Chapter 37
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— Colt —
Lilac was different after I came back. Quieter, more settled, like she’d decided something and made her peace with it. I didn’t ask about it. Some things didn’t need to be explained to be understood.
The next few weeks were the happiest of my life.
And the most terrifying.
Because part of me kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For something to rip this away from me the way it had been ripped away before. I’d wake up reaching for her and find empty space, and it would take a second too long to remember she wasn’t gone.
With Death’s Head gone, the weight I’d been carrying for seven years had lifted. I could breathe again. Could focus on what mattered—my wife and sons.
But the fear lingered, whispering in quiet moments. What if this doesn’t last? What if you lose them again?
We fell into a rhythm anyway. I’d come by Betty’s every morning for breakfast, help the boys get ready for school, drive them myself when my schedule allowed.
Afternoons were for homework and riding lessons and the thousand small moments that made up a life.
Evenings were for dinner together, all of us around Betty’s table, laughing and talking and being a family.
And slowly—so slowly I almost didn’t notice—the fear started to fade.
That side of things was well and truly back on track.
Every time we had a moment alone—boys at school, Betty running errands—we ended up tangled together somewhere in the house.
Lilac kept one ear on the door, always half-listening for small footsteps.
They’re going to catch us, she’d whisper, and I’d say, so lock the door, and then she’d stop worrying.
Fuck, I loved her.
?
The idea had been forming for a while. Weeks, maybe.
But the night it finally came out, I’d been sitting on the couch with Lilac tucked against my side, boys long asleep down the hall, and I’d looked around at the cramped living room—Betty’s reading chair, the boys’ drawings stuck to the fridge, Lilac’s library book face-down on the side table—and thought we’re already a family. We’re just not living like one.
I had a house on club land. Built it years ago, had this idea in the back of my head that I’d want it someday. Been sitting empty ever since because I’d never felt the need for more than my room at the compound. I’d never had a reason.
Now I had three.
“Move in with me,” I said.
She tilted her head to look at me. “Okay.”
Just like that. No hesitation, no conditions. I hadn’t even finished the thought.
“You didn’t let me make the case. I was prepared to convince you,” I said.
“You don’t need to.” She sat up straighter, turning to face me properly.
“Colt. I spent seven years not knowing what I’d lost. I’m not going to spend another week pretending with you isn’t exactly where we should be.
” She said it like it was simple, like it had already been decided.
“The boys get to live with their dad. You get to be there every day. I get—” she hesitated.
“I get to stop missing you every time you go home.”
I felt it land.
“What about Betty?”
“She comes too, obviously.” She raised an eyebrow. “You were going to ask, weren’t you?”
“I was going to ask.”
“Good.” She settled back against me. “Tell her tomorrow. She’ll pretend she needs time to think about it and then immediately start packing.”
I laughed, low and quiet so as not to wake the boys. She was right. She was completely right.
“There’s one more thing,” she said, after a moment. Her voice had shifted—still calm, but careful.
“What?”
“Glitch said something, a while back. About the divorce papers.” She paused. “That my signature was forged. That technically we’re still married. That he could make all the legal mess disappear, or—” she stopped. “He said it was up to us.”
I’d known that. Glitch had told me the same thing, separately, and I’d been sitting on it—not wanting to push, not wanting to make her feel like I was angling for something she wasn’t ready for.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She was quiet for long enough that I didn’t try to fill it. Lilac thought in full sentences; she’d say it when she had it.
“I want to marry you,” she said. “Again. Properly. With the boys there, and Betty, and your brothers.” She looked up at me. “I know it’s—I still don’t have the memories back. I might never. But I don’t need them. I know who you are now. I know who we are now. That’s enough.”
I looked at her for a moment.
Then I slid off the couch and onto one knee on Betty’s living room floor.
She blinked. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
“We’re in Betty’s living room.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have a ring.”
“Didn’t have one the first time either.” I took her hand. It was warm and steady in mine. “Lil, baby. Lilac. Will you marry me?”
She stared at me. Then she laughed—soft and helpless—and leaned forward and kissed me once, hard.
“Yes,” she said against my mouth. “Obviously yes.”
?
We told the boys at breakfast.
Knox went fully sideways—jumping down from his chair, spinning in a circle, shouting about whether there would be space for a dog and could he have a blue room. Lilac said his name twice before he slowed down enough to hear that the dog was a maybe.
Luca didn’t move. He sat very still with his cereal spoon halfway to his mouth, watching me the way he always did when he was deciding whether something was real.
“We’d really live with you?” he said. “All the time?”
“All the time,” I said. “Your own rooms. Your own space. But together.”
He thought about it. “What about Grandma Betty?”
Betty was already in the kitchen doorway, dish towel in hand, not pretending she wasn’t listening. When Luca looked at her, her eyes were bright.
“Try and stop me,” she said.
Knox yelled something triumphant and knocked over his orange juice. Luca set his spoon down carefully, slid off his chair, and walked across to me. He didn’t say anything. He just put his arms around my neck and held on, and I held him back with both hands and didn’t trust myself to speak.
?
My family moved in three weeks later.
Dutch showed up first thing with a truck and Holden and Handful, and then the rest of the brothers filtered in through the morning until Betty’s front yard looked like a full club muster.
Lilac stood in the middle of it looking slightly overwhelmed—a dozen bikers in cuts, hauling furniture with the same intensity they brought to everything else—and then Indira appeared at her elbow with two coffees and said something that made her laugh, and after that she was fine.
It took most of the day.
Knox supervised his room with tremendous authority.
He stood in the doorway directing where each piece of furniture should go, changed his mind twice about the bed placement, and asked Handful four separate times whether he thought blue was the right color.
Handful, who had the patience of a saint when it came to the boys, told him it was definitely the right color and then distracted him with new card tricks.
Luca was quieter about it. He carried his own boxes in from the truck, one at a time, arranged his books himself in an order only he understood. When he was done, he sat on his new bed and looked around the room for a long moment, then came to find me in the hall.
“I like it,” he said.
Coming from Luca, that was a full endorsement.
By mid-afternoon the heavy work was done. I found Lilac in the kitchen with Indira, unpacking boxes, and I stood in the hallway for a minute just watching her—opening cabinets, figuring out where things went, making the space hers.
She caught me looking. “What?”
“Nothing.” I pushed off the doorframe. “You need help?”
“We’ve got it.” Indira waved me off. “Go do something useful.”
Late in the afternoon, the brothers started clearing out. Dutch squeezed my shoulder on the way past without saying anything. Indira hugged Lilac for a long time at the door. Betty disappeared into her room off the hallway, her reading lamp already on.
I found Lilac in the backyard as the sun dropped low. The boys were chasing each other across the grass—Knox shrieking, Luca trying to be dignified about it and failing. She was watching them with her arms crossed loosely, her face easy in a way it hadn’t always been.
I came up behind her and pulled her back against me. She leaned in without hesitation.
“You okay?” I said.
“Better than okay.” She covered my hands with hers. “I keep waiting for it to feel strange. It doesn’t.”
I pressed my mouth to her temple. Felt her exhale, slow and full.
Knox was flat on his back in the grass now, staring at the sky, one arm flung out dramatically. Luca sat cross-legged a few feet away.
I’d had a lot of years to think about what I’d lost. About the shape of the life I’d been supposed to have. But I’d never quite been able to picture it—too far away, too full of grief.
This was it. Right here.