Echoes of the Empty Earth
Copyright© 2025 by Art Samms
Epilogue
It took us roughly two years to find that happy middle ground—our own world, somewhere in the middle. But find it we did.
We decided that entrepreneurship and self-employment would be the way to go. We’d functioned entirely on our own for a year. We wanted to continue on that track in our return to our “normal” world. No bosses, no nine-to-fives, none of that stuff. Just Amara and I, independently together.
The first step was for Amara to enroll in an online MBA program. She embraced this new challenge with gusto, while still plugging away at her office job. It wasn’t long before she was offered a chance to transition to a permanent assignment. She accepted the offer, knowing it wasn’t what she wanted to do in the long term. But for now, it would keep the money coming in.
With both of us working in the same building, a few of our co-workers did raise their eyebrows at the sudden emergence of a relationship between Amara and I—especially given our different backgrounds. We paid them no mind, claiming that “when you know something is right, you don’t waste any time.”
And we both knew it was right. Eight months after the reversal of the shift, Amara and I took a drive up to Pompano Beach, our old shore hangout. We walked out onto the old fishing pier we’d frequented during our long exercise in solitude. Near the end of the pier, I showed Amara a ring, asked her to marry me, and she joyfully accepted. Maybe it would have been more romantic to ask her on the boat we’d used so often, but that wasn’t in the cards. At any rate, neither of us regretted the setting, nor the relative lack of ambience.
We were married three months later, in a small ceremony attended only by close family members and a few selected friends. Amara moved out of her mother’s house and into my condo, but we knew that was only a short-term living arrangement. We began looking around for something more suitable to the kind of life we wanted to live.
To this day, Ruby is the sole guardian of our secret. We don’t intend to tell anyone else. Ruby and I hit it off immediately — she’s a wonderful mother-in-law — and I’ve come to appreciate her grounded nature and her wisdom. Even now, she loves to tease us about the problems Amara and I had when we first met. She says that if she’d been there, she’d have knocked some sense into both of us.
After a lengthy search — we were quite picky about what we wanted — we found our dream residence in Coconut Grove, just a few miles southwest of Miami. It’s a single-story home with four bedrooms in a quiet, upscale area. We invited Ruby to come and live with us, but she remains attached to her humble abode in Liberty City and continues to prefer to stay there. Still, she spends a lot of time at our place. It’s a short drive.