Epilogue
Sixteen Years Later
That’s the end of my story and the beginning of yours.
Like I said, endings are impossible, and beginnings are hard to find. Especially if you’ve lived two lives. And birthed a third one.
When the transport van pulled out of Camden, my world shrinking to the cold metal of that vehicle and the uncertainty that lay ahead, I had no idea that I was pregnant.
You were born eight months later, conceived at the Cahaba Lily Festival, when your father told me that he loved me for the first time.
I have many regrets in my life, but they all boiled down to one.
That I could not provide a better entry into the world for you.
But I’ve learned that beginnings are just one part of the story.
That it is not how you start but how you end that matters.
I liked to think that your father gave me life.
But you gave me purpose. With you, the meaning of life became different.
It became that run-on sentence. I was no longer living for myself but for you.
I had been given not only a second chance at my life but also another life to be responsible for.
I knew I had an even greater responsibility to break free of the chains of my past and forge a new path for us both, splintering the cycle forever.
We are the last of the Wildes. Though that blood courses through your veins, it does not define you.
Please know that. You are not an heir to a legacy of shadows and missteps but one that embodies hope and new beginnings.
That’s what I want you to know. That’s why my story is important.
That the cycle of despair and recklessness ends with us, and it is in this new chapter that we find our true selves, free from the past that sought to bind us.
The shackles are now only in my mind.
Your father never said goodbye. That door between us remained open.
Because that’s what love is—an open door.
It wasn’t an ending, but a pause, the in-between where love could still breathe.
And he stood there, in that gap, and waited.
From there was never too far. And days turned into months and months turned into five years.
It continued on and we never said goodbye.
And in the end, as he had always been, Jackson was there, waiting outside the prison.
Then he took me home, our home, the Flower Farm.
You were there too. Do you remember anything about that day?
I never wanted you to see me behind bars, but your father, Uncle Luke, and Uncle Tibb made sure you knew who I was.
And when I saw you, I thought you were Lila, so familiar yet so achingly different, running to me.
I still think of Lila, see her in my dreams. It’s always the same vision—of running through an endless field of wildflowers, smiling, happy, and free.
The dreams never last long, never to completion, always leaving a little on the bone for later.
Just as I reach out to touch her, she slips away, leaving behind only the promise of a later reunion.
The people we love don’t disappear, I know that now; they stay with us, quietly, in the corners of our days, lingering in ways we don’t always understand, unseen but always present.
I know I will see her again, but for now I’ll settle for seeing her in you.
It is in the presence of you and Jackson that I acknowledge my life.
I am a wife, a mother, and a survivor. That word no longer feels like a curse.
For Mama’s and Daddy’s shortcomings, in my own way, I’ve come to forgive them.
I remember them now with both tenderness and pain.
I told you that we are shaped and molded by those who came before us, even if those molds are broken.
But I’ve learned that they do not define us.
We have the ability to shape our own lives, to mold our own destinies from the clay of our own experiences.
While in prison and now back on the farm, I’ve had a lot of time to think about my life.
Sometimes I feel like I’m feeling everything all at once and it’s too much.
My heart fills up like a balloon about to burst. And then I remember to stop trying to feel it all at once, to ground myself.
And then the truth flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude.
I’ve experienced the lowest of the lows and the highest of the highs.
My peaks have been significant because the valleys have been deep.
But this is what I know: I know now how precious life is.
I know the touch of love and its effects.
And there’s nothing stronger—no crimes, no pain beyond it. Your father taught me that.
This was a lot to take in, I know, and I will be here, my toes in the grass, waiting for you where your father once waited for me. I will walk with you.
And I will listen.