Epilogue
Leah
The kitchen smells like butter and brown sugar and the kind of warmth that doesn't come from the oven.
Wrenleigh is standing at the counter with flour on her nose and a rolling pin in her hand, walking me through her grandmother's sugar cookie recipe with the intensity of a drill sergeant. "You're rolling too thin. They'll burn if they're too thin. Dad, tell her she's rolling too thin."
"She's rolling too thin," Coin says from the kitchen table, where he's drinking coffee and watching us with those blue-gray eyes and the almost-smile that isn't almost anymore.
It's real now. Small, private, but real. I see it every morning and I still haven't gotten used to it.
"I'm a nurse, not a baker," I say. "Cut me some slack."
"No slack. Grandma's recipe is sacred. You mess up the cookies, you mess up Christmas."
"That seems like a lot of pressure for a sugar cookie."
"It's not just a sugar cookie. It's a legacy."
She's not wrong. These cookies—rolled and cut with the same tin shapes Coin's mother used, frosted in the same colors, baked at the same temperature—are the one piece of his parents that he managed to keep.
She taught Wrenleigh when she was eight. She taught Sadie Jo when she was nine.
And now Wrenleigh is teaching me, and the fact that she's doing it—that she's letting me into this tradition, handing me the rolling pin and the tin cutters and the recipe card written in a grandmother's handwriting that I'll never have the chance to meet—says more than any words she's ever spoken to me.
Sadie Jo is in the living room.
Her music is playing too loud from the Bluetooth speaker Coin got her for her birthday, and nobody tells her to turn it down because the sound of a thirteen-year-old girl playing music too loud in a house that used to be too quiet is the best sound any of us have heard in months.
The house looks different.
Not drastically—the bones are the same.
Same hardwood floors, same kitchen table, same photos on the fridge.
But the couch is new.
The old one had memories neither of us wanted to sit on anymore, so we drove to the furniture store in Star City on a Tuesday afternoon and argued about fabric colors for an hour until Sadie Jo picked one and we both agreed immediately because Sadie Jo's taste is better than both of ours combined.
My pillows are on the bed. The good ones.
His are in the closet because I won and he knows it and the argument about pillows has become a running joke that Wrenleigh references at least twice a week.
My scrubs hang in the closet next to his cut.
My toothbrush is in the holder next to his.
My name isn't on the mailbox yet because Coin keeps saying he'll do it and then forgets, and I keep not reminding him because the fact that he offered matters more than whether it's actually done.
This is my home. Not his home that I moved into.
Mine. Ours.
The distinction matters, and I feel it every morning when I come downstairs and Sadie Jo is already at the table and Wrenleigh is already complaining and Coin is already failing at eggs.
"Dad," Wrenleigh says, pulling a tray out of the oven. Golden brown, perfect edges, the whole kitchen filling with the smell. "Have you and Leah talked about the dog yet?"
Coin looks at me over his coffee. I look at him.
"We've talked about it," I say carefully.
"You've been talking about it for three weeks. Talking isn't deciding."
"We're still in the discussion phase."
"The discussion phase." Wrenleigh sets the tray down and crosses her arms—full Wrenleigh stance, hip cocked, eyebrow raised.
"Dad. Sadie Jo has been looking at the Monongalia County shelter website every day after school.
She has a list. An actual list. With photos and names and personality descriptions. "
"I'm aware of the list," Coin says.
"She's ranked them."
"I'm aware of the ranking."
"Number one is a three-year-old hound mix named Biscuit who was surrendered because his owner moved into a no-pets apartment, and he is—according to the shelter description— 'good with kids, house-trained, and loves belly rubs.' Dad. His name is Biscuit."
"I know his name."
"So, what's the holdup?"
Coin looks at me again. The almost-smile is there—the real one. "What do you think?"
"I think a dog named Biscuit would fit right in around here."
Wrenleigh's face does something I rarely see—it goes soft.
Not the hard-edged girl, not the angry teenager.
Just a sixteen-year-old who wants a dog for Christmas and just got one step closer. "Can we go this weekend? To meet him?"
"We'll see," Coin says, which is Dad code for yes, and Wrenleigh knows it, and the grin she gives him is the same grin she gave me the night of the four-wheeler accident—fierce, bright, full of something that might be joy.
"Sadie Jo!" she yells toward the living room. "We're getting Biscuit!"
"We didn't say—" Coin starts.
"WE'RE GETTING BISCUIT!"
The music in the living room stops. A beat of silence. Then Sadie Jo appears in the kitchen doorway with wide eyes and the beginning of a smile that makes my chest crack open in the best possible way.
"Really?" she asks. Looking at Coin. Looking at me.
"Really," I say. Because some promises don't need to be official to be real.
The club's Christmas party is at the clubhouse, because where else would we have it?
Backroads is still being rebuilt—the framing is up, the walls are going in, and Ellie has been supervising.
But the clubhouse is where the family gathers when it matters, and Christmas obviously matters.
The main room is decorated in a way that can only be described as aggressively festive.
Someone—I suspect Tildie—went overboard with the lights.
There are garlands on the bar, a tree in the corner that's leaning about fifteen degrees to the left, and a string of lights around the Church hallway door that flickers in a way that's either intentional or an electrical hazard.
Ellie is in the kitchen. Of course she is.
She's been cooking since dawn—ham, mac and cheese, green beans, rolls, three kinds of pie.
Baby Waylon is in a bouncer on the counter next to her, wearing a onesie that says ‘Santa’s Favorite’ and drooling on a candy cane that someone gave him that Vanna is going to be furious about.
"That child is eating a candy cane," I say.
"That child is teething and the candy cane is helping," Ellie says without looking up from the ham. "His mother will survive."
Vanna will not survive, but that's a conversation for later.
The room fills up.
Brothers in cuts over Christmas sweaters—Maddox in a sweater with a reindeer on it that someone clearly bought as a joke and he's wearing with complete sincerity.
Bracken with a Santa hat. Decorum saying grace over the food while Porter tries to sneak a roll before he's finished.
Tildie is behind the bar, because Tildie is always behind the bar.
Ruger is next to her with his arm around her waist and a look on his face that says this bald, bearded, tattooed President of an outlaw motorcycle club is deeply, embarrassingly in love with his bartender, and he doesn't care who sees it.
Wrenleigh and Sadie Jo are at a table with some of the other club kids, and Wrenleigh is showing everyone photos of Biscuit on her phone with the salesmanship of a girl who is going to run something someday—a company, a country, probably both.
Coin is across the room talking to Ruger, his back against the bar, the coin turning between his fingers.
He catches my eye and holds it—two seconds, three—and the look he gives me is the same one he gave me across the orthopedic waiting room, across the kitchen table, across every room we've shared since the night this started.
Quiet. Deliberate. Full of everything he doesn't say out loud because he doesn't have to anymore.
I know. I always know.
After a couple of hours, I step outside for air.
It’s around nine or so.
The December night is sharp—cold enough to see my breath, cold enough that the mountains are just shapes in the dark, black ridges against a sky full of stars.
The noise from the party bleeds through the walls, muffled and warm.
I'm standing on the porch, letting the cold settle into my lungs, when I hear them.
Not inside. Around the corner of the building, near the parking lot.
Two voices—one I recognize immediately, one I have to listen for.
"Rookie." Kinsey's voice. Quiet. Stripped of the hard edge she usually carries. "Can we talk? Just for a second."
Silence. Then his voice—deeper than you'd expect from someone they still call kid, rougher than it was when I first met him. "About what, Kinsey?"
"About us. About—I know there's no us. I know that.
But I need to know if we can..." She pauses.
I can hear her searching for the word, the way you search for solid ground in the dark.
"Can we start over? Not—not like before.
I don't mean that. I just mean can we be in the same room without you looking through me like I'm not there? "
I shouldn't be listening. I know that. But my feet aren't moving, and the voices carry in the cold air, and something about the way she sounds… stripped, raw, nothing like the girl with the designer clothes, holds me in place.
Rookie is quiet for a long time.
When he speaks, his voice isn't angry.
That's what makes it devastating.
It's tired. The exhaustion of a man who processed his hurt a long time ago and came out the other side with nothing left.
"I don't hate you, Kinsey. I need you to know that.
I don't look through you because I'm angry.
I look through you because when I look at you, I remember who I was when I trusted you, and I don't..." He stops.
Starts again. "I don't want to be that person anymore.
The kid who believed everything you said and defended you to brothers who knew better.
Brothers who got hurt because I let you in. "
"I know. I know what I did. I've been carrying it every day since—"