Epilogue
Six months ago, I thought my life was over.
I still remember the cold sand beneath my knees, the sound of the gunshot, and the moment I truly believed I would never feel CJ’s arms around me again.
Sometimes I still wake up from dreams I don’t remember, my body reacting before my mind does. My heart races and my hands shake. For a few terrifying seconds, I’m back there.
“Baby Boy.”
His voice pulls me back every time like an anchor. It reaches me when the darkness tries to drag me under. I feel his arms wrap around me, steady and warm, as he presses a kiss to my temple, pulling me back onto his lap.
I stare at the man holding me. He didn’t just save my life; he saved the part of me I thought was gone forever. He became the truth I finally get to live in.
And I remember that I am home.
I am healing, slowly, and it hasn’t been easy. I wish I could say that one day I woke up and everything had magically stopped hurting, that the nightmares disappeared and the memories faded away. But I can’t, because they didn’t.
Yet, I’m learning. Every week, I sit with my therapist in town. She’s patient with me, even when I don’t have the words and simply sit there in silence. She reminds me that surviving something doesn’t mean I have to stay trapped in it.
Some days I believe her. Some days I don’t. But I keep showing up, and that has to count for something.
Slowly, I’m starting to understand what happened to me: I was never the reason Adrian hurt me, and I was never the problem. Accepting that might be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
* * *
I got a job at the local hospital. It’s smaller than I’m used to, but I’m happy. I told my new employer a little of what happened, so they were more than happy to let me take my time getting back on my feet.
I remember the first day I walked through those doors; I thought I was going to fall apart, convinced that every hallway, every smell, every memory would drag me back down. But it didn’t. Because this time, I wasn’t walking in as someone broken.
I was walking in as Eli.
A nurse. A person who helps people. A person who matters.
I still wear my purple nails. I bought myself a brand-new bike to replace the Triumph Adrian destroyed. And I still find myself stopping sometimes when the sunlight hits the trees just right, because it reminds me that beautiful things can exist after terrible ones.
I’m learning to let those terrible moments go and let the good ones stay, to let them mean something instead of waiting for the next shadow to fall.
Ree came to visit. Seeing her again felt like finding a piece of myself I thought I had lost forever. We hugged for a long time, that kind of hug where words aren’t enough to bridge the distance, but presence is everything.
CJ and I went to visit Marge. She is back in Campbell River, her grave sitting beside her husband’s exactly where she wanted to be, fulfilling the instructions left in her will. Her dying wish was to go home and rest next to the man who had saved her, the man who had loved her.
But she also gave me something else. When she passed, she left everything to me: The house, the money, everything she had. She and her husband never had children, and she always said she didn’t need children to have a family.
She was right. She had me.
And now she has given CJ and me the place where we get to start over. Our home. It has become a sanctuary where fear doesn’t live, a place where I wake up next to the person who came for me, the person who never stopped fighting.
CJ still looks at me like I hung the moon for him. I still don’t understand how I got lucky enough to have him, and sometimes I catch him watching me like he’s afraid I’ll vanish.
“You know I’m not going anywhere, right?” I tease.
He just gives me a look. And every time, I want to reach out and remind him that he didn’t just save me.
He kept me.
* * *
Tonight, like every night, I’m curled against him, listening to his heartbeat, the same heartbeat I thought I would never hear again. I am curled next to the man I love, who reminds me every day that I am safe, loved, and alive.
At the foot of the bed, a heavy lump rests quietly. We found our dog, Ruby, at the local shelter, and we knew instantly she had to be ours. She’s a Collie cross, and she is absolute perfection. (I still don’t own any houseplants, because… well, let’s not go there.)
I look up at CJ, reaching up to kiss him long and deep. He pulls me tighter onto his lap, taking over the kiss as I hum softly against his mouth.
This man is mine, and I am his. He is the man who saved me.
But what I know now, deep down, where it counts, is that he didn’t save the broken man Adrian had left behind.
He saved Eli.
The man I was always meant to become.