Epilogue
Dread
The following summer
Summer heat. Missouri in July, the kind that sat on your skin like a hand and didn’t lift.
The compound barbecue had started at five and hit its stride by six, charcoal smoke hanging in the thick air in lazy gray drifts that the evening breeze kept rearranging without clearing.
A screen door cracked somewhere behind the clubhouse.
Children’s bare feet slapped across dry grass, the sound traveling through the yard in irregular bursts that peaked and faded and peaked again.
Ellie tore through the middle of it all.
Her light brown hair had come loose from whatever ponytail Katy had managed that morning, the waves flying behind her as she dodged between two of Cotton’s boys near the fire pit.
Biscuit -- the scruffy mixed-breed rescue that had adopted the house within a week of the farmhouse and promptly decided Ellie was his favorite person in the world -- bounded at her heels and misjudged a turn.
His shoulder caught her behind the knee and she went sideways, recovered, and kept running, her laugh carrying across the yard like something light and essential.
I stood near the grill with Fox and Hornet.
The bottle of beer in my hand was sweating through the label, the condensation running cold between my fingers and down my wrist. Hornet was talking.
A story about a parts run to Cape Girardeau, a distributor who’d shorted the order by half, the logistics of a problem that required someone to drive a van three hundred miles and look a man in the eye and ask him what the hell.
I nodded at the right intervals. My ears registered the words. My brain did not.
My gaze drifted across the yard to the clubhouse kitchen window.
Katy stood at the counter beside Kitty, passing a bowl of potato salad down the line to one of the Prospects’ girls.
Her head was tipped back mid-laugh at whatever someone had said, her throat exposed to the warm light spilling through the window, and the sound of it -- distant, dampened by glass and the general noise of forty people eating in an open yard -- reached me anyway.
She wore the blue shirt. The one with the short sleeves that had faded closer to gray at the shoulders from too many washes.
Her hair was loose. Chestnut, catching the kitchen light in a way that turned the ends copper, and for three consecutive seconds I forgot to breathe.
I set my beer down on the picnic table. The bottle made a soft sound against the weathered wood, and I reached into the front pocket of my jeans and closed my fingers around the small velvet box I’d been carrying for three days.
The box was warm from my body heat. Small enough to disappear in a closed fist. I’d picked it up a few days back, driving back from a consult in Jefferson City, pulling into a jewelry store in a strip mall I’d passed a hundred times and never noticed.
The woman behind the counter had asked me what I was looking for.
I’d said something plain. Nothing flashy.
Something she’d wear. The woman had nodded the same way people do when they understand more than you’ve said, and she’d shown me six options.
I’d chosen the third one without hesitation because it looked like it belonged on Katy’s hand rather than in a glass case.
Fox clocked it. His gaze dropped to my pocket and then came back to my face, and the corner of his mouth pulled up -- a fractional movement, barely there, the economy of a man who communicated approval in gestures smaller than most people’s dismissals.
Hornet did not stay quiet. Predictably, catastrophically, he did not stay quiet. He elbowed me hard enough that I nearly dropped the ring box, and his voice dropped to the register he used when he wanted to be heard by exactly one person and no one else.
“About fucking time, Doc. Was starting to think you’d forgotten how that works.”
I turned my head and looked at him, giving him the expression I’d perfected over thirty years of dealing with annoying residents and belligerent patients.
Hornet lasted about two seconds before the corner of his mouth twitched.
He lifted his bottle in something close to a toast, apparently pleased with himself, and took a drink.
The compound around us had achieved its summer-evening state.
Someone had strung lights between the posts along the recreation area -- clear bulbs on a yellow cord, the kind you could buy by the spool at any hardware store within fifty miles.
They cast a warm, uneven glow across the folding tables where the food sat in various stages of depletion.
Potato salad. Coleslaw in a blue bowl that belonged to Clarity.
A sheet pan of brownies cut into squares so large they violated several principles of portion control.
The brothers clustered in small groups throughout the yard -- some near the grill, some by the fire pit where the flames had died to coals, some on the clubhouse porch with their boots on the rail and their voices carrying across the gravel, conversations overlapping and picking up again with the ease of men who had known each other long enough to skip the filler.
Raven moved through the crowd with a stack of paper plates balanced against one hip, restocking the folding table without being asked, pausing every few feet to answer a kid’s question or redirect a dog or accept a hug from someone passing.
Harlow trailed her for a stretch, then peeled off toward the fire pit where Ellie was building an elaborate fort out of sticks, and Raven let her go without looking twice, the ease of a mother who’d stopped needing to keep her kid in her sightline every second of every day.
Fox found her there a few minutes later, said something low against her ear that made her laugh -- a real laugh, sudden and unguarded -- and the sound of it carried across the yard and landed somewhere warm in my chest.
The children laughing, adults talking over each other, the low rumble of bikes parked along the east fence, the distant thwack of a screen door swinging shut -- in the months since Katy’s ex had stopped being a problem, those sounds had become the backdrop of my entire world.
I couldn’t pinpoint when I’d started listening for them or when their absence had begun to feel noticeable.
Somewhere along the way, they’d simply become familiar enough that I expected them to be there, along with Katy, Ellie, and everything else that came with the life I had now.
A cry went up from near the playground. One of the Prospect’s girls, around five, sitting in the dirt with her elbow cradled against her chest and her face doing the crumple that preceded tears by approximately three seconds.
I was moving before my brain registered the transition.
Boots on grass, my hand already finding the aluminum case in my back pocket, already picturing a scrape that would look worse than it was -- and I crouched beside her and took her arm with the gentleness I reserved for children and the very old.
The elbow was dirty. A shallow abrasion, maybe two inches long, bleeding enough to look impressive without being serious.
I checked it for gravel and debris, then reached for the clean napkins on the picnic table and used one to blot away the blood while the girl watched me with wide, solemn eyes.
Her tears had already tapered off, curiosity apparently winning now that someone was examining the damage.
“Hold still,” I said, keeping my tone calm while I cleaned enough of the scrape to get a better look. She obeyed immediately, attention fixed on my hands as though I were performing something considerably more complicated than tending a skinned elbow.
She held still. I pressed my thumb below the scrape, slowing the bleeding through pressure rather than drama, and her mother arrived from somewhere near the drink table with a damp paper towel and the particular expression of a woman who had seen this sequence before and knew how it ended.
“It’s fine,” I said, releasing the girl’s arm. “Wash it before bed. It’ll scab by morning.”
The mother nodded. The girl was already twisting to look at something behind her -- Ellie, probably, or one of the other compound kids who had continued running without pausing for medical emergencies -- and the moment dissolved into the general noise of the evening, same as most moments did if you let them.
Ellie sprinted past me twenty minutes later.
Her cup was empty, the plastic sweating in her hand, her face flushed from running and heat and the sheer abandon of a kid who no longer checked where her mother was before racing to the other side of the yard.
Somewhere over the past few months, that vigilance had faded enough that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it.
I took the cup as she passed, refilled it from the galvanized tub on the picnic table where the lemonade had gone warm but nobody cared, and held it out when she came barreling back.
She snagged it on her way past without slowing down.
Biscuit followed. His tongue lolled, his paws kicked up divots of dry grass, and the distance between his enthusiasm and his coordination remained exactly what it had been since the day Katy brought him home from the shelter in a cardboard carrier that he’d chewed through before they reached the county line.
I watched them go. Ellie’s hair flying, the dog’s ears flattened by speed, the two of them moving through the amber light and the charcoal smoke and the sprawl of a yard where forty people had gathered to eat burned meat and drink warm beer and exist in the same space without wondering whether tomorrow would find them somewhere else.