Epilogue #2
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means pass me a napkin, cartel Barbie.”
Delia gives her a napkin. Then, to everyone’s shock, she laughs out loud.
Lunch becomes chaos after that.
Gentle chaos, which is new for us. Cal is forced to eat soup and complains it has no dignity.
Shiloh offers to bring whiskey; Mari threatens him with a spoon.
Ever takes Cal’s pulse without asking and gets called a brick wall with boundary issues.
Nash discusses security with Delia until I throw a roll at him and tell him no empire talk during soup.
Deacon feeds Homer a forbidden shred of chicken beneath the table and denies it when the cat immediately climbs into his lap.
“You’re a terrible liar,” I tell him.
Deacon looks down at Homer. “He’s starving.”
“He weighs four fat pounds.”
“Four hungry pounds.”
Cal watches the exchange with narrowed eyes. “That cat looks familiar.”
Delia and I both start crying again. Cal stares at us.
“What did I say?”
“Nothing,” Mari says softly, reaching for his hand.
This time, she doesn’t hide the touch. This time, I don’t resent it.
Her hand belongs there. So does mine. So does Delia’s when she reaches across the corner of the table and taps Cal’s wrist with two fingers, too shy for a full touch and too proud to call it anything else.
He looks down at her fingers. Then up at her.
“You were missed,” he says.
Delia looks away fast.
“Terrible timing,” she mutters.
“No,” he says. “Perfect timing.”
The table quiets.
I look at him, at Mari beside him, at Delia across from me, at Sonny pretending not to cry into her napkin, at Nash standing with one hand on my chair, Ever near the terrace steps, Shiloh lounging like his eyes aren’t wet, and Deacon with Homer asleep in his lap.
My family is a disaster.
It’s stitched together from bloodlines, bad choices, bullets, secrets, and men who solve emotional problems with surveillance or sex or knives.
It has a cartel in recovery, a mother learning how to be known, a sister learning how to rule without becoming the monster who trained her, and a father who came home from the hospital furious about soup.
It is mine.
For the first time since I was seven, that word doesn’t feel like a dare. It feels like something that might hold, like something I would do anything to keep.
Later, after lunch, after Cal is settled in the downstairs suite Mari prepared and complained through every pillow adjustment, I stand in the terrace doorway and watch him sleep.
Mari sits beside his bed, one hand in his. She looks up when she sees me. For a moment, neither of us speaks.
Then she says, “You can come in.”
I do.
The room smells like clean sheets, medicine, and the faint orange oil someone used on the old furniture. Cal sleeps with his mouth slightly open, one hand loose in Mari’s, the other resting on the blanket. Grouchy even unconscious. Alive even fragile.
I stand on the other side of the bed.
Mari looks down at him. “He was always stubborn.”
“I know.”
She glances at me. I realize what I said and almost apologize, then don’t.
Her smile is small. “Yes. You do.”
Silence settles…the safe, comfortable kind. I’m still learning those exist.
“He loves you,” I say.
Her fingers tighten around his. “He saved the best part of me.”
“That was me, right?”
Her laugh breaks in the middle. “Both of you.”
I swallow.
There are years between us that will never come back. I can feel them in the room, crowded around the bed, watching to see whether we’ll pretend they were only a misunderstanding.
We won’t.
I lost her. She lost me. Delia lost both of us in different ways. Cal held what he could. Deacon hid what he had to. None of it is clean.
But maybe clean is for people who have never had to crawl out of blood.
Mari reaches across Cal’s sleeping body and offers me her hand. I look at it for a long second. Then I take it.
Her fingers close around mine carefully, as if I might startle. I don’t. I give it a little squeeze instead.
Outside, Delia’s voice rises on the terrace, sharp and annoyed, followed by Sonny laughing and Shiloh protesting innocence he definitely does not possess.
Somewhere farther away, Nash gives an order.
Ever disagrees with it in three words or less.
Homer yowls like someone has violated his orange constitutional rights.
Cal sleeps between us while Mari…Mom…holds my hand, and I feel something settle in me that has been wandering for fifteen years with nowhere to go.
Whole is too simple a word.
I’m scarred. So is she. So is every person in this house. Whole doesn’t mean untouched. It means the missing pieces have names now. Faces. Chairs at the table. Rooms with open doors.
Cal and Mari will have to earn whatever comes next.
So will I, and so will Delia.
But looking at them here, his hand in hers and mine, I can see the shape of it waiting.
Not young and not easy. Nothing about us ever is.
Still…earned.
I bend and press my lips to Cal’s forehead.
“Welcome home,” I whisper.
His eyes stay closed, but his fingers twitch once against mine. Mari smiles through tears.
For once, I let myself believe all the people I love might still be here in the morning.
THE END
Thank you for staying with me through Reva’s journey.