Epilogue
November. Caen, France.
I used to write in this diary to make sense of things.
To put language around the parts of my life that felt too large or too strange or too painful to carry without words underneath them.
I wrote about wanting to be a compulsion rather than a choice. About monsters and love and whether those two things could exist in the same sentence without one destroying the other.
I have my answer.
We got married in ruins today.
Church of Saint-étienne-le-Vieux. The skeletal remains of a millennium-old church in Caen, roof long gone, walls still standing like stubborn witnesses to time.
I stood at what used to be the entrance and looked at all of it and felt completely at home.
Because I’ve been in ruins before.
I know what it looks like when something has lost its ceiling and its roof and most of what was supposed to protect it from the elements, and is still standing anyway, and is still beautiful anyway, and has wildflowers growing in its cracks because life is stubborn and finds a way regardless of what's been taken from it.
I know that.
I am that.
He is that.
We are that.
Two people who lost their roofs and kept their walls and grew something impossible in the cracks.
Ian walked me down the aisle, put my hand in Reth's, and then stood behind us and watched us get married with that look on his face—the one he almost never lets anyone see, the one underneath all the humor and the grit and the crude directness that is load-bearing, that has always been load-bearing.
The one that shows how much he loves both of us and how much that love has cost him.
He told us after.
His life for Reth's. Rowan's new weapon. Already decided, already done, irreversible. Ian, who slept outside my bedroom when the nightmares came.
Who gave me Gerald at a festival in Japan because he noticed I needed something to hold.
Who walked into Valeria's estate and came out with the man I love, traded himself so that man could live.
I don't have words for that yet.
I'm not sure I ever will. Some things are too large for language, and Ian's sacrifice is one of them—the kind of love that doesn't ask for anything back, that pays a price it will never collect on, that walks away from a ruined church in a soaked suit and calls it changing jobs.
He paused at the broken arch on his way out. Just for a second.
Didn't turn around.
And I watched Reth watch him go, and I saw on Reth's face the grief of a man who has spent his whole life being the one who pays the price, discovering too late that this time someone else paid it for him.
We're going to get him back.
Reth made that promise in the ruins while the rain fell, and I believe him the way I've always believed him—completely, without reservation, because this man has never once promised me something he didn't mean.
Wherever Ian is right now, whatever Rowan is making him into, we won't stop until we have him back.
But tonight, in the quiet of this hotel room with the rain still falling outside and Reth asleep beside me, his hand on my waist and the compass against my skin—tonight I let myself sit with the cost of all of it.
What this love has taken from the people inside it.
What it has asked of everyone who got close enough to be touched by it.
And the question I keep circling back to is this.
Would he change anything, knowing what loving me cost him?
I'd like to think no.
What I do know is this.
We’re still here. Together. Choosing each other in the ordinary dark of a Tuesday night in November with no crisis forcing the choice. That every break, every sacrifice had brought us here.
To ruins that are still standing.
To a compass that points north.
And maybe love isn’t the thing you know for certain. Maybe it's the thing you choose anyway, in the not-knowing.
Maybe that's the whole point.
We chose anyway. And that makes it worth it.
All of it.
Every drop.
Every scar.
Every page.
THE END.
Not ready to leave the darkness?
If Reth and Sophia stole your heart, I have one more story waiting for you.
Bared Betrayal follows a heroine carrying scars of her own—ones she's convinced make her unworthy of love.
Until she collides with the one man she should never want.
If you love broken characters who find healing in the most unexpected places, Bared Betrayal is waiting for you.
Happy reading,
Bella J