Epilogue
LUCY
THREE MONTHS LATER
It’s Christmas Eve in Harmony Heights, and it’s snowing.
When I was a little girl, I loved the snow.
The excitement, the expectation, the hope that there would be enough of the white stuff on the ground that I could have a day off from school.
We had our first flurry at the beginning of the month, and the childish excitement that flooded through me was second only to the relief that I can remember what those early days were like.
It’s been four months since my accident.
I still don’t have my full memory back, but each day brings a little more of who Lucy Wright was.
Like, I can remember how I did a dance to an old Britney Spears song during my fifth grade talent show, though I’ve continued to block anything to do with the man I was married to for half a decade.
I remember making Christmas cookies—chocolate chip, naturally—with my mom before she divorced my dad and disappeared, but anything surrounding Tony Wright is as hazy as those lost years.
I do remember how much I love the Christmas season, whether I have good, bad, or missing memories when it comes to the holiday.
I know this isn’t the first one I’ve spent with Dallas—we had one short Christmas in the year-and-a-half we were together—but pulling up those memories is like trying to catch a fish with my bare hands.
I can see it, I can grab at it, but they’re usually too wiggly for me to hold onto.
That’s okay. Dallas spent the last few weeks giving me the perfect holiday season.
Now that he’s stepped down from being the King, settling into his role as Adrian’s fiercest enforcer/bodyguard, he’s had more time to spend with me, and no reason to come up with excuses to abandon his ‘duties’.
That meant he was there to help me string up lights in every one of the penthouse’s windows, and last week, he figured out how to get a seven-foot-tall Douglas fir up to the top floor so we could decorate it together.
We still live in the Fortress. Adrian and Dallas swapped offices after a much smaller remaining group of high-ranking Owed members agreed to let Dallas pass his figurative crown over to Adrian.
However, when Dallas offered to move out of the penthouse so that Adrian and Loni could take it over, Adrian refused.
He and Loni—and their adorable fluffballs, Peaches and Cream—enjoyed the privacy of their home, and as Adrian pointed out, for good or for bad, the penthouse apartment has always been Dallas’s.
Like me, he struggles with his memories. Only, in Dallas’s case, he remembers too much. The ghost of his father might’ve lurked in the King’s office a floor below, but up here? It’s Reese Collins who is everywhere he looks. He loathed his father, but he loved his mother, and this was her home.
And now it’s our home.
I’m standing at the window in the living room, watching the snow fall.
It’s not the soft, flurrying kind, barely there, hardly a wisp on the wind.
Oh, no. These are big suckers. The heavy sort of snowfall, the thick flakes tumbling from the sky like they’re trying to bury all of Harmony Heights in white.
And, to my surprise, while I feel that same excitement young Lucy did—because it’s snowing this morning and it’s Christmas Eve which means tomorrow is Christmas—there’s one thing I don’t feel.
Fear.
Trepidation.
Anxiety…
For the first weeks, I avoided windows and heights.
Do you blame me? Even without the memories of what happened that night, I knew I fell.
I got lucky, too. If I had a different room in the Stanton, if I hadn’t hit the door covering on the way down from the fourth floor room, breaking my fall, I might’ve died.
I know now that was his intent. He wanted me dead, and a fuzzy memory is an okay price to pay to have a second chance with the man who loved me so much, he didn’t just avenge me.
Over the last five years, he never gave up on me.
He never forgot me, even if for a while there, I forgot him.
Now I’m in his home… our home… and I’m standing at the penthouse window, watching the snow collect on the rooftops below the Fortress as the sun tries to break through the storm when Dallas comes up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist.
“You’ve been staring out the window for more than five minutes,” he murmurs against my hair.
I’ve grown it out a little, letting it fall a couple of inches past my shoulders.
He brushes it aside, pressing a kiss to my naked neck.
“Please don’t tell me that you decided you’d rather take a dive than stick it out with me.
Because I got a shrink you could talk to, Luce. Comes highly recommended.”
Now, I’ve been talking to a therapist to help me work through my missing memories.
When he realized how much that was helping me, something finally clicked for Dallas.
With Adrian’s help, he found someone to talk to, to help him with some of the urges he’d been dealing with.
Not because he planned on ending things; not my Dallas, not when we’re finally making a good go of this.
He did it because he wants to banish the demons that Jack Collins left behind, and in a perverse way, going to therapy to talk it out—something that would’ve given the old bastard a conniption if he knew his only boy was talking about his feelings to an outsider—is doing a much better job than eliminating any Owed who challenged Dallas first, then his cousin.
Of course, he’s still doing that, too, but whatever helps.
My memory is still shaky at best, but if there’s one thing I do remember, it’s how much I fucking love Dallas Collins.
I loved him then, I loved him when I had no idea who he was apart from the lies he told me, and even when I thought I’d never be able to forgive him for lying to me—no matter his reasons—I folded almost immediately.
I love him now, and if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that everything I did, I did for him.
If he blows his brains out? I’d jump because I…
I can’t live without him. Knowing that he was safe, that he was thriving, that he was alive…
that’s why I left him. I feel the certainty of that all the way down to my bones.
In my own way, I was protecting him, but if anything ever happened to Dallas, that would be the end of Lucy.
He needs to understand that. Peering over my shoulder, gazing up at him, I say, “The only way I’d jump if I was falling after you.”
“Good thing my boots are firmly planted on the ground then.” It’s as much a heated growl against my skin as it is a promise. “So you’re not plotting another escape? That’s good. But what are you looking at? With the snow blowing around, you can’t see shit.”
I shrug, then lean back against the safety of his solid chest. “I don’t know. I kind of like it,” I say. “When the wind slows, I can see where the snow is sticking. It makes everything look clean.”
He hums, but there’s a hint of annoyance in the sound.
I turn fully in his arms, going up on my tiptoes so that I can get a better look at his face. His scruffy jaw is tight, and there’s a flicker of frustration in his deep green eyes as he peers over my head and out the window.
Dallas hates windows as much as I do. First, because of his mom, then due to my own accident. For a moment, I think that’s why he’s not happy to find me staring through the glass, but as his gaze darts back and forth, his cheeks hollowing, I realize there’s something more than that.
I brace my palms against his middle. “What’s the matter? Something wrong?”
He shakes his head. “Just thinking about the snow. I don’t mind getting snowed-in together tomorrow, but I want to be able to go out today.”
“I hope you haven’t left your Christmas shopping until last minute,” I tease.
And it is a tease. I accidentally stumbled upon the stash of gifts he’s been collecting for me since Thanksgiving when I went looking in his closet because…
okay, I was snooping. But that’s also because I wanted to sneak a peek at the size of his boots so I could get him a winter pair since my stubborn lover refuses to upgrade his normal boots despite our unusually wintry December.
I almost want to grab the wrapped box I stowed in a linen closet so that he can change his shoes if he really wants to go out, but I’m not sure why he would need to—
—until Dallas reminds me with a shrug, “Adrian invited us to have dinner with him and Loni. My truck is a beast. It’ll get us there, no problem, but not if we get stuck with a foot of snow or something.”
I pat his side. “Weatherman says it’s only a squall. We might get an inch or two tops before it’s over, but we should be able to make it there alright. You said dinner was at… six?”
“Seven. It’s tradition.” Glancing away, presenting me with his profile as he stares at the tree in the corner, he says, “Ever since my mom… Jack couldn’t give a shit when it came to Christmas.
I would go to my aunt and uncle’s place, have dinner with Adrian, know what it was like to be part of a real family.
When he and Loni got hitched, they invited me last year.
Now that I have you… we can stay in if you want. Start our own tradition, Dandelion.”
We can, but I heard the wistfulness in his voice when he mentioned family. Dallas is all I have now. Even if I wanted to be selfish and keep him to myself for Christmas, I wouldn’t do that to him.
“I’d like to go to your cousin’s,” I tell him, “as long as we’re home before Santa comes tonight.”
His lips twitch, a sly smile, though his jaw relaxes at the same time and I know I’ve erased a few of his demons at least for a little while. “It’s a deal.”