Epilogue
ARCHIE
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER…
Sunlight spilled through my mother’s kitchen windows in long golden stripes, warming the old hardwood floors and the chipped ceramic bowl of lemons she insisted on keeping in the middle of the table.
The windows were open just enough for late-summer air to drift through the screens, carrying the sound of lawnmowers somewhere down the block and kids shouting farther up the street.
Normal sounds.
For a long time, normal didn’t exist in this house anymore.
It did now… or at least pieces of it had started coming back.
“You cut vegetables like you’re preparing for war,” Rhys informed Henry from across the counter.
Henry didn’t even look up from the cutting board. “Efficiency matters.”
“You’re dicing onions, not disarming a bomb.”
“Same skill set.”
Rhys snorted into his drink while my mother laughed softly under her breath from the stove.
Actually laughed.
I still wasn’t used to hearing that sound without something inside me pausing in surprise first.
A lot had changed over the last few months.
Most of it, ugly.
Some of it, unbearable.
But some of it… good.
The investigation surrounding Ashford exploded after William’s arrest. Storage units were uncovered across three states under different aliases, each one packed with enough evidence to keep entire FBI teams working around the clock. Financial records. Burner phones. Transaction logs.
Cardboard boxes lined carefully with plastic, each one holding pieces of stolen lives.
They’d found Abel’s shoes in one of them.
I was beside my mother when Agent Chen unzipped the evidence bag.
Black with red soles, the fabric worn pale around the toes where he used to drag his feet against the pavement. The laces were tied unevenly tight because Abel never learned how to loosen them properly before taking them off, so he’d just force his feet in and out until the heels bent inward.
And there, barely hanging onto the rubber near the side seam, was the faded corner of a Superman sticker he’d stuck on them himself because he’d been obsessed with superheroes that year.
My mother made this sound when she saw them—just this crushed, broken noise like her body had forgotten how to hold itself upright around that amount of pain.
That moment would never leave me, and I worried it would destroy Mom permanently.
It didn’t.
Instead, it seemed to carve something open inside her that finally allowed the grief to breathe instead.
It wasn’t closure—people like us didn’t get closure.
But certainty.
And certainty changed things.
Otto confirmed what everyone had already started suspecting by then. Abel was gone long before the names, transactions, and storage units started piling high enough to make national news. No body was ever recovered, but the timeline matched too cleanly for anyone to keep pretending otherwise.
I think part of me knew before Agent Chen ever sat us down. Hope just makes people stupid sometimes. It keeps your chest open long after everything inside it should’ve learned better.
Even then, I still caught myself imagining him somewhere out there waiting to be found. Older now. Alive.
Henry helped arrange trauma counseling after everything came out. At first, my mother barely spoke during the sessions. She mostly cried and blamed herself and apologized to ghosts nobody blamed but her.
Then, before I really noticed, the house began changing.
She started playing music again while she cooked dinner.
The curtains stayed open during the day now, sunlight stretching across the floors instead of being shut out, and little by little, the house stopped feeling frozen in the exact moment Abel disappeared.
William Kellerman died two months after his arrest.
Officially, it was a cardiac event brought on by stress-related complications while awaiting federal transfer.
Unofficially—
“Well,” Henry had said mildly from across his kitchen island, lifting his coffee to his mouth, “that’s a shame.”
I stared at Henry over the edge of my own coffee cup. “Did you just mafia-villain your way through that sentence on purpose?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Archibald, I have no idea what you mean.
“Mmhm.” I narrowed my eyes. “Should I be concerned?”
Henry took another slow sip like we were discussing weather patterns instead of the sudden death of a child trafficker.
“Stress is very hard on the heart.”
I made a strangled sound. “Henry.”
“Baby.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Plausible deniability looks very pretty on you,” he said smoothly.
That was absolutely not an answer.
Which probably was answer enough.
Some things existed better in silence.
“You’re staring again,” Rhys said, pointing at me with his fork.
I blinked. “Hm?”
“At your boyfriend.” He leaned back in his stool. “It’s honestly getting weird at this point.”
My mother glanced over immediately, a smile pulling at her mouth. “Oh, leave him alone.”
“I would,” Rhys replied, “if he looked at literally anything else in this house with that amount of emotional devastation.”
“I am sitting right here,” Henry said dryly.
“That’s unfortunately the problem.”
Warmth spread through my chest before I could stop it.
Henry glanced toward me then, one hand resting against the counter beside him while sunlight caught against the silver at his watch and the faint scar near his wrist. His sleeves were rolled halfway up his forearms, tie abandoned hours ago, expression softer around the edges than it used to be back when he still believed love was something temporary people eventually survived losing.
He looked at home here now.
My mother moved around him easily while finishing dinner, bumping his shoulder occasionally when he stood in the wrong place. Rhys had stopped acting intimidated by him weeks ago and now treated Henry’s existence like a personal challenge from God.
And Henry… he stayed.
Every terrible thing that happened in my life before this had taught me people disappeared eventually.
Not my Daddy.
He woke up beside me every morning—reached for my hand in parking lots and kissed my forehead while grading papers.
He filled the empty spaces in my life so naturally that sometimes I forgot they’d ever been empty at all.
“You’re doing it again,” Rhys informed me. “Totally glassy-eyed.”
“I hope that stool leg snaps and you fall hard enough to knock the sarcasm out of your body.”
Rhys looked down at the stool beneath him thoughtfully. “What sarcasm? You are glassy-eyed. You’ve been staring at that man for the last five minutes like a Victorian woman dying of consumption.”
My mother laughed under her breath from the stove while heat crawled straight into my face.
“I hate everyone in this house.”
“Nope. You don’t.” Rhys grinned into his drink. “You’re obsessed with at least one of us.”
Henry finally crossed the kitchen toward me then, sliding one hand against the back of my neck as he passed behind my stool.
“You alright, baby?”
I looked up at him—at the man who ran into a café ready to burn the world down for me.
The man who stood in my mother’s kitchen now with sunlight across his skin and onion on his hands because he decided this family belonged to him too.
“Rhys is being mean to me,” I informed him immediately.
Rhys made a strangled sound. “Oh my God. Are you tattling on me to your boyfriend right now?”
Henry’s thumb brushed slowly beneath my ear. “That does seem serious.”
“Thank you,” I said solemnly.
“You’re both insane.”
My mouth twitched.
Henry leaned down before I could say anything else and pressed a kiss against my lips, soft and absentminded enough that it settled straight into the center of my chest.
Rhys gagged violently. “Jesus Christ. Get a room.”
“We have one,” I shot back.
Which was true.
Technically, I still paid half the rent at the apartment because I wasn’t about to screw Rhys over financially after years of surviving college together.
I couldn’t remember the last night I actually slept there.
Every road somehow led back to Henry—back to the quiet certainty of someone choosing me over and over again.
His fingers squeezed mine on top of the counter, and for the first time in, well… ever, the future felt easy.