Epilogue #2
Wanting to spread our wings, we chose Washington D.C.
Cat is a nuclear engineer for the United States Air Force.
She designs the systems that keep the country’s most advanced energy infrastructure running, and she does it with the same intensity she brings to everything—total, consuming, the particular focus of a woman who read Haynes manuals for fun at twelve and now reads classified technical documents for the Department of Defense.
She comes home smelling like coffee and whiteboard marker and the faint ozone of lab equipment, and I find it as attractive now as I did the first time she identified my turbo swap from the passenger seat.
I work for the Federal Reserve Board. Monetary policy.
Institutional economics. The numbers behind the numbers behind the money.
It is, objectively, the nerdiest goddamn career path for a boy who was once known primarily for breaking noses and making teachers quit.
I love it. Cat says I talk about interest rates in my sleep. I neither confirm nor deny.
We’re getting married in the fall. Massachusetts.
Small—our families, the boys and their girls, the people who were in the rooms when the worst things happened and earned the right to be in the room when the best things do.
My mother is planning it with the ferocity of a woman who has been waiting for this since the night she watched her son clean blood off a girl’s wrists.
Cat has wisely stopped fighting her on floral arrangements.
Thomas drives down every other month. Parks in our driveway.
Reads the paper in our kitchen. Stays a week.
Mom and Dad come for holidays. The boys visit when they can—Iz on a random Tuesday because he was in the area, Danny for a weekend because Danny doesn’t explain his appearances and nobody asks.
Ryan sends encrypted files of information we didn’t request and can’t always legally possess.
Xander sends nothing, but he shows up when it matters. He always shows up when it matters.
The dark is still there. I said it doesn’t end, and I wasn’t being poetic—I was being honest. There are mornings when the basement is the first thing I see.
Not the room. The feeling. The weight of the door.
The sound of his laugh. The particular helplessness of being twelve and alone in a room with no windows.
On those mornings, Cat’s hand finds mine under the covers before I’ve made a sound, because her body reads the change in my breathing the way a seismograph reads tremors.
She has her mornings too. The eyeliner that won’t go on straight because her hands are shaking.
The exit-counting. The scars that itch—burn scars, bleach scars, the ones on her wrists that have faded to silver but will never fully disappear.
She presses her fingers against them sometimes, testing. The way you’d press a bruise.
It still hurts. It will always still hurt.
But the hurt has become weather rather than climate—something that comes and passes rather than something that defines the landscape.
Darla still sees us. Not weekly. Monthly, or when we need it.
The work continues. It will always continue.
And that’s okay. That’s the thing nobody tells you—that healing isn’t a destination, it’s a practice.
Like brushing your teeth or telling the truth.
You do it every day. Some days you do it well. Some days you don’t. You do it anyway.
I come home from work on a Tuesday in October.
The house—our house, the one we bought six months ago in a neighborhood just outside the District, the one with a yard that faces south and a kitchen with actual counter space—smells like Thai food because Cat cannot cook and has made peace with this limitation.
There’s a bag from the place down the street on the counter. Two containers. Chopsticks.
She’s in the kitchen. My MIT sweatshirt—the one she stole freshman year and has never returned and at this point I’ve stopped pretending I want it back.
Leggings. Bare feet. Her laptop open on the island, reading something classified she’ll never tell me about.
The Claddagh ring catching the overhead light. The engagement ring beside it.
She looks up when I walk in. The smile. The real one. Eight years of collecting that smile and it still rearranges everything inside me every single time.
“Hey.”
“Hey, Kitty Cat.”
I set my bag down. Walk to the kitchen window. Look out.
The yard. Green—still green, even in October, because Cat researched grass varieties with the same intensity she applies to nuclear reactor design and chose a blend that stays green through November in the mid-Atlantic climate.
There’s a garden along the fence—not elaborate, just a row of plants that Cat tends on weekends with the particular attention of a girl who used to lie in her father’s garden and stare at the sky.
A single chair on the patio because we haven’t gotten around to the second one yet.
A kitchen with enough counter space. A window that faces something green. The words I said on a tailgate at a car show when I was eighteen. The answer to “what do you actually want at thirty.”
I’m standing in it.
Cat comes up behind me. Wraps her arms around my waist. Chin on my shoulder. Looking out at the same view.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you stand in the kitchen and look at the yard and get quiet because you’re realizing that the life we talked about is the life we’re actually living.”
I laugh. “You know me too well.”
“I know you exactly the right amount.” She presses her face into my back. “The Thai food is getting cold.”
“In a minute.”
“Kaid.”
“Yeah.”
“We made it.”
I turn. Face her. Take her hands—both of them, the Claddagh and the engagement ring and the scars underneath and the history written in the bones.
I bring them to my mouth. Kiss her knuckles.
The gesture from the hospital. The ritual that started when she was sedated and I was terrified and I whispered words she couldn’t hear into the space between her fingers.
“Yeah, Cat. We made it.”
She looks up at me. Green eyes. Sharp eyeliner. The face I’ve been looking at across kitchen islands and hospital beds and car consoles and pillows for eight years. The face of the girl who walked through a stone arch in Vans and eyeliner and set my entire life on fire.
“The Thai food is seriously getting cold,” she says.
“Marry me next month.”
“We’re already engaged. The wedding is in November. Your mother will kill you if you change the date.”
“Marry me right now. In this kitchen. With the Thai food as our witness.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You love it.”
“Unfortunately.”
She rises on her toes. Kisses me. Soft. The version that exists in kitchens and doorways and the quiet spaces of a life built on purpose.
The version that says “I chose you eight years ago and I’m choosing you right now and I’ll choose you tomorrow and the day after and the day after that until choosing you is the thing I’m made of. ”
We eat the Thai food on the kitchen island. Her feet on my lap because there aren’t enough chairs and she refuses to sit properly. The laptop closed. The classified documents waiting. The yard green through the window. The October light going gold.
My phone buzzes. Iz. A photo—no context, no caption. Just a picture of the five of us from high school. Lacrosse jerseys. Arms around each other. Young. Damaged. Completely unaware of what was coming and somehow already equipped to survive it.
I show Cat. She looks. Smiles. Leans her head against my shoulder.
“We were so young,” she says.
“We were so fucked up.”
“Both.”
“Both.”
I set the phone down. Pull her closer. The Thai food gets cold and neither of us cares.
Outside, Washington hums. The traffic and the monuments and the particular machinery of a city that runs on power and paper.
Inside, it’s a kitchen with counter space and a window facing green and two people who were broken by the same monster and chose to build something from the wreckage instead of lying in it.
Not a fairy tale. We never wanted a fairy tale.
Fairy tales require villains to be defeated and heroes to be whole, and we are neither of those things.
We are two people who carry their damage the way you carry a scar—visible, permanent, part of the body’s record.
The damage doesn’t define us. But it’s there.
It will always be there. And we’ve made our peace with “always” because the alternative—pretending it doesn’t exist, performing wholeness for an audience that doesn’t deserve the show—is a waste of the life we fought so goddamn hard to keep.
Cat steals the last spring roll. I let her. She grins at me—the grin that’s been collecting compound interest since September of senior year.
“Kaid.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being the villain. The dirty pirate. The boy in the dark who recognized the girl in the dark and decided that two people who speak the same damage can build something the undamaged can’t.”
“That’s a lot of words, Cat.”
“I have a doctorate. I’m allowed a lot of words.”
I pull her off the stool. Into my arms. Hold her in the kitchen of the house we built in the city we chose. The Claddagh ring pressing between our bodies. The scars under our clothes. The history in our bones. The October light turning everything gold.
“I love you, Kitty Cat. Every version. Every morning. Even the ones where the dark comes back.”
“Especially those ones,” she says. “Those are the ones that count.”
She’s right. She’s always right. It’s infuriating and perfect and the reason I will spend the rest of my life standing in kitchens with this woman, looking out at green yards, eating Thai food that’s gone cold because we were too busy holding each other to care about temperature.
The boy from the basement. The girl from the fire. Eight years later. A kitchen. A yard. A life.
Not a fairy tale. A true story. Ours.