Epilogue - June
June
Molly's truck smells like bar soap and gunpowder and something warm underneath — vanilla, maybe, or cinnamon — and I decide that smell is what safety feels like.
I'm wedged between Evan and the passenger door, which isn't comfortable by any objective measure.
His shoulder is still healing, and every time Molly takes a corner, I feel him brace against the pain he won't admit to.
I've been watching him do that my whole life — absorb damage and call it fine.
The difference now is that when he does it, Molly reaches over without looking and puts her hand on his knee, and something in his whole body settles.
I've never seen him settle before.
I look out the window so they can't see my face, because I'm smiling like an idiot and I don't want to ruin the cool, quiet version of myself I've been trying to project since Ironwood Falls took me in.
The town slides past in amber streetlight and wet pavement, small and strange and nothing like Salem, nothing like anywhere I've ever called home.
It doesn't feel like nothing, though. It feels like something I don't have a word for yet.
"You okay back there, Junebug?" Evan asks.
"Fine," I say, which is the Wilder family answer for everything from a paper cut to a bullet wound, and he knows it, so he doesn't push. But his hand finds my knee for a second — a quick, clumsy pat — and I put my hand over his and squeeze.
We don't say anything else. We don't need to.
Molly pulls up in front of the studio apartment the Devils are lending me, a ground-floor unit in a converted Victorian three blocks from the Noble Fir.
It's small. The radiator makes a sound like someone dropping cutlery down a staircase.
The mattress has seen better decades. I love it in a way that feels embarrassing to admit — because it's mine, because no one put me here to use me for something, because the key in my pocket is mine to keep.
"Text me when you're inside," Evan says.
"I'm thirty feet from the door."
"Text me anyway."
I roll my eyes, which is the correct response, and climb out.
The night air is cold and clean and smells of pine and distant rain.
I turn back to the truck’s window. Evan is watching me with that look he gets — the one that's been there since I was eleven and he became everything — careful and steady and a little afraid of how much he needs me to be okay.
"Go home, Evan," I say. "I'm fine."
This time I mean it.
He nods. Molly gives me a small wave, the kind that means she sees me and isn't making a big deal of it, which is exactly how I want to be seen. The truck pulls away, and I watch the taillights until they round the corner and disappear.
I stand there for a moment in the quiet.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, the quiet doesn't feel like a threat. It feels like permission. Like the world is giving me a second before the next thing starts, a breath between one life and whatever comes after it.
I think about the party. About Riley pulling me into a hug like she'd known me for years.
About Rabid nodding at me across the room in a way that meant something, even if I don't speak that language yet.
About Molly, who is sharp and guarded and more like me than she'd probably want to admit, pressing a cupcake into my hand and saying, eat something in a tone that was really saying you're allowed to be here.
I think about what it would feel like to stay.
I want to stay.
I'm still smiling when I reach the door.
The note is folded once, tucked under the door knocker, white paper against dark paint. My name isn't on it. It doesn't need to be.
I unfold it.
Five words in block letters, written in a hurried, violent scratch.
They know what you saw.