Epilogue #3
“Sometimes.” A pause. “When I need to hear his voice but cannot remember exactly what it sounded like anymore.”
Her thumb moves over my knuckles, tracing the scars that have faded over the years but never fully disappeared—a map of everything my hands have been through and what they have learnt since.
“You realize, he was proud long before Ava was born,” she states.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Do you? Because you became a good man before you believed you were one.”
Skylar shifts in my lap and I glance toward the house.
At the back door, one tiny pink gumboot lies on its side, the other standing upright beside it, abandoned mid-stride—the way Ava abandons everything, with complete commitment and zero follow-through.
She is going to be a nightmare at sixteen and I can already see it.
Skylar pulls back and looks at my face.
God, I love this woman.
Not only in the wild, starving way of seventeen, looking at her as if she hung every star by hand and then called him an asshole for staring.
Not only in the desperate way of twenty-five, when I came out of prison and found her changed and hurting, still mine in every way I had no right to claim and could not stop wanting anyway.
I love her now in the way a man loves life. Without the fear underneath it that used to come with everything good.
I love her in the coffee she leaves, too sweet for me because she says bitterness is not a personality.
I love her in the way she still says my full name when she is furious and in the way she still curls into my side in sleep, as if my chest is the only pillow she has ever trusted with the unguarded version of herself.
I lean in and kiss the side of her neck.
She tilts her head and gives me more room, as she always has and always will, and thank fuck for that, because some things should never change and that is one of them.
“I love you, Sky.”
For a while, we sit here without talking.
Just the two of us on the back porch. The night settles around the house. Somewhere beyond the fence, a bird calls once, then falls quiet again.
It’s hard to believe that Rainer is gone but still here too.
He’s in the boards beneath us. In the workshop lights still burning out front. In the woman on my lap. He is in every second chance I did not earn but received anyway. Every tool on the wall and every stubborn lesson.
I never changed the workshop sign. I never will. It will always say Rainer’s Custom Restorations, crooked and faded and entirely his, because some things are not mine to change no matter whose name is on the paperwork.
He is in the way I stand beside the young kid who came by last winter looking for cash work and pretending he wasn’t hungry. It hurt to watch because I recognized every single part of that performance.
His name is Noah.
Sixteen. Too thin. Too angry. Mouthy as fuck, in the specific way of someone who learnt early that a sharp mouth was cheaper than armor and more immediately available.
I gave him a sandwich.
He told me to fuck off.
The next day, I gave him another one.
I hired him two weeks later and let him stay in the apartment above the workshop.
He steals my food, over-tightens everything, and treats praise like a communicable disease.
I know that kid.
Rainer knew it too.
Maybe that is how men like us get saved. Not by one grand gesture. Someone hands you a sandwich. Someone gives you work and stays until you learn how to do it.
Skylar reaches down and folds the letter with care.
She takes her time with it, smoothing the creases with her fingers, treating his words with care, before sliding it into the pocket of my shirt, right over my heart.
The ache there shifts. Not gone. It’s just different.
I glance back toward the creek.
For a second, I swear I can hear him. Not a voice.
Just the old echo of him in the places he left better than he found them.
Some people leave so much of themselves behind that death doesn’t have the final say.
It can take the body. It can take the voice.
But it does not take the lessons or the love.
I am still a rough-edged bastard with a mouth on me, a past full of shit, and a heart that has never known how to do anything but halfway.
But I am no longer lost. I am not running.
For the first time in my life, I don’t feel as if I am waiting for everything good to be taken away from me.
So I hold my wife a little tighter, kiss her once more in the dark, and let myself believe it.
This life. This woman. My family.
That is the whole story. That is all there is.
A man who believed in me before I knew how to believe in myself. That was the beginning of everything. One quiet, stubborn act of faith that changed the shape of my whole life.
And the boy who grew into a man on the other side of all that damage finally understands that every broken piece of him did not make him any less worthy of love.
After everything he lost, everything he survived, and everything that brought him home, he knows exactly what he has, and he finally fucking knows what he is worth.