Epilogue
KAI
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
It had taken the better part of a decade to earn that sentence.
Years of standing in the dark outside another man’s window.
Years of watching that man hold my entire world in his hands and complain about it.
The world in question made up stories for Bella, cried at other people’s happy endings, and had never once learned how to love anything halfway.
She was the answer to every prayer I never said out loud.
Now the fire in the chimney had burned low. The kids were asleep upstairs. And my wife was crossing the living room of the house where she’d first learned what a family sounded like, barefoot, in my shirt, seven months of our child rounding the front of it.
Two years since the door slid shut on him. Two years of Pictionary and pancakes, of school runs and Sunday markets, of my ring on her finger without another one overshadowing it. Domesticity, it turned out, was simply the art of showing up when someone needed you.
We could have lived anywhere. I owned mansions she’d never seen, a dozen addresses that would have photographed better than this one. But I kept us here, in the smallest house I owned, because my wife spent her childhood disappearing inside palaces, and this was the first home to make her smile.
Was it wrong to take his childhood home on top of his family?
I only had one response to that question—who cares?
I didn’t give a shit about morals as long as it brought a smile to my wife’s face.
She asked me once for a totally ordinary life, and I knew then that she was imagining this house.
It was where the noise she loved first learned its name.
It was where she witnessed an ordinary life.
I intended to spend the rest of mine making sure she never had to ask twice.
Moving her somewhere grander would have been spending her happiness to show off my money. And I’d never make his mistake.
“The kids are down,” Amelie said.
I watched her as she walked toward me. Sometimes, it still felt surreal that she walked toward me willingly.
“Mrs. Bea took the night off.”
“I know. I told her to.”
“Of course you did. I’m guessing it’s because you have nefarious intentions.”
“You guess correctly.”
She stopped between my knees, firelight moving over her face, and I permitted myself the luxury I had once rationed through glass—I looked at her without a time limit.
My beautiful wife, and she was finally mine.
Only mine. Though anyone keeping tabs knew the ownership ran the other way.
She held a control over me that was unparalleled by any power in this universe.
“What are you staring at?” she asked, climbing onto my lap with the careful geometry of a pregnant woman.
“You.”
She smiled shyly as her fingers found the hem of the shirt.
I caught them.
Not because I didn’t want her to take it off. Wanting her was the one appetite that had never once obeyed me. Two years of marriage, and her reaching for me still felt like the first time. I’d stopped waiting for her effect to wear off. It wasn’t going to.
However, a familiar pressure had settled between my shoulder blades. It was the feeling of being watched. It was the only skill the watching years had left me, and it had never been wrong.
My eyes went to the window and looked out into the dark. I knew the spot. I had stood in it myself, learning this window by heart.
I lifted her gently by the hips, set her on the cushion, and stood.
“Where are you going?” she asked, curious.
“To close the blinds.”
“Kai. It’s pitch-dark out there. Nobody’s watching us.”
“Just a precaution, Princess.”
She rolled her eyes. There was a time my proximity made her flinch.
Now she rolled her eyes, huffed at me, and did all sorts of gestures to express her annoyance, all of which were worth more to me than gold.
Every one of her reactions, anything that showed she cared and wasn’t indifferent to me, was worth its weight in gold to me.
I crossed to the window and looked out at nothing.
Except it wasn’t nothing. He was out there.
I couldn’t see him, but I knew. I could have my security team drag him away, I could have him thrown in jail, I could do a whole lot to him.
But I didn’t. Instead, I let him watch the life he desperately wanted.
Call it professional courtesy between men who have held the same post. Somewhere out there, I used to barter with my sanity to stop this madness.
I was never able to do it. Who was I to rob him of what little joy he had left in his life?
If our lives were ever written down, I know the part I’d be assigned.
Every story needed a villain, and I never auditioned for anything else.
I stalked a girl for years. I engineered a family’s ruin and used a good man’s desperation to buy my way into his marriage.
The rules of fairy tales were clear about how that story should end.
The villain was supposed to lose. The hero was supposed to redeem himself before getting the girl back.
Readers wanted the hero to live happily ever after.
In this story, however, the villain won.
I understood why readers wanted a different ending.
I just didn’t care. I robbed him of his happily ever after, and I had zero remorse.
Remorse implied an outstanding debt, and I had settled every account.
Technically, I didn’t steal his life. He left it on the curb, and I just happened to know its worth.
He stood in the warmest room I had ever seen and spent his time staring out the window, thinking the grass was greener. So, I offered him the grass.
And now, he stood in that grass and watched another man live inside his old house, laugh with his brothers, tuck in his sister, raise a child with the woman of his dreams.
Behind me, my wife shifted on the old couch that had outlasted years of wear and tear, the same stained relic I’d ferried across town like a state treasure, because she measured a home in memories, and her measurements were my religion.
I looked into the dark one final time. Then I thumbed the wand, and the slats closed over the yard, the fence, and the man standing in my old spot.
I allowed him glimpses into his old life because that was all I got back then.
It was a fair trade. Nevertheless, I’d never let him see my wife in the position I was about to get her into.
“Kai. Come here.” From the couch, half a laugh in it. Not a question, a summons that I willingly complied with.
I turned back to Amelie—and to the warm, loud, ordinary life I had promised her—and left him behind, in the cold.
I was supposed to feel sorry for the hero of this story.
I felt nothing.
I’d handed him everything he’d wished for, it wasn’t my fault he was unhappy with the outcome. He could stand there for all of eternity, and I wouldn’t give a shit. In fact, I’d only throw salt in his wound and leave him with one final word.
Suffer.