Epilogue
JOY
Afew weeks after Deveaux Bank, grief didn’t arrive like a wave anymore.
It came like weather.
A sudden drop in pressure when I least expected it. A sharp, salt-tang memory that hit the back of my throat. A flicker of a woman’s voice—smooth, cruel, and then, for one brief second, almost … human.
Victoria.
My biological mother.
I’d checked. Quietly. Methodically. The sealed records my parents had once offered and I’d said I didn’t need. Her name had been there in black ink, unadorned and final.
The words still felt strange on my tongue, like saying them could summon her back from wherever the dead went to hide from the living.
Some mornings, I woke up angry. Some mornings, hollow.
Some mornings, I could hold the whole complicated truth in my hands without shaking: that she gave me away and also didn’t want to; that she hurt people and also carried her own kind of pain; that she died in front of Micah after dropping a truth I never asked for but now couldn’t un-know.
And my biological father …
That was the piece that kept snagging in my ribs like a fishhook.
Because there would probably never be a neat answer.
His name hadn’t been in the records at all—no line filled in, no explanation offered.
Just an empty space where a man should have been.
No name to write down. No photo to stare at until resemblance appeared.
Just a blank stretch in my lineage where someone had existed and then vanished, leaving only DNA and questions.
Somewhere inside me, the adopted child still lived—the one who had learned not to ask too much, not to need too loudly, not to make love contingent on answers.
But today—today I refused to dwell.
Today, I chose joy.
Which felt poetic in a way my momma would’ve teased me about, because my name had always been a prophecy. Not a mood. Not a performance. A direction.
I stood at the top of the wide staircase inside Dominion Hall, looking down at the chaos of women and garment bags and laughter spilling across the marble like sunlight.
There were a lot of them—wives and fiancées and one very pregnant woman who had turned waddling into a power move.
Hallie Mae—Noah’s Hallie Mae—rested a hand on her belly like she was already holding the future. She was close enough to her due date that the whole room seemed to orbit her carefully.
These women weren’t strangers anymore. Somewhere between late-night planning sessions, borrowed lipstick, shared confessions, and the kind of laughter that only comes after surviving something together, they had become my people.
I knew their rhythms now. Their tells. Who swore when stressed, who went quiet, who took charge without asking permission.
I felt it then, clear and steady: I didn’t feel like a guest standing above them. I felt like I belonged among them—woven into the noise and the affection and the beautiful, unhinged energy of women who loved dangerous men and refused to be small beside them.
“Joy!” Portia called, like she hadn’t already been calling my name all morning. “Tell me you have the ring.”
I lifted a small velvet box and shook it once.
Portia’s eyes lit up with pure, feral delight. “Oh, we’re doing this. We are absolutely doing this.”
Amelia swept by with a garment bag that looked like it contained something fragile. Natalie was filming—holding her phone up high and narrating to no one in particular like the world needed to know that Dominion Hall was currently full of fourteen women with a mission.
“Okay,” Natalie said, panning. “So, what you’re seeing here is the calm before the most iconic chaos event of our lives. We have blindfolds. We have wedding gowns. We have men who think they’re in control. We love that for them.”
Hazel adjusted the silk scarf in her hands like it was tactical equipment.
“It’s not a blindfold,” she said dryly. “It’s a compliance test.”
Lexi cackled. “Lucas is going to hate this.”
“He’ll survive,” Anna said, serene as ever.
Isabel moved through the group the way she did at The Palmetto Rose—hotel-owner energy that could calm a hurricane with one look.
“All right, ladies,” she said. “We have fifteen minutes before the men arrive. If anyone still needs safety pins, now is the time. Then hide the dresses.”
Natalie lifted her chin. “I don’t need safety pins. I need someone to confirm Ethan is actually blindfolded.”
Camille, sun-kissed and calm in that marine-biologist way, grinned. “Jacob’s blindfolded. I saw him try to cheat and got his hands slapped.”
Meghan rolled her eyes. “Caleb said blindfolds were ‘unnecessary theatrics.’”
“Micah said that, too,” I murmured, more to myself than anyone.
Portia heard me, anyway. Portia always heard everything.
She drifted close and lowered her voice. “Are you ready?”
It was the kind of question that meant: Are you okay underneath all this? Are you okay in the places you don’t show?
I met her eyes and let myself be honest.
“I’m … healing,” I said. “And today, I’m choosing to be excited.”
Portia nodded, understanding softening her face. “Good. Because we’re about to do something that will make fourteen men lose what little composure they have left.”
A laugh bubbled out of me—real, unexpected.
“Fourteen,” I repeated.
That number still did strange things to my brain.
Fourteen Dane brothers. One father. Two mothers they loved—Caroline and Lila—both gone now, both still present in the way the men spoke their names with reverence and grief and gratitude.
Seven Charleston Danes already married and settled into something that looked like peace.
Ryker and Isabel.
Marcus and Claire.
Atlas and Anna.
Noah and Hallie Mae—so pregnant and glowing and somehow still sweetly ferocious.
Elias and Vivienne.
Charlie and Sloane.
Silas and Portia.
And then the seven Montana Danes—the ones who had grown up on a ranch under big sky and hard winters, the ones who carried Lila’s name in their bones.
Caleb and Meghan.
Jacob and Camille.
Ethan and Natalie.
Lucas and Lexi Montgomery.
Gideon and Hazel.
Levi and Amelia.
And Micah—
Micah, who was mine.
Micah, who had been my awakening and my anchor.
Micah, who was about to be blindfolded on a private plane like the world’s most lethal man had just been recruited for a surprise party.
The thought made me smile again, even as something softer moved under it—an ache that wasn’t grief this time. An ache that was love. The kind that made your chest hurt because your body had no better place to put it.
I checked my phone.
A text from my momma.
Momma: Y’all better not forget the buckets.
I laughed under my breath.
My parents and siblings were already en route, too—flown out because Portia didn’t do anything halfway. The McKinleys were coming to oversee the flowers, because Charleston blooms were being flown in as if petals could be airlifted like reinforcements.
In a way, they could.
Flowers were our language. Our love made visible.
And the wedding location—
The ranch.
The land where the Montana Danes had grown up.
The place that held their childhood like an old song you couldn’t hear without crying a little.
The men didn’t know. At least, not really.
That was the best part.
They thought we were flying somewhere for a “logistics run.” Something vague enough to make them suspicious but not suspicious enough to ruin the surprise.
Portia had orchestrated the entire thing like she was staging a heist.
Which, I realized, she was.
We were stealing their breath.
We were stealing their control.
We were stealing their chance to brace themselves.
And we were giving them something else instead—something so tender it would crack them open.
A wedding on their childhood land.
A tribute to their mother.
A reclaiming of home.
The doors at the front of the hall opened, and the sound of boots hit marble.
The men arrived in a group, broad shoulders and sharp eyes and that Dane way of taking up space like they owned the oxygen.
Fourteen of them.
No Byron.
He’d left after the war room, chasing loose ends and shadows and whatever else a man like him carried like penance. He wasn’t here for the flight. He wasn’t here for the surprise.
But he’d still found a way to be part of it.
He had sent something ahead to Montana—a special item, one for each of the seven Montana boys. Portia had shown us the list in secret: childhood tokens pulled from the past like proof that, once, they’d been boys before they became weapons.
A carved wooden horse Caleb had made with Lila’s pocketknife.
A smooth river stone Jacob had kept in his pocket, rubbed nearly flat from years of worrying it between his fingers.
A rope coil Ethan had learned to throw on the first try—Lila had cried from pride and pretended it was dust.
A dog tag Lucas wore before he had any right to feel grown.
A weathered journal Gideon kept hidden under a floorboard.
A pocket radio Levi used to listen to late-night games under blankets.
And for Micah …
A worn leather bracelet.
Lila’s.
The one she’d made him when he was small enough to still show her his scraped knees.
Byron couldn’t be there.
But he could send memory.
He could send apology in the shape of relics.
The men approached, and the women surged like a coordinated front.
Scarves appeared. Silk slid into place. Hands reached up.
Micah was directly in front of me—eyes already narrowing like he knew this was a trap.
“Baby,” he warned quietly.
I smiled sweetly and lifted the blindfold. “Don’t start.”
His mouth twitched. “This is silly.”
“It’s romantic,” I corrected, looping the fabric behind his head.
“It’s suspicious,” he murmured, but he didn’t pull away.
Which was its own kind of tenderness.
All around us, the same thing happened: Ethan grumbling, Caleb swearing, Jacob laughing, Levi making a sarcastic comment, Gideon going still like he was already calculating every exit, Lucas trying to charm his way out of it until Lexi kissed him and he surrendered.