Epilogue - Travis
Travis
After Deja Brew
She didn’t ask where we were going. She just got in and let me drive.
I was glad she didn’t ask because I wasn’t sure I had an answer that would come out right.
The plan existed in my head as a series of precise coordinates and a set of words I’d been assembling for two weeks, and all of it felt solid right up until I was behind the wheel with her beside me and Garnet Bend falling away in the rearview mirror.
“You’re quiet,” she said.
“I’m driving.”
“You’re always quiet when you drive. This is a different quiet.”
“There are different quiets?”
“At least four. This is the one where you’re thinking something you haven’t figured out how to say.”
She was right. She was always right about the things I hadn’t figured out how to say. It was incredibly inconvenient and also the reason I was driving toward a ridge I’d never taken anyone to instead of turning toward home.
“Maude, how’s the perimeter?” I asked, mostly to hear a voice other than the one in my head.
“All clear. No alerts. The gray kitten is asleep on your keyboard again. I’ve stopped filing incident reports about it because my storage has limits, unlike that cat’s audacity.”
Sera laughed. Something about the sound of it loosened the knot behind my sternum by half a turn.
I shook my head. “You and Maude are just alike.”
“That’s because you programmed me to be like Sera. I’m surprised you haven’t figured that out yet.”
What?? I blinked out at the road in front of me, turned to look at Sera then back at the road. “That’s not true.”
“If you say so.” Both Maude and Sera said it at the same time.
Holy shit. Was that true? I couldn’t deny the possibility. It… made sense. I’d programed Maude to talk to me in a way that pushed me but also comforted me. As someone with dry wit but kindness overall.
I had to have modeled that from somewhere.
I couldn’t think about this right now. I had more pressing problems. “Whatever.”
The road climbed through pines and opened onto the ridge a few minutes later.
I’d found this spot on the satellite feeds years ago and had never been here in person.
Never had a reason to. It was on the far edge of my property, high enough that the valley spread out below in every direction.
The mountains were stacked against the sky to the west.
I parked and killed the engine. The silence was immediate and total, the kind of quiet that would have been unbearable two months ago. No walls. No ceiling. No controlled perimeter. Just sky and space and the woman in my passenger seat.
I got out. Walked around and opened her door. She took my hand and stepped out and looked at the view and didn’t say anything for a few seconds, which was generous, because what I needed right now was about thirty seconds of not being looked at while I tried to remember how breathing worked.
The hives were still there. Not overwhelming, but present. My body’s old protest, running at a lower volume now. Not silent. Just no longer the loudest thing in my head.
Sera leaned against the hood of the car. I stood beside her. Close enough that our arms touched.
“You’ve never brought me here,” she said.
“I’ve never been here. I’ve looked at it on screens about a hundred times, but I never had a reason to actually come.”
“And now you do?”
“Now I do.”
The light was doing something across the valley that I didn’t have vocabulary for. I was a man who lived in an underground compound and stared at data feeds. Sunsets weren’t my area of expertise.
But Sera was. She was the thing I’d studied more carefully than any feed or intercept or threat assessment.
The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was reading data.
The seven freckles on her left forearm. The sound of her laugh when something caught her off guard—the real one, not the polite version she’d perfected for people who didn’t deserve the real one.
“I changed the gate code,” I said.
She looked at me. “I know. I use it every day.”
“Do you know why I picked that word?”
“Serenity.” She said it the way she said everything. Precisely. “I assumed it was because the compound is your calm space. Your center.”
“That’s what I told myself when I set it. Seemed logical. Clean. A word about what the compound gives me.” I looked at our hands, side by side on the hood. “Took me about a week to realize your name was inside it.”
She went still.
“Sera. Inside serenity. I didn’t do it on purpose. At least not the part of my brain I have access to.” I turned to face her. “The part I don’t have access to has apparently known what it wanted for a lot longer than I’ve been willing to admit, especially if what you and Maude are saying is true.”
“Travis.”
“The old code was a name for a woman I’d lost. The new one is the name of the woman who found me.
” My hands were shaking. Not the hives, not the agoraphobia.
Just the ordinary terror of a man saying the most important thing he’d ever said.
“You walked into my house and refused to leave and made me eat sandwiches and stitched my shoulder and yelled at me when I deserved it and saved my life when I didn’t deserve it. ”
“You deserved it.”
“I want you to marry me.”
It came out without polish. No preamble, no graceful lead-in. Just the sentence, raw and plain, delivered the same way I’d told her every other truth. Badly. Honestly.
She stared at me. Her eyes were wet, and her hand had found mine on the hood of the car, and she was gripping it hard enough that I could feel her pulse against my knuckles.
“You don’t have a ring,” she said.
“I have three cats and an underground bunker. I thought that was enough.”
She laughed. It broke through the tears, and I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the box I’d been carrying since Tuesday.
Beckett had driven me to the jeweler in Missoula.
Coop had opinions about the cut. Hunter had stood in the corner with his arms crossed and said nothing until I’d picked the right one, and then he’d nodded once.
I got down on one knee. Her laughter stopped.
“Travis.”
I opened the box. Simple band, single stone. Nothing flashy. Nothing that would catch on a keyboard or snag inside a tactical glove. The kind of ring a woman could wear while she was saving your life.
Because she did that for me every damned day.
“Is that a yes?”
She took my face in both hands. Her palms were warm against my jaw, her fingers holding my face, and she kissed me. Long and slow and thorough, the kind of kiss that answered a question so completely that the question forgot it had ever needed an answer.
She pulled back just far enough to look at me. “That’s a yes.”
I stood and pressed my forehead against hers. Her breathing and mine, out of sync, finding each other, settling.
The valley was going dark below us. The mountains held the last of the light along their ridgeline. My skin was calm. My hands, wrapped around hers, were still.
“Take me home,” Sera said.
I did.