Bonus Epilogue
Alicia
Ten Years Later
The coffee maker has been running for seventeen minutes.
I know this because I’ve been watching the clock on the microwave from my spot at the kitchen island, willing myself not to go upstairs and knock on Stella’s door.
She’s twenty-two. She doesn’t need to be woken up on a Sunday morning.
She came home because she wanted to, not because anyone summoned her—and if I blow this by hovering, she’ll remember that when she’s deciding whether to visit next time.
I turn the coffee mug in my hands instead. Three slow rotations. An old habit.
The kitchen catches the morning light differently than any room I’ve ever lived in.
The Georgetown house had high ceilings and heritage brick and the kind of architectural bones that made design magazines salivate, but the light was always fighting its way in around the corner, always half-blocked by the iron fence and the two scrawny trees I’d had absolutely no interest in pruning.
This house sits on two acres in McLean, set back from the road by a long gravel drive, with windows that face east across the yard.
By eight in the morning, the kitchen is full of sunlight.
Noah picked it out. I let him think I needed convincing.
He’d made his case the way he always did—methodically and without drama.
Set back from the road. Single point of entry at the front.
Alarm system that he upgraded himself, which I still find slightly unnerving even a decade later.
He’d gone through twelve properties before he brought me to this one, and when I walked into the kitchen and saw the morning light laying itself across the wide-plank floors, I said we should probably schedule a second showing.
He’d looked at me for a long moment, something quiet moving behind his eyes, and said, “Whatever you need.”
We were back the next day. I made an offer before we reached the car.
I hear him before I see him—the soft fall of bare feet on the stairs, the creak of the third step that he keeps saying he’ll fix and never does.
Then Eli appears in the doorway, his hair still pressed flat on one side from sleep, wearing the oversized Virginia Tech T-shirt that has been his weekend uniform since Stella brought it home from a campus visit three years ago.
Eight years old, and already the shirt hits him at the knee.
“Is Stella awake?”
He asks this the way he asks about the weather—reflexively, because it is the primary variable that determines whether this morning will be good or simply fine.
“Not yet.”
His face does the thing. I’ve catalogued that face—the very specific arrangement of Noah’s jaw and my brow that has been producing that particular expression since he was approximately three and first understood the concept of waiting.
“She said she’d show me the new route on the trail map.”
“She will.”
“She promised.”
“Eli.”
“What?”
“She will.”
He climbs onto the stool beside me and leans his head against my arm, and for a moment I hold very still, the way you do when a bird lands on your wrist. These moments have a weight to them that I understand much better now than I did when Stella was small.
You can’t save them. You can only be in them while they last.
I was forty-three when Eli was born.
That’s what I think about when people talk about luck—not the cases, not the crisis that eventually resolved itself, not even the investigation that I’ve spent a decade filing into the locked drawer at the back of my mind where I keep the things that tried to break me.
I think about the afternoon I sat in the master bathroom of this house with a pregnancy test in my hand and felt something shift in my chest that I had no language for.
We’d stopped preventing it after our engagement.
That was how I’d framed it to myself—not trying, just no longer trying not to.
The distinction mattered to me in ways that were difficult to articulate.
Noah hadn’t pushed. He’d said, once, quietly, that whatever I wanted was what he wanted, and I’d believed him because I’d spent enough years learning to read people to know when they were telling me the truth.
My parents had me at forty-one. Their late-in-life surprise, my mother used to say, in a tone that made it sound like finding a twenty in an old coat pocket.
I called it the universe answering a question I hadn’t quite known how to ask.
Noah had sat with me on the bathroom floor for an hour without saying much of anything, his hand over mine, and when he finally spoke, what he said was, “We’re going to need to talk about the school district.”
That was when I knew we were going to be fine.
Noah appears at nine, already dressed—dark jeans, a grey Henley that I have strong feelings about—with the look he gets when he’s been up for a while and decided not to wake me.
He does this on weekends sometimes, goes down early and runs the perimeter of the property in the dark and then makes eggs that he leaves covered on the stove.
Military habit. He’s never been able to fully retire it, and by now I’ve stopped wanting him to.
“She’s still upstairs,” I say, because Eli is already leaning forward on his stool like a retriever spotting a tennis ball.
Noah looks at Eli. “Give her until ten.”
“That’s an hour.”
“That’s how long.”
Eli accepts this with the resignation of a man who has been outranked. He slides off the stool and disappears toward the back of the house, where his elaborate system of trail maps and topographical printouts is spread across the coffee table, waiting.
Noah comes around the island and presses a kiss to my temple. His hand rests on the back of my neck for a moment—warm, steady—and I lean into it without thinking.
“Good morning,” he says.
“You let me sleep in.”
“You needed it.”
“I always need it. That’s never stopped you before.”
He smiles and pours himself coffee and that’s the whole conversation, which I used to find alarming and now find essential. One of the many adjustments of this life that I didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t trade.
He’s doing well. I know this is not a small thing.
He spent three years transitioning KOAN’s federal contracts into something he co-owned—a smaller firm, more specialized, the kind of work that doesn’t get discussed at dinner parties—and then spent another two building it into something that stood on its own.
His name carries weight in rooms I’ll never be invited into.
He comes home most nights by seven. On the nights he doesn’t, I don’t ask.
We understand each other.
“Maya texted,” he says, settling onto the stool Eli vacated.
“How’s she doing?”
“Good. Phoenix’s marathon is next weekend. Maya’s asking if Eli wants to come cheer. Rosa wants him too.”
Eli and Maya’s younger daughter, Rosa, are eight months apart and have the kind of friendship that communicates primarily through a shared language of Marvel references and competitive silences. When they’re together, the adults in the room become set dressing.
“He’ll lose his mind,” I say. “Tell her yes.”
Noah types the reply. Something in his jaw is easy in a way it sometimes isn’t when Maya comes up—she was the one who made the calls after his father passed, three years ago now.
Cancer, the slow and certain kind. His father had been proud of him in ways he’d sometimes struggled to say out loud, and Noah has been carrying that particular knowledge with a quiet that I’ve learned not to try to fill.
I reach over and put my hand on his.
He turns it over and holds it.
Stella comes downstairs at nine-forty, which is technically still before ten, and Eli is waiting at the bottom of the stairs with a trail map.
She’s independent, but she’s still mine.
Watching her cross the kitchen with her hair pulled up and her brother orbiting her like she has her own gravitational field is the specific kind of thing that used to make me nervous.
When she was small, I’d loved her so completely that the loving felt like exposure.
Like I’d handed someone a key to everything breakable in me.
It still does.
But I’ve gotten better at letting her hold it.
“Good morning, everyone,” she says, heading directly for the coffee. She glances at Eli’s map over the rim of the mug. “That’s the north loop.”
“You said you’d show me the cutoff by the ridge.”
“I did say that.”
“So?”
She looks at him the way she used to look at Richard and me when she was trying to determine which adult was more worth negotiating with. Then she looks at me.
“After breakfast,” I say, which is not my negotiation to make, but Stella’s gaze carries just enough of a question that I can’t help myself. “Give her five minutes to wake up, Eli.”
He doesn’t argue. With me, he rarely does. With Noah, never. With Stella, always—but in the way you argue with someone you’re not actually worried about. In the way that means you already know it’s going to be fine.
She sits beside him and pulls the map toward her and starts tracing the cutoff with her finger, explaining the elevation change in terms an eight-year-old can follow, and I sit at the island and drink my coffee and don’t say anything at all.
Across the kitchen, I catch Noah’s eye.
He’s watching them too. His expression does the thing it does—that particular stillness that I misread, early on, as distance. I know better now. It’s the opposite. It’s what he looks like when he’s holding something carefully.
I glance down at my mug.
2222.
The number on the receipt tucked under the corner of my laptop. Some grocery delivery confirmation I hadn’t looked at yet.
Major life alignment. The universe confirming you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
I used to assign meaning to these numbers strategically—cataloguing them like data points, weighing them against whatever decision was in front of me.
A tool for self-discovery, I’d always said.
A way of paying attention. Now I think the numbers were never the point.
The point was the attention itself. The willingness to look up.
I set the mug down. Three rotations, clockwise.
Stella says something that makes Eli laugh—real and sudden, the kind that startles it out of him—and Noah glances over at me again, and this time I don’t look away.
Ten years ago, I thought surviving meant staying intact. Keeping everything in its place, in its column, accounted for and contained.
I didn’t understand, yet, that you could let things be uncontrollable and still not lose them. That some things get bigger when you stop trying to fit them inside something manageable.
“Hey,” Noah says. Quiet. Just for me.
“Hey,” I say back.
Outside, the yard is full of morning light.
Somewhere at the bottom of the trail, the ridge Eli has been studying for two weeks waits in the trees.
Stella will take him there and he will remember it for years, and she will move into the next chapter of her life and come back to visit, and Noah will stand in the kitchen doorway on a Sunday and look at the thing we built here with that quiet, careful expression.
And I will watch him, and I will know.
We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.
Gabe’s story in Only the Hunter is next…
Some men keep their distance and call it discipline.
Gabriel Martin has been calling it that for years.
Evie Thompson is his best friend's sister, an AUSA hunting the worst of humanity through federal courts, and the one woman he's never let himself want out loud.
When the threat against her stops being theoretical, he stops pretending distance was ever really an option.
He watches her for weeks before she catches him.