Epilogue
Several months later…
Cade
Spring showed up in Michigan like it expected applause for doing the bare minimum.
The snow had finally retreated from the edges of the roads.
The trees outside the Saginaw high-rise had started pushing out stubborn green buds like they were as tired of winter as the rest of us.
The river below caught sunlight in broken flashes through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse, and for the first time in months, the world outside did not look like something I had to survive.
It looked like something waiting.
I hated how poetic that sounded, but almost dying had apparently made me annoying.
Recovery had been ugly at first. Humiliating in the beginning.
There were weeks of pain so sharp I woke up sweating through sheets.
Weeks where breathing wrong felt like being stabbed all over again.
Weeks where Bliss hovered with a medication schedule color-coded so aggressively even my doctors respected it.
Weeks where the first time I walked across a room without needing to stop, everyone acted like I had personally won the Stanley Cup on one lung and spite.
But by spring, the doctors had stopped looking surprised when I beat another benchmark and started looking personally offended by my refusal to behave like a normal patient.
My lung was strong. My abdomen had healed better than anyone expected. My scars still pulled sometimes when I twisted too fast, and my body still knew the difference between the man I had been before that hallway and the man I was now, but the difference did not feel like weakness anymore.
It felt like proof.
I was training every day now. Controlled lifts.
Conditioning. Skating drills. No contact yet, because apparently medical professionals hated joy, but my legs were back under me, my shot had not deserted me, and Coach Little had already started muttering about September preseason like he was trying not to smile.
I would be more than ready.
Not because I needed to prove Luke Dempsey had not ended my career.
He hadn’t.
I ended him.
Bam.
Facts.
I was still here.
And tonight, everyone I loved was in my parents’ penthouse for their farewell party, which was a sentence I would not have believed six months ago for several reasons.
First, because I had not loved that many people six months ago.
Second, because my parents had not been the kind of people who inspired farewell parties unless someone was retiring from a board of directors.
Third, because Harrison and Elenore Mercer were leaving Saginaw tomorrow, moving back to Manhattan, and I already knew I was going to miss them.
That one still fucked me up if I thought about it too long.
The penthouse was loud now in a way it had never been when my parents first bought it.
Not because the space had changed, though Bliss had made sure it did.
The cold expensive neutrals had been replaced by texture, warmth, blankets thrown over chair backs, vases of fresh flowers, framed photos, a ridiculous neon-pink-and-yellow abstract piece my mother pretended to be skeptical about before hanging it in the main living room anyway.
There were candles on the shelves, throw pillows in colors my father claimed had names that sounded “made up and aggressive,” and a massive framed picture of Bliss laughing at something my mother had said while the two of them stood in a kitchen covered in flour from some disastrous baking attempt.
My father had hung that one himself.
Bliss Bennett had come into my life like glitter with a weapon and somehow turned Harrison and Elenore Mercer into actual parents.
Not perfect ones. Not magically rewritten ones. But present. Warm. Trying.
A tight, formidable little unit none of us knew how to be until she walked into the middle of us and refused to let love stay quiet.
She had become the magnet. The impossible center. The bright, chaotic, bossy thing that pulled the three of us into a family and made it stick.
Now my parents were going back to Manhattan because my father’s empire apparently could not run forever on video calls and intimidation alone, and my mother’s patience for “living out of a temporary closet like a displaced socialite” had finally reached its natural limit.
It was going to suck not having them one floor above us anymore.
Which was another sentence I would have once considered evidence of a traumatic brain injury.
They were not leaving completely, though. Because apparently once Elenore Mercer decided to become emotionally invested, she did it with real estate.
They had bought a cottage on a lake outside Saginaw.
“Cottage,” of course, was a rich-person lie.
It was less cottage and more luxury lodge that had gone to finishing school, with stone fireplaces, lake views, a kitchen bigger than Daniel Bennett’s entire dining room, and enough guest bedrooms to house a minor royal family.
According to my mother, it was “small and manageable,” which meant it only had one staircase wide enough for a wedding procession and a dock that looked like it should have its own staff.
Bliss had seen pictures and stared at my mother for a full ten seconds.
“That is not a cottage, Elenore.”
My mother had blinked, then looked down at the glossy brochure. “It has wood beams.”
“Ma’am, so does a ski resort.”
My father had laughed so hard he had to leave the room.
I was still thinking about that when Bliss’s voice cut through the main living area from somewhere near the kitchen.
“No, Briggs. You cannot call it a charcoochie board.”
“It has meats and cheeses,” Briggs argued. “I’m honoring the format.”
“You are dishonoring women and appetizers.”
Ryan coughed into his drink near the windows.
Charm gasped. “Actually, I kind of support the word.”
“Of course you do,” Aura said. “You like chaos with snacks.”
Easton’s lower voice followed. “I also support snacks.”
“You support anything Aura says,” Rider muttered.
Easton said, “Correct.”
I smiled into my glass of water because everyone else got champagne tonight, but I was still technically under enough medical supervision that Bliss had threatened to make Steve appear from nowhere if I tried anything “organ-taxing.” I had been cleared for training, cleared for skating, cleared for carefully rebuilding myself into a collegiate athlete again.
Apparently I had not been cleared for alcohol near my girlfriend’s anxiety.
Fair.
She stood across the room with her back to me, talking with my mother and Charm near the kitchen island.
She wore a soft yellow dress that hit mid-thigh, white sneakers, and one of my old KFU zip-ups hanging open over it because spring in Michigan was still rude after sunset.
Her hair fell in loose blonde waves down her back, and every time she laughed, every person near her turned like the sound had weight.
Mine. Still. Always.
It didn’t hit the way it had in the beginning anymore, sharp and hungry and half-feral. It was still possessive because I was still me, but now the word had roots. It lived under my skin in a steadier way.
Mine, because I was hers.
Mine, because we had survived long enough to choose it without blood on the floor.
Tonight, I was going to ask her to make it permanent.
The ring was in my pocket.
The one I had bought for her after Ryan drove me to the jeweler because everyone in my life still acted like me operating a vehicle was a federal crime.
Charm had come with us because apparently choosing an engagement ring without her was “how men end up proposing with tragic geometry,” and while I had not enjoyed being bullied by a five-foot fashion demon in a jewelry store, I had to admit she knew her shit.
She had rejected the first six rings with increasing horror.
“Too basic.”
“Too cold.”
“Too divorced.”
“Too influencer-sponsored.”
“That one looks like it apologizes after sex.”
Ryan had stared at her. “How does a ring apologize after sex?”
Charm had looked at him like he was personally responsible for male failure. “With that setting.”
I had found the one ten minutes later.
Oval center stone. Delicate but not fragile. Tiny hidden pink stones under the gallery where only Bliss would notice them. A band that looked classic from far away and a little dramatic up close.
Like her.
Charm had cried, then pretended she had allergies.
Ryan had looked at the ring, then at me, and said quietly, “That’s her.”
I had bought it immediately.
Asking Daniel Bennett for his blessing had been worse than getting stabbed.
Less blood, somehow more sweating.
He had met me at his house two weeks ago because I refused to ask him over the phone like a coward.
Bliss had been at lunch with Aura and Charm, completely unaware Ryan was tracking her location like a professional criminal under strict instructions to keep her away from the Bennett house until I got through the conversation.
Daniel had sat across from me at his kitchen table with his hands folded and his eyes already wet, which had felt wildly unfair.
I had expected threats. A lecture. Maybe one of those father-of-the-bride speeches where he made it clear he could hide my body in a fire station and no one would ask questions.
Instead, he had listened.
To all of it.
To me telling him I loved his daughter more than hockey, more than the future everyone kept trying to hand me, more than the version of myself I used to think I had to become.
To me telling him I would spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of the trust she kept giving me even when life had taught her not to.
To me telling him I knew I was young, and she was young, and no, we were not getting married tomorrow, but I wanted her to know now that every future I could imagine had her name written straight through it.
Daniel had let me finish, then sat there so long I thought he might actually kill me after all.