Epilogue
SAGE
Two Weeks Later
June in Las Vegas carries heat with confidence.
Summer is no longer threatening to arrive.
It is here, settled into the city’s structures.
The air is dry in that relentless, desert way, the kind that pulls moisture from your skin, and the evenings linger in long, copper-gold stretches that make the world feel suspended a little longer than it should.
I don’t stay outside.
I am inside the clubhouse. I’ve been here for three hours already, and I know I’ll stay at least one more.
It has become a rhythm now—my Sundays, this place, these people—and I didn’t plan it.
It arrived sideways, the way the best things do, through Marley, through a black Honda Civic and her fake dating drama, real feelings, and a found family I couldn’t have drawn a blueprint for if I’d have tried.
And now here I am, thirty-one years old, in a Las Vegas motorcycle clubhouse on a Sunday evening like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Because it is.
That’s the part that still catches me sometimes, just how natural this all is.
The room has that easy, settled quality it gets when nothing is on fire. And I mean that in the real sense and the metaphorical one, because this club has had enough of both kinds of fire in the past year to earn a quiet Sunday.
Millie is at the bar with Anchor’s hand resting at the small of her back, and she is laughing at something Deek has said, properly laughing, head tipped back, the laugh of someone who has cried a lot recently and is rediscovering that the other thing is still possible.
It’s just over a month since Jonas passed.
She is not okay, not fully, but she is upright, she is here, and Anchor hasn’t left her side in weeks.
He is strong and steady, as if staying had never been a question for him.
I watch them for a moment and feel something warm and uncomplicated move through my chest.
He’s going to take care of her.
I knew it before I could have told you why.
I’m certain of it now.
Victoria is camped out in the armchair by the window—the good one, the one closest to the air conditioner. She claimed it about six weeks ago, and nobody in this clubhouse is stupid enough to challenge her ownership at this point.
She’s massively pregnant, completely over it, and has spent the last month delivering increasingly aggressive opinions about chairs, body temperature, swollen feet, and the general betrayal that is the third trimester.
Sin doesn’t even wait for her to ask for things anymore. Drinks appear, snacks appear, blankets appear. Half the time he’s already moving before she opens her mouth.
This is the ONLY correct response.
She catches my eye from across the room and raises her glass of sparkling water at me. I raise my wine back. This is our version of a conversation, and it contains everything it needs to.
Marley is beside me at the table, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, on her third glass of wine and talking me through the wedding venue situation with the kind of energy that says she loves planning things and is also slightly losing her mind over them.
I am listening with genuine attention because I love her, and also because the story involves Nitro attempting to form an opinion on floral arrangements, and the results are genuinely extraordinary.
I am also aware, without making a production of being aware, that Ghost is at the table in the corner.
He is always at the table in the corner.
This is one of the reliable constants of my life, up there with Marley crying at commercials, Deek finding everything funnier than it is, and the fact that I will never, not once, be able to find my keys when I actually need them.
Ghost’s laptop is open, and the toothpick is in.
A few weeks ago, he moved his laptop bag approximately four inches to the left without being asked, and it happened to create exactly enough space for me to put my bag down when I arrived.
He has not commented on this. I have not commented on this, and the whole arrangement has the charged casualness of two people pretending something isn’t exactly what it is.
We are not defining things.
Not that there is anything to define exactly.
This was an unspoken agreement we reached sometime around month two, when I began claiming the chair beside him.
It has served us well in the sense that neither of us has had to say anything terrifying out loud.
It has not served us well in the sense that I am increasingly aware that ‘not defining things’ is simply a more comfortable name for ‘something I am running out of reasons to keep not defining.’ But I guess just sitting next to someone while they effectively ignore you for their laptop is about as much definition as I’m going to get.
There has been no dating.
No flirting.
Absolutely no physical contact.
The guy is making me work for it.
But even if he lets me sit next to him, and that is all I get, I will take it. Because there is something about Ghost that draws me in. A motherfucking pathetic moth to the proverbial flame.
Marley knows. Of course, Marley knows. She has the knowing expression of someone who found her own love story in the back of a black Honda and recognizes the shape of the beginning of one from fifty feet.
Suddenly, my phone buzzes on the table, jerking my eyes away from staring at Ghost.
I do that way too much.
Glancing down at my screen, I see a text from my baby sister.
Piper.
A slow smile starts before I even open it, because Piper texts the way she does everything, at volume, with commitment, and with zero regard for whether the timing is convenient.
Piper: Okay, so I have news… Good news. Call me when you can? Or FaceTime. FaceTime is better. I have a face I need you to see when I tell you.
I look at my phone for a moment.
My sister.
Twenty-six and living in Phoenix, which means I see her more through a phone screen than I do in real life these days. I miss her constantly. Not in some dramatic, chest-crushing way every second of the day, but in that steady background way absence settles into your life after long enough.
‘Good news,’ she said.
I push back from the table. “Two minutes,” I tell Marley, who waves me off without breaking her story about the floral arrangements.
I hold up one finger toward Ghost’s corner on reflex, a habit, at this point, automatic, and I feel more than see him glance up and register it before I slip out the side door.
The evening meets me head-on. June heat that doesn’t build anymore, it just exists, settled into the pavement and the air with no intention of leaving.
It’s still warm even with the sun dropping, the light turning everything that deep, molten gold that makes the edges of the world feel softer than they are.
The asphalt holds the day’s heat beneath my boots, and somewhere beyond the rooflines the desert stretches out in its endless way, doing what it always does… enduring.
I lean against the wall and FaceTime Piper. She answers in two rings, already wearing the face she promised me she’d wear today, bright, a little too careful around the edges, eyes flicking over my expression before she even thinks about signing.
“Hey,” I say anyway, even though I know she can’t hear me.
Piper tilts her head, reading the shape of the word off my mouth the way she always has, like language is just another puzzle she refuses to lose to.
She lifts one hand, fingers already moving, the familiar rhythm of ASL settling between us as naturally as breath.
That’s how we talk, most days. Hands, eyes, in the space that belongs only to us.
But I still speak sometimes. Not out of habit, not because I forget, but because she never asked me to stop.
Because she reads lips like a professional thief reads locks, and she says it makes her feel closer to the moment, like she’s catching the sound of it even if she isn’t hearing it.
So, I let the words exist alongside the signs, shaping them carefully, knowing she’ll catch every syllable anyway.
She starts signing fast, already talking over herself in the way she does when she’s too excited to separate the two. Her voice lands in short bursts while her hands do the real work of the sentence.
“Okay,” she says aloud, then signs the rest in a rush. ‘I’ve been sitting on this for a week. Needed to be sure. Now I’m sure.’
“Piper.”
“I got a job offer.” That part she says clearly and deliberately because she knows I’ll hear it and wants to see my reaction in real time.
I wait.
She exhales, signs more slowly now, shaping each word with intention. ‘A good one. Junior designer. Great salary. Real career path. Not temporary.’
She mouths real as she signs it, repeating the sign once more for emphasis.
‘Sage.’ Another pause. She holds my gaze through the screen, hands hovering mid-air like she hasn’t decided whether to finish the sentence yet.
Then she signs it…
‘Las Vegas.’
I go completely still.
On the screen, Piper watches my face move through half a dozen reactions in the span of a breath, and her own expression shifts into that careful softness she saves for moments she knows will matter long after they pass.
She signs more slowly now, with no voice. ‘I wanted to tell you first. Before I decide.’
“Piper.” My voice comes out strange, and I clear my throat. “If you want to come here… that’s not a decision that needs discussion. It never has. That’s just… yes. Always yes.”
She studies me for a second, then sighs, small and unguarded. ‘I miss you.’
I have been fine all evening. The version of myself that fills space and holds it together. I have been that person for three solid hours.
But my little sister signing, ‘I miss you,’ from her kitchen in Phoenix, with that plain, unfiltered honesty she’s always had, I press my free hand over my mouth and breathe through it.