Epilogue
Njal
Three months after our move, our apartment smells like my mother's cornbread.
I've stopped being surprised by how much that wrecks me every time.
She's in our kitchen right now—my kitchen, mine and Sophie's, the top half of an old house with good light and a yard that's already half dug up by a hound who can't believe his luck—standing at the stove with a dish towel over her shoulder.
She’s been teaching Sophie the cornbread the way she swore she would the day she heard I cared about this woman.
"You've got to let the skillet get angry," Ma says. "Hot enough to spit at you. That's the secret nobody writes down."
"That sounds dangerous," Sophie says.
"Most good things are." Ma bumps her with a hip. "Pour."
I stand in the doorway, watching my mother teach the woman I claimed how to make the food I grew up on.
I have to look down at the dog for a second because the feeling's too big to hold with my face.
Hoagie looks back up at me like he gets it.
He probably does. He came from nothing, too, until the woman we love saved him.
The whole table shows by six, because in my family, invitations are theoretical and arrival times are a contact sport.
Bjorn comes through the door first, because of course he does, with a six-pack he didn't need to bring and a grin he's been saving the whole drive.
"So this is the famous apartment." He sets the beer on the counter and turns a slow circle, taking in the place, the curtains Sophie picked, the framed thing on the wall.
"Huh. It's got, like, throw pillows. Coasters.
My brother owns coasters." He picks one up and holds it like evidence.
"Brother, a few months ago you were sleeping in a small ass town with one stoplight. "
"And now I own coasters." I take the coaster out of his hand and set it back down. "Weep about it."
"I might." He claps me on the shoulder, and the grin softens into what lives underneath it, the part only I get to see. "You look good, man. You look—" He stops, because we don't do this out loud, the two of us, we never have. He squeezes once and lets it say itself.
"Yeah," I tell him. "I know. You too."
Then Sophie comes around the corner with flour on her cheek, and Bjorn's whole face changes, and he opens his arms wide.
"There she is. The woman who tamed my brother." He hugs her like he's known her for years instead of months, because that's how my family does it, all at once or not at all. "I've been hearing about you since before he'd admit there was a you."
"He doesn't admit much of anything," Sophie says.
"He's been like that our whole lives. I used to think he was broken." Bjorn winks. "Turns out he was just saving it all up for you."
Everly and Regnor come with all three kids and a bag the size of a body.
Eira comes through gracefully even though she glares at us with her pre-teen charm.
Mykelti is all giggles and smiles, asking her mom for her tablet.
And Boden…the second that boy is through the door my father—Kraken, terror of three counties, a man I've watched make grown patched men go pale—drops to the floor on his knees to make a fool of himself.
"There he is," Kraken rumbles, holding his hands out. "There's my boy. Come to Granddad. Come on."
"He's going to cry," Everly warns. "He's in a phase, and he’s pissed off I didn’t take him for ice cream."
"He's not gonna cry for me." Boden immediately cries. Kraken doesn't even flinch. "He's just warming up. We've got an understanding."
Sophie watches the whole thing from the kitchen doorway with a look on her face.
Almost like she’s admiring all of this.
I cross to her and put a hand on the small of her back.
"You okay?"
"I'm watching one of the scariest-looking men I've ever met crawl around my floor barking like a dog to make his grandson laugh," she says. "I'm better than okay. I'm just trying to remember every second of it."
Hannah's the last to arrive, because she texted that she got held up at the library.
When she comes through the door, Sophie crosses the room so fast she nearly takes out a chair.
The two of them hold on a few moments longer than sisters who see each other every week need to.
But here's what nobody outside it understands—they didn't get to see each other every week, for years.
They're making up for a whole stretch of silence the people who were supposed to love them caused.
So they get to hold on as long as they want. Nobody at this table is ever going to tell a Crockett girl to make herself smaller again.
If anyone tries, I’ll personally fucking handle it.
"You found it okay?" Sophie asks.
"Soph, you're fifteen minutes from me. I could find it drunk.
" Hannah holds up a bottle of wine. "Which—not tonight, I'm driving, but I brought it because I'm not an animal.
" She clocks the room, the noise, my father on the floor, Bjorn already arguing with Regnor about something, Ma hollering that the cornbread's almost up.
Something moves across her face, quickly, before she puts it away. "This is a lot of people."
"Too many?" Sophie asks.
"No." Hannah's voice goes rough at the edges. "No. It's exactly the right amount. I just—we didn't have this, growing up. A loud table. People who showed up." She squeezes Sophie's hand. "Look at you. You went and found us a loud table."
"I found a biker," Sophie says. "The table came with him."
"Best impulse buy you ever made."
We eat at a table I built with Magnus’ help, because a prospect with downtime and a guilt complex learns to keep himself busy, to do something with his hands.
I made it too big on purpose so there'd never be a night somebody didn't fit.
Tonight it's full and it still has room, which is exactly how I wanted it.
Ma's cornbread disappears in about ninety seconds.
Boden ends up on Dad's lap, smiling from ear to ear.
Bjorn tells the story about the time I tried to fix our father's bike at fourteen and nearly took my own thumb off. He tells it loud and wrong on purpose, and I let him, because watching Sophie laugh at the dumb version is worth my dignity any day of the week.
Halfway through, Esperanza texts Sophie, and Sophie reads it under the table thinking I don't notice, and her whole face lights.
"What?" I ask.
"The fund." She turns the phone so I can see, but she's too excited to let me read it.
"We got the first one. A teacher in Georgia—same thing, fabricated, they were about to fire her—and Esperanza got there first. Before the board could fold.
She kept her job, Njal. She didn't have to stand in a parking lot by herself.
Because we created something that got there in time. "
"You created it," I tell her.
"We did."
"You built it." I take her hand on top of the too-big table. "I just paid the rent."
Down the table, Hannah's watching us, and when I catch her eye she doesn't look away, the way most people would.
She holds it. Then she mouths two words at me, quiet, only for me, over the noise of my whole loud family.
Thank you.
I shake my head, because she's got it backwards.
Sophie's the one who saved Sophie—stood up in a parking lot, said no to her father, drove out of a town that threw eggs at her—and all I did was hold the door and refuse to let her shut it on herself.
But Hannah keeps looking, so I mouth it back because some things you just take when family hands them to you.
You're welcome.
Later, when Boden’s asleep in the spare room and the wine's mostly gone, and Bjorn and Regnor have taken their argument to the porch, I find a minute alone by the kitchen window with my father.
He's got a cup of coffee because he doesn't hardly drink these days either, and we've never once talked about why we share that.
He looks out at the yard for a while.
"You got patched two weeks ago," he says.
"I did."
"I didn't say anything that night. Too many people. You know how I am." He turns the cup in his big scarred hands. "But I want to say it now, with no audience. When they put that patch on you, your mother cried in the truck the whole way home. She was so proud, son, and so am I."
His jaw works. "Seven years ago, I drove you to a locked door and I didn't know if I was getting a son back. I made my peace, on that drive, with the idea that I might not. And then I spent every week refusing to believe the peace I'd made."
"Dad."
"Let me finish, I only do this once a decade.
" He sets the cup down. "You walked out of that place, and you did the work, and you came back.
Then you went and found a woman the whole world had decided to throw away, and you didn't throw her away.
You stood in front of her. You did it the right way when everything in you was screaming for the other way.
I know what that cost you, because I've got the same wiring, and I've spent forty years choosing the cold road over the hot one, and it never once got easier.
" He puts his hand on the back of my neck, heavy and warm, the way he's done since I was small enough to fit under his arm.
"I'm proud of you, son. Not for the patch. For the man wearing it."
I don't trust my voice, so I nod, and he lets me.
We stand at the window a while not saying anything, two men with the same broken wiring who both learned to live anyway.
The night winds down the way good nights do, slow and reluctant, everybody finding reasons to stay ten more minutes.
Before they go, Bjorn pulls me aside by the door, lower now, the joking set down.
"Heard the table's talking about a run up north," he says.
"And that they might want me on it. Bodul too.
" He shrugs like it's nothing, and I know when he's circling something.
"He’s been doing a lot of work these last couple weeks.
My guess is, he saw you get patched in after all these years and he wants his patch next.
On top of it, Tor's girl's been hanging around the new shop a lot.
Tindra." He says the name carefully, like it's molten lava.
"Meghan's about ready to skin him alive. "
"That's a fire you don’t want to be standing next to," I tell him.
"Who said anything about standing next to it?" He grins, but there's a flicker under it, the same restless thing he's carried since the leg. "I'm just saying. Things are moving up there. Might be I've got my own road coming."
"Might be." I clap his shoulder. "When it comes, you call me. Whatever it is. However it goes."
"Yeah." He holds my eyes for a second. "You too, brother. You too."
I walk the last of them out—Hannah with leftovers Ma forced on her, Everly with Boden, boneless and drooling on her shoulder, my parents last, Ma cupping Sophie's face in both hands at the door and telling her she did good with the cornbread, which from my mother is roughly a knighthood.
Then it's quiet, and it's just us, and the dog, and a sink full of dishes we're both going to pretend not to see until morning.
Sophie leans back against the counter and surveys the wreckage of a good night—the crumbs, the glasses, the throw pillows Bjorn definitely rearranged to mess with me.
"Your family is a lot," she says.
"They are."
"I love them so much I can't breathe right." Her eyes go bright. "Njal, your dad called me ours again tonight. To Hannah. He said our Sophie. Like I've always been here. Like there was never a version of this where I wasn't."
I cross the kitchen and pull her into me, her back to my chest, both of us looking out the dark window at a yard that's ours.
I run the check.
I can't help it. It's the last thing the sickness left me, the reflex of taking my own pulse, and I do it now with my arms around her and my chin on her hair.
No lift. No race. No bright climbing wire trying to dress itself up as something it isn't.
Just a man, in his home, holding his woman, on a full stomach, in a quiet house, while his dog snores under a table he built too big on purpose.
The word home used to be a locked door at the end of a hallway with a green light going red.
Now it smells like cornbread and has flour on its cheek and leans back into me like it trusts me to hold the weight.
"What are you thinking?" Sophie asks. "You went somewhere."
"I went home," I tell her. "Turns out I was already standing in it."
She turns in my arms and kisses me slowly, the dishes forgotten, the night ours, and outside the window the sky holds itself up over a life we built out of the wreckage of the ones they tried to bury us under.
It's still up there.
It was always going to be.
We just had to get somewhere we could finally see it.
* * *