Epilogue
DOLL
Maverick pulls Darling’s chair out at noon, same as every Sunday, and the whole lot settles around that small ceremony like it’s the bell for church.
Grill smoke over the picnic tables. Two long tables pushed into one. Phoenix ferrying trays from the kitchen and threatening the hands that reach for the foil early. Levi on the gate, trying to look bored and failing, because today there’s cake.
It’s the first Sunday since Victor’s house.
The news gave it four paragraphs. Home invasion gone wrong, two men dead, an investigation that everyone at this table knows will stay ongoing until it quietly isn’t.
Chicago’s people walked the house before the first badge did.
They were thorough. The Quinlans buried their cousin in Chicago. Nobody sent flowers. The truce holds.
I still wake some nights with three flat tones in my ears. Angel doesn’t tell me it will pass. He turns on the light and stays awake with me until it does.
Cash finds me between the coolers and the horseshoe pit with a folder under his arm. Other men bring beer to a barbecue. Cash brings probate.
“You want the numbers now,” he says, “or Monday, in an office, like civilized people?”
Angel is at my shoulder, close enough to touch. “Your call, Doll.”
“The headlines now?”
Cash walks me through it in his treasurer’s voice, kind and exact.
Victor never wrote a will, so what was his lands on his only family.
Me. The house, and what’s left of Halcyon.
The corporation is being liquidated and since I never officially worked there, no one is going to come after me.
Voss is buried in filings. What remains is real estate.
The proceeds of the sales will pay back Chicago paper first, and there’s still plenty left.
“Real estate is still money. Handled right,” Cash says, watching me, “it comes out to more than your parents’ account would’ve grown into over ten years. Maybe a good deal more.”
I wait to feel like that’s justice. It doesn’t, not really.
The money doesn’t buy back a single birthday cake. It doesn’t unsay a decade of you cost me. None of it makes what he did okay. It makes me not empty-handed. And these days the paperwork works for me, not on me.
“Let’s do the rest on Monday then, in your office. We’ll pretend we’re civilized people.”
“Knew I liked you,” he says, and goes to lose at horseshoes.
Down the table, Levi carries a wooden crate that just arrived, hand delivered, for Bishop.
He sets it by his elbow. Bishop slides the lid.
It’s a bottle of Macallan, his favorite.
According to the label, it’s older than I am.
It spent the last thirty years in the cask.
There’s a card with it. He reads, folds it into his inside pocket, and catches me watching.
“Our new Chicago allies have manners.” It’s all he says.
I’m curious, but the note was for the president. Chances are we’ll never know what’s in it.
“You want me with you when you go back out there?” Angel asks, while Phoenix’s second wave of trays comes through. He means the house. I haven’t been back.
“Everything I want from that house is already here. The boxes are in our room. The ring’s around my neck.” I turn my beer slowly on the wood. “The rest is square footage. I’ll sell it, probably. Or let it sit a season first.”
“Any special reason?”
“Yeah, I need to wait for people to forget it was the scene of a double homicide.”
“Fuck yeah.”
Then Bones is on his feet, tapping a bottle with a fork, hauling Bandit up beside him while she protests exactly enough to make him grin.
“Riley Bennett has been working the ED for a week now and she hasn’t killed anyone,” Bones says. “The state of Washington was right to entrust her with our lives!”
“Just don’t forget to lock your supply closets,” Smoke calls out, and the table roars, because everybody here knows how their story started.
Darling stands last. She lifts her glass of iced tea, and the noise dies. “No one’s allowed to make fun of the girl who came back for me,” she says very seriously. “But Smoke’s right. If I was in charge, I would keep an inventory of all our supplies.”
The table roars even louder.
I’m on my feet with everyone else, and it takes me a moment to notice it. I’m not watching from the edge. I’m a member of this family. Birdie leans on my shoulder to see the one-week anniversary cake. Sweetheart smiles at me.
Nobody has asked whether I’m staying.
“Doll.” Phoenix, both hands full, chin pointing at the last tray. “Grab that for me.”
I grab it. Family helps family.
Later, when the cake is rubble and the horseshoe scores are contested, mostly by Cash, mostly because I won, Darling holds court over decaf.
I sit down next to Angel. He’s easy in his chair, boots crossed, watching his family with the patience of a man off the clock for the first time in a month. His arm lies along the back of my seat.
His hand is open on his knee, palm up.
I put mine in it and leave it there.