Oh, feel free to poke me about this sort of thing -- I have a bad habit of starting episodic stories like this one and then letting them slide, especially if I'm not sure that the audience is really there for them.

I'm so pleased by your comment that you can see what's going on, because I know I'm a bit lax when it comes to description, and I can't show much of what the characters are thinking here, because neither of them are terribly introspective. So I have to let these brief exchanges do all the heavy work.

But I do see emotional intricacies as plot advancement, and this Epilogue is filled to the brim with emotional intricacies :)

That's true -- and both characters needed to do this emotional stuff, or at least I needed them to do it. They're still feeling their way around each other, at least a little, but I think they're on firmer gound now.