Epilogue One - The World Didn’t End
Epilogue One - The World Didn’t End
Summer
The good thing about the milkshake stand in the mall is that it never changes.
Same neon menu. Same sticky laminated tables. Same smell of strawberries and sugar and fries drifting through the air.
For the first time in months, something feels normal.
I walk toward the booth with Constance and Adelaide beside me and silently thank every God in existence that our corner is empty. Not that it's surprising at ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning. Most people are at work.
Meanwhile we're here, pretending our lives didn't completely implode and rebuild themselves in the space of a few days.
Oliver—the guy who's worked the milkshake counter since we were teenagers—grins the second he sees us.
"Well, if it isn't trouble times three."
"Well, you somehow managed to get even more handsome, Oliver," Constance says smoothly, leaning against the counter.
He laughs nervously.
Still terrified of her after all these years.
I order my usual strawberry and cream while Constance gets the horrifying combination of banana and cookie dough she's currently obsessed with, and Adelaide sticks with vanilla because, according to Constance, she's ‘emotionally incapable of making chaotic choices.’
Once we slide into the booth, something strange settles over me.
For a few minutes I almost feel eighteen again. Like my life isn't split into before and after. Like I'm just another girl sitting in a mall with her friends talking absolute rubbish over milkshakes.
Adelaide stirs hers slowly with her straw. "So…"
Then nothing.
Constance groans. "Ugh. This is weird."
I laugh softly. "Since when do we not have gossip?"
"Or someone to bitch about," Constance adds.
I look between them both, and the smile that comes is a real one.
"We could start," I say casually, "by talking about how long Adelaide's been sleeping with Carter."
I sip my milkshake while Adelaide nearly chokes on air.
"Summer! There's nothing—"
"Oh, fuck off." Constance cuts her off with exaggerated air quotes. "'Ever so innocent Adelaide.' It is painfully obvious you two have a thing going on."
Adelaide's face turns bright red. Actually red.
Which only makes Constance worse. "Oh my God. You are sleeping with him."
Adelaide drops her head into her hands, laughing. "Okay, okay—technically nothing happened at first."
"At first," I repeat slowly.
She points at me. "Don't you start."
Constance leans forward like a gremlin sensing drama. "Details. Immediately."
"Fine." Adelaide groans. "Remember when Carter made sure Connie and I got checked over at the hospital."
"And?"
"And I threw up all over his shoes." She cringes into her hands. "Ugh. I can't believe I'm telling you this."
Silence.
Then Constance bursts into laughter loud enough that Oliver glances over from the counter.
"I was concussed!" Adelaide defends.
"Romantic," I say dryly, wiggling my eyebrows for added effect.
She points at me accusingly. "I offered to wash them. We swapped numbers. And at first it was all about you—about Jacob, about what was happening—but there was…" She waves a hand vaguely. "Chemistry."
Constance wipes tears from under her eyes. "That man is either deeply in love with you or clinically insane."
"Probably both," I murmur.
Adelaide takes a long sip and changes the subject at speed. "How's Jacob recovering?"
I narrow my eyes. "You literally already know the answer."
"Yes, but I want updates."
Of course she does. She and Carter have become disgustingly close, which means she's heard every detail through him already.
"He's better," I say. "Still gets pain in the shoulder sometimes. Especially if he overdoes it."
Constance snorts. "So constantly, then."
Honestly? Fair. Because Jacob Darnell appears to be physically incapable of resting. If he isn't working, he's fixing something around the house, reorganizing paperwork, checking in on the women from the warehouse, or hovering near me like I might dissolve if he looks away too long.
Not that I mind. Not even slightly.
"Has he finally stopped pretending he doesn't need painkillers?" Adelaide asks.
"No."
"Stubborn bastard," Constance mutters, and there's real affection in it.
Something in my chest warms at that. Because despite everything, they love him now too. Not just because he saved me, but because they've finally seen the man underneath all the rage—the one who'd burn himself down before he let anybody he loves suffer.
The next hour passes so normally it almost hurts.
We gossip. Constance points out men she finds attractive while Adelaide judges every single choice.
We talk about vacations we'll probably never book, clothes we can't justify buying, and whether Adelaide is finally brave enough to wear the very small white bikini that's been sitting in her online basket since June.
And for a little while, life feels light again.
Not fixed. Maybe it never fully will be. I've got a standing Thursday appointment with a therapist that says as much, and some weeks I come out of that room hollowed out and some weeks I come out lighter, and I've stopped expecting to be able to predict which.
But lighter. That's real. That counts.
There's a moment, somewhere in the middle of Constance describing a man's shoulders in forensic detail, where I think about Mama. The way she'd have laughed at this table, at all three of us, with her hand over her mouth the way she always did.
It still hurts. It's going to keep hurting.
But it doesn't take me under anymore. It just moves through and out again, and leaves me sitting here with my friends and my milkshake.
By the time we leave and start wandering through the mall, I realize this is the longest I've spent away from Jacob since the Ridge.
And honestly? I already miss him.
"I think I'm going to head home," I admit, digging through my bag for my cell. "I kind of just want to curl up on the couch with a book and a hot chocolate."
"Fucking grandma," Constance says instantly.
I glare at her. "I enjoy peace."
"No," Adelaide says firmly. "Jacob specifically said you're allowed to buy whatever you want on his card."
"I don't want to spend his money."
Adelaide rolls her eyes. "Summer. That man would buy you the moon if you mentioned liking it."
She's probably right.
"I heard the boutique upstairs got a new lingerie collection in," she adds, far too casually. "If you don't want to spend money on yourself, spend it on something he'll appreciate."
Constance gasps. "Oh, now that I support."
I laugh despite myself, and then I actually think about it.
About the way he's been with me these past weeks. About every single time he's waited, and never once let me see him wanting. About however long you need, whatever you need, that's what we do, and how he meant every word of it, and how he's proved it a hundred quiet times since.
About the fact that a few weeks ago, I stopped flinching when he reached for me in the dark.
About the fact that last Sunday, in our own bed, in our own house, I reached for him first.
So maybe it isn't such a bad idea after all.
We head for the boutique.
The second I step inside, soft perfume and expensive fabric fill the air. Dark lace hangs from the displays under warm lighting while Adelaide starts browsing like she's been training for this her whole life.
Constance holds something up, admiring the missing fabric around the crotch. "This feels illegal."
I ignore her and keep looking.
Then I see it.
Black. Elegant. Dangerous. A bralette with fine silver chains laid across the front, and the matching set with the same chains sweeping low across the back.
Heat curls low in my stomach at the sight of it—and underneath that, sudden and bright and entirely unexpected, comes something that takes me a second to place.
Anticipation.
I stand there holding a scrap of black lace in a shop full of strangers and I feel it properly, the way I used to. Not remembered. Not braced for. Just there, warm and mine and uncomplicated.
Jackson Moore spent three days trying to take this from me. He got a version of me that lay still and counted cracks in a ceiling, while he played with my body and pretended I was someone else.
He didn't get this. He was never going to.
"Oh," Adelaide says softly behind me. "That's very him."
"It really is," Constance agrees.
I run my fingers over the fabric, and I think about the way that man looks at me—like something worth worshipping and ruining in equal measure—and I take my size off the rail before I can talk myself out of it.
"Now that," I murmur, mostly to myself, "is going to be worth it."
Constance cackles loud enough that half the store turns around.
We head for the checkout with the lingerie folded over my arm while the two of them argue behind me about whether banana and cookie dough milkshakes should legally be allowed to exist.
The cashier folds the black lace into tissue paper and slides it into a glossy bag, and as I take it from her my phone buzzes in my handbag.
Jacob.
Just his name on the screen softens something in me.
I answer before the second ring. "Hey, baby." His voice comes through rough and warm. God, I miss him already.
"You surviving without me?" I tease, stepping away from the others.
"Barely." I can hear the smirk in it. "House is too quiet."
My chest does the stupid thing it always does with him now.
"I bought something."
"Yeah?"
"Mhm."
A beat of silence. Then, lower: "Something I'm going to enjoy?"
Heat climbs up my neck. Partly because I know exactly what that voice means. Partly because after everything the two of us have survived, this man can still make me blush like a teenager.
"You'll see when I get home."
A low chuckle rumbles down the line. "Christ, baby. You can't say things like that while I'm trying to behave."
I laugh, leaning against the rail that overlooks the lower level of the mall. Below me, people move around with shopping bags and coffees, none of them with the faintest idea what the last few months have taken out of the woman standing above them.
A few months ago I thought my world had ended.
Now I've got friends who walked through hell beside me and came out the other side still arguing about milkshakes. I've got my freedom. I've got a future I can actually picture, which is a thing I genuinely thought I'd never have again.
And I've got a man at home who would take the world apart before he let anyone touch me.
"You okay?" Jacob asks, softer this time.
The question settles warm in my chest.
I look back at Adelaide and Constance still bickering outside the boutique. Then out across the busy mall. Then down at the black bag hanging from my wrist.
And I smile. A real one—the kind that goes all the way into my chest now instead of stopping halfway.
"Yeah," I say.
And for the first time in a very long time, I really am.