EPILOGUE
Monica's world had crumbled completely.
The video of her breakdown on the runway had gone viral within minutes of her being walked out of the venue.
News tabloids ran the story with headlines that managed to be both judgmental and devastating, tarnishing her already complicated name with the permanent ink of a crime she had committed in front of an audience.
For once in her existence, the Blanchard name could not put up a sufficient fight.
The machine that Tao had helped her build had been running on borrowed credibility, and credibility, it turned out, was the one thing money could not manufacture when the alternative version of events was on video and in the hands of every journalist on every continent.
True to her promise, Taera Montgomery had pulled every force at her disposal to ensure that Monica would answer for everything she had done.
Vincent Montgomery, who had spent months drinking himself quietly to pieces, had found in this a purpose that got him out of the armchair and into the world again, and the precision of a Montgomery family with a unified goal directed at your legal situation was not something Monica's defence team had been fully prepared for.
The final day of judgement arrived on a Tuesday in the spring, the courthouse packed with press and observers and people who had known Tao along with people who had only known of her.
Monica stood at the defence table in a grey suit her council had clearly selected to communicate contrition and looked at none of them.
"Guilty," the jury delivered. The single word fell into the packed courtroom like a stone dropped into still water, the silence after it carrying the weight of everyone seeking retribution.
Monica's eyes went wide for just a moment. Then the mask came back down, because even now, even here, the mask was the last thing to leave her. She had built it over so many months that it had become structural.
The judge's gavel struck.
The cold silver cuffs clinked onto her wrists.
She looked down at them and the expression on her face changed to that of grief.
Her career. Her fame. The power she had accumulated so carefully across so many years.
All of it had proven to be exactly what Tao had said it was, borrowed, conditional, and hers only for as long as she could keep the truth from surfacing.
A lone tear rolled down her cheek as they walked her toward the doors.
"Killer!" the crowd outside booed, pressing against the barriers with their placards and their phones.
Monica walked through it with her chin level and her eyes forward, and if it cost her something to maintain that composure then she paid the cost without showing the payment, it was all she had left.
Fate, she understood now, was a trickster. She had wanted her name to be written into the history of the world in permanent and irreversible letters. And fate, true to its nature, had made certain that the world would never forget Monica Blanchard. Just not in any of the ways she had hoped.
?
Priya watched the proceedings from three rows back with relief in her eyes and a sorrow in her heart she had finally allowed herself to feel.
Justice had been served. That was the phrase people used and it was not wrong, but it was not complete either.
Justice did not give back what had been taken.
It did not restore the dead or undo the grief that had settled permanently into the Montgomery household or return the months that Priya herself had spent sleeping badly and eating poorly and watching every shadow in every room she walked into.
Justice was its own thing, separate from healing, and Priya had finally understood that she was going to have to find the second thing herself.
She had kept a completely stoned face throughout the trial, devoid of all visible emotion. She had promised herself this. She would not let Monica see weakness. She would not give her the satisfaction of visible pain.
The burning scar on her head served as a reminder.
She had looked at it every morning since the night Rachael had found Taron in time.
Every morning it reminded her of what she had survived and who had tried to prevent that survival.
She wore it as a channelled strength now.
You could survive the worst that someone intended for you and still be standing on the other side of it. She was evidence of that.
The courthouse doors opened and the crowd surged outside. Monica was led through it with the cuffs on her wrists and the cameras on her face, the voices of the crowd following her all the way to the police vehicle.
"Killer!" they called.
Priya watched from the top of the courthouse steps as the vehicle pulled away and disappeared around the corner. Then she stood in the afternoon sun and let it warm her and breathed.
Something moved in the air beside her. Not a sound, but a warmth that the spring afternoon did not entirely account for, and with it a drift of Coco Chanel that arrived and was gone before she could fully confirm it.
Priya smiled. She closed her eyes.
"It's over," she said quietly, to the warmth and the scent and whatever carried both. "You can rest now. I hope you're resting."
She stood there for another moment, letting the sun and the certainty settle over her. Then she walked down the courthouse steps with fulfilled purpose, she could finally move on.
?
Taron-Lee Montgomery did not go inside the courthouse.
He had made his decision about this weeks ago when he understood that he could not sit in a room calmly with Monica Blanchard for the duration of a trial.
He was his father's son in many ways, but he was also very much his own person, and his own person had a particular difficulty with rooms that required him to look at the person responsible for his sister's death and fake the neutrality of a bystander.
So he sat in his car in the parking structure across the street and he waited.
When the courthouse doors opened and the crowd spilled out and Monica was walked through it to the vehicle, he watched from a distance with the windows up and the engine off, and he didn’t need to ask what the verdict was.
He sat for a while after the vehicle had gone.
He thought about Tao the way he had been thinking about her since the night she disappeared, not in grand memorial scenes but in small and ordinary ones.
Her voice in the Edinburgh kitchen. Her phone calls from university that always ran forty minutes longer than she said they would.
The summer evenings in the garden at home where they would lay on the grass looking up at the stars and talked about nothing in particular for three hours, neither of them wanting to go inside.
He thought about the ouija board spelling garden, and about how like her it was to choose the one word that would have their brains twisted trying to understand. He felt lighter, and he silently thanked the powers at be for bringing his sister’s killer to Justice
He signalled to his driver. The car pulled out of the structure and into the afternoon traffic, and Taron watched the city pass outside the window and thought about where he wanted to go next.
Not today. Overall. He thought about the life that he was now going to have to build around an absence that would always be there.
But somewhere in the long dark months since her death, he had decided that her death was not going to be the only thing that defined it.
Tao would have hated it if it were.
?
In the Netherworld, the ceremony was held in the Elysian fields at the hour where the sky burned its deepest scarlet.
The souls of the realm assembled along the edges of the field, their combined presence creating a kind of light that Sidius, who had been here since before light was a concept, found genuinely moving. He stood near the back and watched with pride at the conclusion to a long winded tale.
"For eternity," Tao and Hades said together, the words completing the last clause of the ritual that sealed the covenant made, not as obligation but as choice, and the difference between those two things was everything.
The Elysian fields responded, the gold brighter and the air warmer, the pillars of Baal casting their familiar long shadows across the luminous sand.
"Lilith," the souls said, bowing their heads in the old gesture of recognition that was also an acknowledgement, the realm was complete. The balance had been restored. The long unease was over.
Tao stood in her realm, the one she had arrived in dead and furious, that she had gradually, improbably, claimed as her own. This was where she belonged.
She looked at Hades beside her, his obsidian eyes warm in the scarlet light, and at Sidius near the back of the assembly with an expression of satisfaction on his ancient face, and at the realm spread around them in all its impossible and magnificent detail.
She had died. She had been betrayed by the person she had simultaneously loved and underestimated.
She had navigated the Netherworld on incomplete information with insufficient guidance and had found, in the process, something she had not known she was looking for.
She had watched justice find its way in the living world, had seen her family begin the long work of healing, had said goodbye to a life that had been extraordinary and flawed and entirely hers.
And she was here. And here was home. And that, she decided, was more than enough.
?
Sidius stood alone at the edge of the River Styx after the assembly had dispersed and the Elysian fields had returned to their normal rhythm of quiet.
The goddess of the river surfaced for the second time in his long experience of this place, which she did rarely, and only for things she considered worth surfacing for.
"Well done," she said. Her voice carried the sound of water over stone, the sound of the very old and the very patient.
Sidius considered the river for a while in comfortable silence.
He thought about the long list of souls he had guided to their paths across all the centuries of his work, the ones who had wept and the ones who had raged and the ones who had gone quietly, each one the entire world to someone somewhere.
He thought about Tao, who had done none of these expected things and had instead asked approximately a thousand questions and argued with him about Charon and walked through the living world for one last afternoon, saying goodbye properly.
"She'll be a handful," he said.
"Yes," the goddess replied. The corners of what might have been a smile. "That's rather the point of her."
He watched the river for a while longer, the light from the Pathana catching the edges of the current and making it briefly, brilliantly coloured.
Tao’s death was not an ending. It never had been. It was the particular kind of beginning that only became possible once everything you had been was stripped away and you were left with the question of who you actually were underneath all of it.
Tao-Lee Montgomery had always known exactly who she was underneath all of it.
She had simply needed somewhere new to prove it.
— END —