Epilogue
Isolde
Eleven months later
The cemetery on the eastern ridge is small.
Six markers. They are not headstones — Conrad and Savage built them in the metal shop over a winter, and they are flat plaques of weathered steel set into the granite with the names cut clean through so the morning light passes through the letters and throws them onto the rock behind.
Holt. Rodriguez. Kim. Diaz. Whitlock. Park. Trent.
That's seven names, not six. The seventh is Trent, who I lost ten years before the others, in my first year on the line, when I was twenty-three and didn't yet know that the air could turn on you.
I almost didn't put him up there. I put him up there because Ezra said, "Bring everyone," and meant it.
I come up here on the first morning of every month.
Sometimes I come alone. Sometimes Ezra comes with me.
Today he came with me, and he is sitting on the granite shelf ten yards back from the plaques with his hands loose on his knees and his face turned toward the rising sun, giving me the room I need without leaving me alone in it.
I sit down in front of Holt's marker.
I tell him about the spring. I tell him the breaks held all winter.
I tell him the wildflowers came up early on the southern slope and Della took her daughter up there last weekend to pick them and the daughter came back with a fist full of trillium and asked me to put them in water.
I tell him I'm running the Hollow Volunteer Fire Crew now — me and four of the brothers and two of the women from the compound, and we cover from Cumberland down through the gap, and we are the only crew in three counties that has a wolf shifter who can walk fire, which is not something I write down on the federal forms.
I tell him about Creed.
The trial was in March. He took the plea — twenty-three counts, six counts of murder, all federal.
He is going to die in a supermax in Colorado.
He looked at me once across the courtroom and I looked back at him and that was all the looking either of us needed.
The Bureau gave me a medal. I gave it to Della to put in the clubhouse case next to Conrad's old patches. I didn't want it on me.
I tell Holt the rest.
I tell him about the cabin Ezra built me — us — on the rise above his old one, with a workshop on the ground floor and a sleeping loft above and a wraparound porch that catches the morning sun.
I tell him about the wood stove and the way it ticks on cold nights.
I tell him about the dog Ezra brought home in November, a half-grown shepherd mutt that the wolf tolerates with grave dignity.
I tell him about the patch on the back of my jacket, the one Della stitched for me last summer — the match-and-flame, in red and black, on the leather, the same one Ezra wears on his cut, the sigil of the man I am with.
I tell him I am happy.
I tell him I am the kind of happy that isn't loud. The kind that doesn't go away when I close my eyes. The kind that sits in my chest like a low banked fire and warms me from the inside even when the wind is at four knots and the air smells wrong.
I tell him I'm sorry I lived and he didn't. I have told him this every month for eleven months and the saying of it has changed, slowly, from the thing I said with a fist in my mouth to the thing I say with my hand flat on the granite, palm-down, the scarred palm against the cool stone, and the saying of it does not break me anymore.
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't have to.
I stand up. I touch each of the seven plaques in turn, with the scarred palm, and I say the seven names out loud — Holt, Rodriguez, Kim, Diaz, Whitlock, Park, Trent — and the cemetery on the eastern ridge holds them, and the morning sun comes through the cut letters and throws their names in long shadows on the granite, and the wind is at zero.
I turn around.
Ezra is still on the shelf. He has the dog with him now — she must have come up the trail behind us, the way she does — and her head is on his knee and his hand is on her ears and he is looking at me across the granite the way he always looks at me, which is the way of a man who is not going to look away.
I walk over to him. I sit beside him. The dog noses my hand and accepts a scratch and goes back to leaning on his leg.
He puts his arm around me. I tuck under it.
I lay my left hand on his thigh, palm-down, the scarred one against the heat of him through the denim, and the cool-and-warm of us is the same as it has always been.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi."
"All seven."
"All seven."
We sit there for a while. The sun comes up the rest of the way over the ridge.
Below us the compound is starting to wake — there's smoke from the clubhouse chimney, and a kid yelling about something to do with a bicycle, and Casket's truck pulling out of the yard for the run into town.
The bowl is green. The fire scar from last June has come back in fireweed and bluestem and is greener now than the slopes that didn't burn.
The basement of the clubhouse no longer needs to lock from the outside.
The break lines are walked every Saturday by the kids' line, which I taught the summer before, and the kids are competent at the work in a way that delights me.
"Della says supper at seven," Ezra says.
"I heard her."
"She made a whole list of who's bringing what."
"Della always makes a list."
"You're on it for the cornbread."
"I always make the cornbread."
He makes the small almost-smile, the one where the burned half of his face follows the unburned half a half-second late, the one I have stopped registering as a thing to remark on because it is just his face now, the face I see in the morning and the face I see at night and the face I have learned the whole map of with the cool of my scarred palm.
"Iz."
"Yeah."
"Will you marry me."
I turn my head and I look at him.
He is not down on a knee. He is not holding a ring. He has his arm around me and his other hand on the dog's ears and his eyes on the ridge across the bowl, and he has asked the question the way you ask a question you've already asked yourself a hundred times and finally decided to say out loud.
"Ezra."
"Yes."
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes."
"Okay."
"Okay."
He turns his face down to me. He kisses me.
It is a quiet kiss, in the morning sun, with the dog leaning on his leg and the cemetery ten yards back and the bowl green below us.
His mouth is warm. His skin is hot. My palm against the back of his neck is cool.
The contrast is still the whole shape of us.
He pulls back.
"I don't have a ring."
"I don't want a ring."
"What do you want."
"A patch."
"A patch."
"A patch on the back of my jacket. Property of."
He looks at me for a long second. The amber eyes have a thing in them I haven't seen before, or maybe have seen and not named.
"Done," he says.
"Della will sew it."
"Della will sew it tonight."
"Good."
"Iz."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"I know. I love you too."
He stands up. He pulls me up. The dog stands.
The three of us walk down the eastern ridge trail toward the compound in the morning sun, with the cemetery behind us and the bowl in front of us and the breaks green on every slope, and the wind is at zero, and the air tastes like pine and damp granite and the chimney smoke from Della's stove, and there is no fire anywhere in the world that wants me.
I lived.
Holt didn't. Rodriguez didn't. Kim and Diaz and Whitlock and Park didn't. Trent didn't.
I did. Because of a man with a furnace under his skin and a wolf in his chest and a face that was burned in half when he was sixteen and a heart that was never burned at all.
I will say their names on the first of every month for the rest of my life.
I will say them out loud, and I will say them with my scarred palm on the granite, and I will say them in the cabin Ezra built me with the match-and-flame on the back of my jacket and a ring on a chain around my neck because I don't wear rings on my hands when I work the line.
And when I am very old, and I have walked a thousand fires down to mop-up, and Ezra is old next to me and the wolf in him is old too and the dog has been buried and replaced and buried and replaced, I will come up to this ridge one last time, and I will say all seven names, and then I will say one more.
Mine.
And the granite will hold all eight of us, in cut letters, with the morning light coming through.
Supper is at the long table in the clubhouse.
Della has set it for thirty-two — the regulars, plus the two new prospects, plus Hex's sister and her wife who drove up from Knoxville, plus Casket's mother who Conrad still calls Ma though she is not his.
The cornbread is in the iron skillet at my end of the table.
The bowl of greens is at Savage's. Conrad sits at the head with his rifle on the wall behind him the way he always does, not because there is danger anymore, but because it is the shape of the room he has held for thirty years and the room does not want to lose its shape.
I tell them, halfway through.
I stand up at my place with my glass of cold water — I don't drink, not at the table — and I say, "Ezra asked me this morning. I said yes."
The table erupts.
It is the noise of a family. Savage stands up.
Priest stands up. Hex laughs the laugh of a man whose intelligence work has finally paid out.
Casket pounds the table with his fist hard enough that the iron skillet rings.
Della — who knew, because Della always knows — cries the small clean tears of a woman who has been waiting for this for a year and is relieved to have it finally said out loud.
Conrad sits in his place at the head of the table and nods at Ezra and nods at me and then, without standing, lifts his glass.
"To the Hollow," he says.
"To the Hollow," the table answers.
We drink.
Della pulls me into the back room after dessert.
She has the patch on the cutting table — she has had it ready for months, I realize, she had it ready before he asked — and the leather is soft and the stitching is red and black and the words across the bottom say, in Della's careful even thread, Property of Ash.
She puts it on my jacket that night.
I wear it home.
Ezra walks behind me on the path to the cabin.
He doesn't say anything. I can feel him behind me — the heat of him, the slow steady pace of him, the wolf in him moving easy in his chest because the wolf is satisfied — and when we reach the porch he stops me at the door and turns me around and looks at the back of the jacket in the porch light, and his hand goes flat on the patch, scarred palm of his against the leather above the stitching, and he holds it there for a long quiet second.
"Mine," he says.
"Yours."
He kisses the back of my neck.
We go inside.
Until then —
Today is the first of May. The sun is up. The compound is awake. There is cornbread to make and a patch to ask for and a man to walk down the ridge with, and his hand is around mine, and his palm is hot, and mine is cool, and the contrast is the whole thing.
The whole thing.
The whole thing.
The whole thing.