Epilogue
Five Years Later
The first book took her eleven months to write.
She wrote it in the apartment in Somerville, on her laptop, at the desk that still had the coffee ring from the mug Sidney had given her.
She wrote it in the mornings before her shift at the BPL and in the evenings after, and on weekends when her roommates were out and the apartment was quiet enough that she could hear herself think.
She didn’t know what she was doing at first. She’d never written fiction before.
She was a librarian. She read books. She shelved them and catalogued them and repaired their spines and fought with patrons who thought the restricted section was a suggestion rather than a policy. She didn’t write them.
Except now she did.
The first book was called The Monster at the End of the Hall.
It was about a creature who lived in the walls of a crumbling estate, and the woman who inherited the house and refused to be afraid of him.
The creature was terrible. He did terrible things.
He ate the previous owner. He terrorized the village.
He had claws and shadows and a voice that could curdle milk.
And the woman loved him anyway.
Not because he changed. Not because he revealed a hidden heart of gold. Not because her love redeemed him or fixed him or made him safe. He was still a monster on the last page. Still had claws. Still had shadows. Still spoke in a voice that could curdle milk. Still ate people.
But someone loved him. And that mattered.
The book sold nine hundred copies in its first year.
It was not a bestseller. It was not a phenomenon.
But the people who found it loved it with a ferocity that startled her.
They wrote her emails. They drew fanart.
They got tattoos of the creature’s silhouette, which she found both flattering and deeply unsettling.
She wrote a second book. And a third. And a fourth.
They were all different. Different genres, different settings, different characters.
A pirate captain with ink-black eyes and a ship made of nightmares.
A sorcerer who collected souls in glass jars and danced with the woman who came to steal them back.
A detective who solved murders by committing them, and the partner who loved him not in spite of it but alongside it.
Different stories. Same thesis.
The villain got a happy ending.
Not because he earns it. Not because he deserved it.
Because love wasn’t a reward for good behavior.
It’s a thing that happens to people—to all people, to the worst people, and to things that aren’t even people at all. And she had simply formed the opinion that the only original sin in the history of storytelling was deciding that some of them didn’t get to have it.
Sidney thought she was processing trauma through fiction.
Sidney’s therapist agreed.
They had the conversation once, maybe twice a year. Usually over drinks. Usually after Sidney had read the latest manuscript and made her face—the one that was fifty percent pride and fifty percent are you okay, though, like really okay.
“You know all your villains have purple eyes, right?” Sidney said once, three wines into a Tuesday evening at a bar in the North End.
“Do they?” Sasha sipped her drink. She was still a terrible liar.
“Every. Single. One.”
“Huh.”
“And they all smell like roses and old books.”
“It’s a motif.”
“It’s a pattern, Sash.” Sidney leaned back in her chair. “My therapist says you’re using fiction to construct a safe space in which to process an unresolved attachment to a figure who represented both danger and intimacy.”
“Your therapist has never been burned at the stake.”
Sidney blinked. Then she laughed—loud and sudden and startled—and Sasha laughed too, and for a moment they were just two sisters at a bar, and the weight of everything they’d been through together was exactly the right kind of heavy. The kind you didn’t put down, because it was yours.
Sasha didn’t correct them.
She didn’t tell Sidney that she wasn’t processing anything. She didn’t explain that every word she put on a page was on purpose.
Why?
Because they went somewhere—not into the ether, not into the void, but into the vast, infinite library between worlds where a man made of shadows and sharp angles shelved them alongside Shakespeare and Stoker and the Brothers Grimm.
But she didn’t say that every time she wrote a villain who got to be loved, she was changing the story. Just a little. Just enough.
One book at a time.
She didn’t know if it was working. There was no way to check. No portal. No stained-glass window. No dark book appearing on her desk to drag her back into a world of fiction and monsters and impossible things.
But she believed it was.
And in a world made of stories, belief was the most powerful thing there was.
The signing was at a library in Cambridge.
Not the BPL. She’d left the BPL two years ago, when the royalties from book four had finally tipped past the threshold where she could write full-time without her roommates covering her share of rent.
She’d cried on her last day. Not because she was sad to go, but because the restricted section smelled like dust and old leather, and the fluorescent lights hummed, and the marble floor was cold, and it was the last place in the world that still smelled like him.
The Cambridge library was nicer. Newer. It had good lighting and comfortable chairs and a community room where they hosted author events on Thursday evenings.
There was a banner outside that said SASHA LANCASTER — BOOK SIGNING — THE VILLAIN’S GARDEN in a font that was trying very hard to look spooky and… mostly succeeding.
Book five. Her latest. The one about the dark gardener who grew poisonous flowers—that ahem, did things—and fell in love with the botanist who came to study them. It had done well. Not bestseller well, but well enough that the line at the signing table stretched to the door.
She sat behind the table, signing copies, smiling at readers. On the table beside the stack of books, arranged in a small display that Sidney had helped her set up, were the stuffed animals she sold that were creatures she had written into book four.
They were hideous.
They were perfect.
Little plush things, about six inches long, stitched together from mismatched fabrics—part alligator print, part magpie feather pattern, with big, lopsided black button eyes and tiny glass beads for teeth. They didn’t look like any real animal.
They looked like something a bog witch might make if she were very lonely and very creative and had access to a lot of taxidermy supplies.
They came in pairs. Dundle and Lundle.
They sold better than the books.
She was only slightly annoyed by that.
Sidney had designed the merchandise line.
Of course she had. Marketing was what Sidney did, and she’d thrown herself into Sasha’s career with the same ferocious energy she brought to everything.
The stuffed animals had been her idea. “People will buy ugly things if the ugly things have a cute backstory,” she’d said, and she’d been right.
Her sister had even come up from New York for the signing, since it was Sasha’s first one. She was standing over by a refreshment table, schmoozing. Which was, to be fair, what she did best.
Sasha was signing a copy for a woman who was telling her, with great enthusiasm, that the gardener book had made her cry on a plane, when Sasha had seen it.
Not in her peripheral vision. Not out of the corner of her eye. She saw it the way you see something that has been waiting to be seen—directly, undeniably, as if it had called her name.
A book.
On a table near the back of the room. A table that had been empty ten minutes ago when she’d scanned the room during a lull. She was sure of it.
This book had not been there.
And now it was.
It was old. Huge. Leather-bound. Ornate in a way that had no business existing in a modern community library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The cover was dark—not black, not brown, but that deep, impossible shade of not-quite-anything that she’d seen once before.
Five years ago. In a different library. In a different life.
The V on the cover caught the overhead light.
Purple.
“Ma’am? Are you okay?”
The woman whose book she’d been signing was looking at her with concern. Sasha realized she’d stopped writing mid-signature. Her pen was hovering over the title page, a droplet of ink forming at the tip.
“Yes. Sorry. I—excuse me for just a moment.”
She stood.
The room continued around her. People browsed. People chatted. Nobody was looking at the back table. Nobody was looking at the book.
She walked toward it. Her footsteps were silent on the library carpet. The rest of the room felt very far away—the voices, the laughter, the soft background music the library had put on for the event.
All of it receded, like the tide pulling back from a shore, leaving her alone with the sound of her own heartbeat.
She stopped in front of the table.
The book sat there, patient and immovable.
Looking around the room one more time, she couldn’t help but watch Sidney. She was still by the refreshment table, talking to someone, gesturing with a wine glass in one hand and a Dundle plush in the other. She was laughing. She looked happy. She looked whole.
She looked like someone who had survived something impossible and come out the other side with nothing worse than a recurring dream and a sister who wrote weird books about monsters.
Sasha looked back at the book.
Her hand hovered over the cover.
The leather was dark and cracked with age. The scrollwork along the spine was tarnished. The V on the front was the same impossible purple that she’d been writing into every villain’s eyes for five years.
She could walk away. She could go back to the signing table, finish her signatures, pack up the Dundle and Lundle plushes, drive home, pour a glass of wine, and sit at her desk and write another book about a monster who got to be loved.
She could keep doing what she’d been doing—one story at a time, one book at a time, changing the narrative from the outside, believing it mattered without ever knowing for certain.
She could live her life.
Or.
She placed her palm on the cover.
The leather was warm.
It smelled like dust. And old books. And roses.
Sasha Lancaster smiled.
She opened the book.
“You want a story to be about you? Oh, darling, be careful what you wish for.”
— V