Epilogue
June
Late spring, and the grass along the mill road has gone thick and green in the way it does right before it starts thinking about summer.
I've been in Clover Ridge going on a year now, and I still catch myself, some mornings, running the old scan out of habit — checking the street, checking the mirrors, checking the exits — before I remember, with a small private laugh, that nobody's coming.
Nobody's looking. I get to just live here now, using my own real name, in a town I picked with my finger on a map because it was small enough to hide in and turned out to be exactly the place I needed to be found.
Marsh's trial wrapped up months ago. He's exactly as unhappy about the outcome as a man like that deserves to be, and my testimony was one small, solid piece of the wall that came down on him.
I don't think about him much anymore. That's the strangest part of getting your life back — the thing that terrified you for months just gradually stops taking up room in your head, crowded out by better things.
I called my sister the week after the trial ended, the first real conversation we'd had since that eleven o'clock call in March.
She cried again, different tears this time, and Biscuit apparently refuses to come when called by any name but the one my sister gave him in my absence, which feels like a fair trade for four months of safekeeping.
I'm planning a visit soon. It'll be strange, seeing my old life up close again, knowing I get to choose how much of it to keep and how much to leave in the past where it belongs.
I started a design business — the cover story that finally became true.
I do the town's logos now instead of made-up ones for a made-up freelance career.
I designed the new charity logo for the Iron Thorn's spring fundraiser, and Harper's bakery packaging, which she insisted on paying me for in pastries, which is a currency I have zero complaints about.
Rafferty
I taught June my tricks, the ones I built out of six years of watching this town like it owed me something.
How to clock an exit without looking like you're clocking it.
How to read a room in under ten seconds.
How to know, from across a crowded space, whether somebody's a threat or just having a bad day.
She's good at it now. Unnervingly good. We stand at the edge of every club gathering these days, backs to the wall, eyes on the door, and I'd call us the quietest couple in the Iron Thorn if I didn't think it'd go straight to her head.
"We're not paranoid," she told Knox once, when he teased us about our matching corner-table habits. "We're thorough."
"Same thing," Knox said.
"Only one of those words sounds cool," she said, and he laughed loud enough that half the clubhouse turned to look, which — for two people who spend their lives trying not to be looked at — struck us both as very funny.
Tank still hasn't let go of his old betting pool about how long it took me to ask her out properly, and June still brings it up at least once a month purely to watch me pretend I don't remember exactly how long it took, which was, for the record, considerably faster than Tank's official odds suggested.
June
We live in his house now — our house, he corrected me on that within the first week and hasn't let me forget it since — and I sleep with both eyes closed every single night.
That still feels like a small miracle some mornings, waking up and remembering I didn't spend the night listening for a car that never comes.
The club adopted me the way it adopts everyone worth keeping, without ceremony, just steadily, until one day you look around and realize you belong somewhere completely.
That's the only currency this club really trades in, I've learned.
Not money, not power. Just family, handed out to whoever's earned it, no questions asked past the ones that matter.
Cormac and Josie had us over for dinner last month, and somewhere between his second helping and her third joke at his expense, Cormac told me that watching me settle into this life reminded him of his own first year here, how long it took him to stop bracing for the ground to disappear underneath him.
"It doesn't disappear," he told me. "Not here. Took me a while to believe that too."
Rafferty
At the annual spring ride, June rides behind me, and I feel her stop scanning the tree line about halfway up the ridge road, feel her actually relax into the ride instead of bracing through it, and something in my chest settles every single time it happens, like watching a wound finally, fully close.
Six years I spent alone by choice, certain that watching cost nothing and trusting cost everything. I was right about the second part. I just didn't know yet that some people are worth paying the toll for.
Knox asked me the other day if I regretted breaking my own rule for her.
I told him the only thing I regret is how long it took me to figure out the rule needed breaking.
He just laughed and said something about how I'd gone soft, and I told him soft was underrated, and he didn't have a comeback for that one, which might be a first in the ten years I've known him.
June
Final thought, mine, watching the greening hills roll by from the back of Rafferty's bike, my arms around a man who spent a whole month proving himself before he ever asked me for anything:
I ran for four months because I trusted the wrong person once and it nearly killed me, and I decided trust was a luxury I couldn't afford anymore.
Then I rolled into a lucky little town under a fake name, and a quiet man with sharp eyes saw straight through me and decided to stand between me and the dark, asking for nothing in return.
He didn't make me trust him. He just kept being trustworthy, patiently, day after day, until I couldn't help it anymore.
I stopped running. I stopped hiding. I stopped watching the door — because he's watching it, and he always will be.
They named him for the crow: clever, watchful, loyal for life. He's all three. And he's mine.
Lucky, lucky me.