Epilogue
In the month since we arrived on Finn’s island, life had slowly settled into something that resembled normal—or at least whatever normal meant now, in this fucked up version of the world we were learning to navigate.
Lock and Callan spent their days keeping the place running.
They’d fallen into the work like men who understood that idle hands and idle minds were dangerous things.
There was always something to fix, something to reinforce, something to build.
Finn still hadn’t shown up, and none of us talked about what that likely meant.
We simply kept his place going, tending to it like a promise we’d made him in silence—that if he ever did come walking through those doors, he’d find everything exactly as it should be.
Ethan turned out to be an excellent fisherman.
The kid had patience for it that surprised me, a stillness that seemed almost meditative as he sat at the edge of the dock with his line in the water, his young face unreadable against the light bouncing off the surface, sitting there for hours without complaint, and he rarely came back empty-handed.
It was one of the few things that seemed to quiet whatever storm was raging inside him.
Because there was a storm.
The day after we’d arrived, Jeff had pulled us aside—me, Lock, and Callan—while Ethan slept.
He’d stood there in the early morning gray, his hands shaking at his sides, and asked us to keep his kid safe.
He had to go. His wife was still out there somewhere, and he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t at least try.
He swore he’d be back.
Callan tried to talk him out of it. Lock offered to go with him.
I’d stood there watching a father make the most impossible choice a person could make—the love of his life against the life they’d made together—and I’d said nothing because there was nothing to say.
Jeff had already decided; it was in his eyes.
The decision, final, made long before he opened his mouth.
He left before Ethan woke up, which I thought was cowardly until I imagined having to look into my child’s face and say goodbye when I didn’t know if I’d ever come back.
I understood. Some goodbyes are too heavy to carry out in person.
He’d left a letter instead—pages and pages of it, folded and tucked under Ethan’s pillow—and I never asked what it said because it wasn’t mine to know.
“Devastated” was the only way to describe Ethan.
That was a small word for what I actually witnessed.
“Devastated” implied something that broke and settled into its broken shape.
What happened to Ethan was more like watching him unravel in real time—a slow unwinding of a boy who had already lost so much and now stood holding the absence of the one person he had left.
He’d wanted to go after him. He’d begged, begged.
It broke my heart and made my stomach physically ache, his voice cracking between rage and terror.
So we stayed. And Jeff had not come back.
As of yet. That was the phrase I used in my head—as of yet—because the alternative was a door I refused to open for Ethan’s sake.
* * *
This morning was one of those mornings the island seemed to manufacture specifically to mock the state of the world—golden, warm, the air thick with the scent of pine, and the faintest salt breeze drifting from the water.
I sat on the porch with a cup of what we generously called coffee, and I watched as Lock and Callan split wood in the clearing below.
They’d both stripped their shirts off about twenty minutes in, which was understandable given the heat, and also—objectively speaking—an impressive sight to behold.
For men in their forties, they looked good.
The kind of good that came not from vanity but from lives lived hard, from years of physical work and discipline, carved into them something solid and enduring.
Lock was broader, thicker through the shoulders, built like a wall.
Callan was leaner but no less powerful, his frame corded with long muscle that flexed and shifted beneath sun-darkened skin every time he swung the axe.
I watched the way he moved—the controlled arc of his arms, the way his body coiled and released with each strike, the split second of stillness at the top of the swing before gravity and force brought the blade down. There was something almost hypnotic about it; I couldn’t look away from it.
And I didn’t want to look away.
That was the thing. That was the revelation that had taken place inside me over these past weeks, so gradually that I almost missed it happening.
My eyes were only for Callan.
Not in a fleeting way, or the way I’d admired attractive men before—a passing observation filed away and forgotten.
This was something else entirely. This was a gravitational thing.
A magnetic thing. A him-and-only-him thing that had rewired something fundamental in the way I experienced the world.
When he was in a room, I knew exactly where he was without looking.
When he laughed—which was rare and therefore precious—something lit up in my chest like a match struck in a dark room.
When he spoke to me, even about mundane things—firewood, water, what we were eating for dinner—I found myself leaning in, not because I couldn’t hear him, but because some part of me was always trying to close the distance between us.
I wrapped both hands around my mug and let the warmth seep into my palms as I sat with the realization that had been building for a long while, pressing against the walls of my chest like a living thing demanding to be acknowledged.
Somehow—somehow—I had gone from feeling nothing for anyone to feeling everything for one person.
I turned that over in my mind, examining it from every angle the way you’d examine something fragile, because that’s what this seemed like.
Something impossibly delicate that had survived something destructive.
For God, for years—I had lived behind a wall so thick and so high that I’d forgotten there was anything on the other side.
I hadn’t felt romantic love. I hadn’t felt the pull of another person.
I had convinced myself, somewhere along the way, that I simply wasn’t built for it, that whatever part of the human experience made people fall and yearn and ache for each other had been left out of my design, or beaten out of me by circumstance, or both.
I had been numb for so long that I thought the numbness was me.
And then Callan.
I realized, sitting there on that porch with the sun warming my face and the sound of wood splitting in the clearing below, that at the age of thirty I had never been in love.
Never. Not once. Not even close.
Until now.
Because that was what this was. There was no other word for it, no softer, safer term I could dress it up in to keep it at arm’s length.
This was love. The kind I’d read about, the kind I’d watched other people experience, the kind I quietly, privately grieved, never knowing, in those rare honest moments with myself in the dark.
I was completely, irreversibly, head over heels in love with Callan.
The thought should have terrified me. In some ways, it did, because love was exposure. Love was handing someone the exact code of how to destroy you and trusting them not to use it. And I was not a person who trusted easily—or at all.
But here was the part that kept me up at night, the part that made me press my fingers to my chest as if I could feel the change that had taken place there:
This man—this man—who I mostly hated, who made me dread my days for years, whose voice alone had once been enough to make my stomach twist into knots, the man who had challenged me and criticized me and pushed me past every limit I thought I had, the man I had fantasized about throwing in the shark tank once or twice.
Hewas the one who, somehow, without my permission and certainly without my awareness, slipped past every defense I had ever built.
He had gotten into my head first, and then—so quietly I didn’t even feel it happening—into my heart.
He’d found the breaks in my walls, the ones I didn’t even know were there, and he hadn’t broken through them.
He’d just… moved through them, like water, like the light, like something that always belonged on the other side and was simply finding its way home.
And now he was there, woven into every quiet moment, the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I thought about before sleep pulled me under.
He became the person I looked for in every room, the voice I strained to hear, the presence that made me feel like I was standing on solid ground.
He had become the one person I was unwilling to do life without.
Not unable. Unwilling. There was a difference, and it mattered.
I could survive without him—I had survived worse, survived things that should have destroyed me—but I didn’t want to.
I wanted more than that. I wanted him. I wanted mornings like this, watching him in the sun.
I wanted his low voice and his rare smiles and the way his hand sometimes found the small of my back when we walked, so casually, like it was nothing, like it didn’t send electricity sparking through every nerve in my body.
All of it was strange—the hatred turning to tolerance, turning to understanding, turning to something so tender it almost hurt to hold. The end of everything brought me the one thing I never thought I’d find: this cranky-ass man turning out to be the safest place I’d ever been.
But it was strange in a good way. In the best way, the kind of way that made me think perhaps the universe wasn’t entirely indifferent after all, that sometimes, it put you exactly where you needed to be—even if it burned everything else down to do it.