Epilogue
Freya
One year later, the gallery on Harbor Street is full of people drinking cheap wine out of plastic cups and pretending to understand what they're looking at, and the thing they're looking at is us.
That's still the part I can't get used to.
Us. Not my work, not his work — ours. The wall at the far end of the gallery holds the collaborative series we spent the winter on, the one the owner is already calling the centerpiece of the whole show: ink and illustration married together, my tattoo language and his draftsman's eye, harbor scenes that aren't quite tattoos and aren't quite drawings, something in between that neither of us could have made alone.
The little card on the wall says KATSAROS / WOLFE.
Two names. Same size type. I made them promise on that part.
Kieran's across the room in a button-down shirt he's tugging at like it's trying to kill him, talking to a collector who drove up from the city, and he keeps catching my eye over the woman's shoulder with a look that says get me out of here and can you believe this in the same glance.
He's twenty-five now. He's grown the rest of the way into his shoulders.
The harbor-at-dawn cover-up runs the length of his right arm, healed and perfect, the cell-wall drawing made permanent the way I promised, and I watch the collector's eyes keep snagging on it, and I know before she says it that she's going to ask who did the tattoo, and I know Kieran's going to point across the room at me and say she did, with that particular pride he gets, and I get to watch a stranger realize the artist and the canvas came as a set.
Black Tide Ink has a second chair now. We expanded into the empty unit next door last spring — knocked through the wall, doubled the floor, put in a proper drawing studio in the back where Kieran apprentices under me and takes his own clients three days a week.
He's getting good. He's getting dangerous, the way I told him he would the night of the green bottle, except now it's on skin, now it's permanent, now people drive up the coast to sit in his chair the way they drive up to sit in mine.
He still leaves the right things out. He learned that lesson and he never forgot it.
It wasn't a straight line, getting here.
I want to be honest about that, even to myself, even on a night like this with both our names on the wall.
There was a hard stretch after the patching — months of it — where being together in public was its own kind of work.
The town talked. Some of the club's old guard had opinions about the sergeant-at-arms's sister and the prospect she'd been hiding, and they shared those opinions in the careful sideways way bikers share everything, and I had to learn to walk into the compound with my chin up and let it roll off me.
Kieran had it worse. He had to be twice as good as anyone to shut down the whispers that he'd gotten his patch on his back instead of his merit, and so he was — he worked twice as hard, took the worst jobs, said yes to everything, until even the ones who'd voted against him ran out of room to doubt him.
He never complained. Not once. He took it the way he takes everything, with his eyes open, and I watched a man build a place for himself out of nothing but the refusal to flinch, and I fell in love with him all over again, the slow way this time, the way you fall when the secret's gone and there's nothing left but the actual person standing in the daylight.
And there were the small things, the domestic things nobody warns you about.
He'd never had a home that was his, so he didn't know how to keep one — left his charcoal everywhere, slept like a man expecting to be woken and moved, flinched the first dozen times I came up behind him in the kitchen.
I learned his edges. He learned mine — that I need a morning hour alone with coffee and a pencil before I'm fit for human company, that I'll pick a fight when I'm scared instead of saying I'm scared, that I keep the studio upstairs the way some people keep a diary.
We sanded each other down. We built the thing slowly, with our hands, the way you build anything that's meant to last, and it's not perfect, and it's not always easy, and it's the realest thing I've ever made, and I've made a lot of things.
The collector finally releases Kieran. He crosses half the room toward me, gets intercepted by the gallery owner, glances at me with naked desperation, and I take pity and start to rescue him — and that's when the bell over the gallery door rings and Theo comes in.
He's in the good leather, the one he saves for things that matter, and he's holding a bottle of actual wine, not the plastic-cup stuff, and he scans the room with the enforcer eyes until he finds me, and his face does the thing it does now, which is a thing I didn't think it would ever do again after the kitchen and the cardamom rolls.
It softens.
It took a while. It took most of the year.
There was a long cold stretch where my brother and I were polite strangers who happened to share blood, where every dinner was a minefield and every silence was a wall.
But Kieran did the thing he does — he just kept standing there, kept showing up, kept earning it clean, the way he earned everything else.
He never once asked Theo to forgive him faster than Theo could.
He took the slow thaw the way he takes every hard thing, with his eyes open, not flinching.
And somewhere in the slowness, the brothers rebuilt the bond — different than before, sharper, more honest, a thing built on a hard truth instead of an easy assumption.
Theo trusts him now. Not the way he did before, the easy way. The earned way. The better way.
"That his arm?" Theo says, coming up beside me, nodding across the room at the harbor cover-up.
"That's his arm."
"It's good work." A pause. "You did that?"
"I did that."
Theo takes a sip of his good wine and watches the kid he un-sponsored charm a city collector under a wall with both their names on it. "He's still terrible at parties."
"Hates them. He's counting the minutes till he can go home and draw in his sweatpants."
"Good," Theo says, and there's something in it that's almost fond, almost, the closest my brother comes. "A man who likes parties this much would worry me." He clinks his bottle gently against my plastic cup. "He's all right, Freya. I'm not going to say it twice, so don't make me. He's all right."
It's the closest thing to I was wrong I'm ever going to get, and from Theo it's practically a sonnet, and I let it be enough, because it is.
But I push my luck, because I'm a Katsaros and pushing my luck is genetic. "You know what fixed it?" I say. "Between you two. I always wondered if it was the storm. The boat."
Theo's quiet a moment, watching Kieran across the room.
"The storm got my attention," he says finally.
"Anybody can do one brave thing. Brave's cheap, in this club.
We've all got brave." He turns the wine bottle in his hands.
"It was after. The whole year after. He kept showing up.
I iced him out for months, gave him every garbage detail I could think of, waited for him to crack and come whining to you about how the big bad sergeant-at-arms was being unfair.
He never did. He never said a word to you about it — I checked, don't give me that look — and he never said a word to me except yes and on it and understood.
" Theo's jaw works. "A man who does one brave thing, that's nothing.
A man who eats a year of cold and keeps showing up clean and never makes his woman carry it for him — that's the one you let near your sister.
That's the one you hand the leather to yourself.
" He takes a drink. "I figured it out about month eight.
Took me till month ten to say it out loud to Dominic. I'm a slow learner."
"You're not slow," I say. "You're careful. There's a difference."
"You sound like him." He almost smiles. Almost. "You two even talk the same now. It's unsettling."
"That's what happens. You spend enough years with someone, you start sharing a language.
" I bump my shoulder against his arm — my big, hard, careful brother, the wall that came down one brick at a time over a year I wasn't sure we'd survive.
"I missed you, Theo. That stretch where we were strangers.
I hated it. I'd have hated it even if it cost me him, and that's the thing I need you to know — I never stopped wanting you in my life.
I just needed you to want the actual me in yours. Not the princess. The me."
Theo looks at me for a long moment with our father's eyes.
"I know," he says. "I'm sorry it took a year.
I'm sorry it took a storm and ten months of cold.
" He clears his throat, which is the most emotion he'll permit himself in a public room.
"Dad would've hated him, you know. At first. The record, the streets, all of it.
And then about month eight Dad would've handed him the leather too, because Dad was a slow learner who knew brave from real, same as me.
" He raises the bottle an inch. "He'd have liked the gallery. Both your names. Same size."
"I made them promise on that part."
"Course you did." And this time he does smile, barely, the first full one I've gotten from him in a year, and it's worth every cold month it cost to earn.
Kieran finally escapes the collector and crosses the room to us, tugging at the collar again, and he and Theo do the thing they do now — the forearm clasp, the nod, the wordless exchange that says everything the way it did on the dock in the storm.
They're brothers in the way that matters.
They'll never talk about it. They don't have to.
"She wants to buy the whole series," Kieran says to me, dazed. "The whole wall. For her place in the city."