Grasser looked at them with disdain while the rest of the class basked in the love that seemed to radiate from these two. For Sarah, like Katie and Jessie, could also hold something in her heart after 20 years… she still had not understood why Katie broke up with her to be with Jessie.

So Katie taught and published and lived her calling; Jessie healed people and eventually also joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School. This assured their 2 kids a free ride to Harvard when they go to college. Only if they want to go to Harvard, of course. Because Katie was ready to send them to Oxford while Jessie thought Northwestern was the only institute of higher learning she could entrust their children too.

Jessie, however, did not live to see Kary and Erick attend either institution; she died from cancer at the age of 47. Too young, really, but she was ready to go home. She already had a glimpse of what Eternity was all about; Katie made it possible for her.

Katie was devastated, but she continued on for their kids. She had to. She had kept her promise to God 13 years ago to never go astray again if He would save Jessie from that train accident. And after Jessie had died, she could only hold on to this God to help her through because really, she did not know how else to live.

But they all lived and still went to the cabin and spent time with Jessie's family. Every time Kary or Erick would come home and hug Katie, she knew that Jessie would live on through them. Katie never dated after that, she was busy raising 2 wonderful children. They still all went to Red Sox games, sometimes with Drs. Garrett and Ribizi, and they still visited Grammy Karen and Pop-pop Rick in Sinclair.

Katie still spent time at the flat in London whenever she could, sometimes alone, sometimes with the children. And as the sunrise pierced the clouds over the Thames, she would look up at the sky and whisper, "I love you, Billie, I will always love you."

THE END

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