Epilogue
CINDY
Almost two years after this desert first tried to kill me, there are exactly two good reasons to spend an entire afternoon in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Both of them are currently covered in cake.
The first is my daughter, who is one year old today, and who has discovered that frosting is the single greatest substance the universe has ever produced.
The second is the man sitting on the ground beside her in the dirt of the ranch yard, the most feared pakhan in the American Southwest, letting her grab two fistfuls of his hair and pull while he makes a low rumbling sound that took me months to recognize as a laugh.
I stand on the terrace with a glass of Yelena’s lemonade, watching the scene below, and I think about the last time I was out in this desert, in the dark instead of the gold of the afternoon.
I came into all of this alone in the dark. That’s the thing I keep turning over. Almost two years ago, I walked away from a fire into the black nowhere of this exact desert, cold, with no jacket, certain of nothing except that I was a broke girl nobody would miss.
I came over a rise in the sand and watched a man in a beautiful suit put a gun to someone’s head in the headlights.
I crouched there with my heart in my teeth, telling myself I was just a girl in the dark and the dark was everywhere, sure down to my bones that the desert had finally decided to keep me.
It kept me. Just not the way I thought.
Because here is the same desert now, in broad gold daylight, and it isn’t a place where a person becomes a thing on the ground anymore.
It’s a yard full of people I love. There are paper streamers strung between the posts that Tasha hung and Roma pretended not to help with.
There’s a ring on Tasha’s hand now, small, bright, fought for through six months of bickering that fooled nobody.
Roma proposed, by all accounts, in the garage, mid-argument, by handing her the keys to his own car.
The system, I’m told, is no longer under review.
There’s a long table groaning under more food than fifty people could eat, because Yelena cannot conceive of a celebration that doesn’t threaten to bankrupt a small nation.
She has appointed Krista her sole heir in matters of the kitchen, announced publicly, twice.
My daughter, who eats sand. She has been in that kitchen since before dawn, ruling it like a general, swatting hands away from dishes and feeding everyone anyway.
There are hardened men with prison ink and shoulder holsters they’ve left inside today, standing around in a loose ring, making complete fools of themselves over a baby in a frosting-smeared sundress.
One of them is teaching her to high-five.
She’s teaching him something harder, by the look on his face.
And there’s the man in the dirt.
Sevastian feels me watching and looks up.
The thing his face does when he finds me has stopped being a surprise.
It’s the face I get to live with now. He’s got our daughter on his knee now, steadying her with one enormous scarred hand, the hand that has done things I will never ask him to describe, holding her like she’s made of blown glass.
She’s named Krystyna. We call her Krista. It’s as close as we could come to the name of the woman who should be standing here next to me, organizing this entire party, bossing everyone into having more fun, the woman who told me once to save myself and never got to see me figure out how.
Her stone is an hour south of here. We visit.
Krista has stood on the grass above her namesake with frosting on her face, which is exactly, exactly how Crystal would have wanted to be visited.
My best friend’s name, softened into my daughter’s.
So that it gets said out loud, with love, every single day, for the rest of all our lives.
There’s a photograph on the mantel inside, the good one, Crystal mid-shriek at some long-gone night out, head thrown back, gorgeous, alive.
The frame is the one she stood on my nightstand herself, a lifetime ago.
The photo changed. The frame stays. Things her hands touched don’t get retired.
Krista will grow up knowing exactly who that is.
She’ll grow up knowing she’s named for the bravest, warmest, most generous woman either of her parents ever knew, a woman who loved too loud, gave away everything, and would have adored her past all reason.
That’s the only kind of forever I believe in anymore.
Not stone. People, carrying each other’s names forward into rooms the dead never got to see.
Promise and Lacey are here, of course. My crew. They drove out together, got lost twice, arrived bickering, burst into tears the second they saw the baby, because that is exactly what Crystal would have done, and we are all of us still a little bit running her program.
Lacey has appointed herself Krista’s most dangerous influence and I have already caught her teaching my one-year-old to blow raspberries at Sevastian’s most terrifying lieutenant.
The man adores it. Stevie did not text the ex.
Stevie married a paramedic she met at the club, which Promise takes full credit for.
The ice bucket is retired, undefeated. The whole world has gone soft in a way I would not have believed possible standing in that dark a year and a half ago.
The empire is still the empire. I’m not naive about what my husband is.
There are still rooms I’m not in, calls that end when I walk through a door, a hardness in him that the world requires and that I married with my eyes open.
But it’s quieter now. Steadier. He has been turning the whole machine, slow and deliberate, toward things that look more like business than blood, building something that might outlast him, that Krista might inherit without inheriting a war.
The man who was certain he had nothing to give anyone but money and fear is laying down, board by board, a thing solid enough to leave behind. For her. For us.
I came here at nineteen behind a shattered knee, a dead coach, a certainty that wanting things was how I got punished.
I spent seven years at the Wet Sunset keeping my head down, my mouth shut, a packed bag in the closet, one eye always on the exit, telling myself that wanting nothing was the same thing as being safe.
I was the last person on earth who should have ended up here, in this, with this, the witness who saw too much, the stray, the problem to solve.
The girl who never reached for anything because reaching was how it all got taken away.
And then I reached anyway. Once. For the most dangerous, least sensible, most impossible thing in the entire state. And it reached back.
The knee, for the record, got its surgery last spring.
Dr. Acheson says another year of the boring exercises and I could teach.
Somewhere in this house there’s a brochure for a children’s dance studio I keep not throwing away, and a man who sets it back on top of the mail every single time he finds it buried.
Krista shrieks with delight at something Sevastian has done, some indignity he’s allowing with the patience of a man who would let this child set him on fire and thank her for the warmth.
The sound of it carries up to the terrace, my daughter’s joy ringing out across the same sand that opened everything in blood.
Half the yard turns to watch. Killers, dancers, an old woman with iron in her spine, all of them lit up by one small girl in the desert sun.
Later, when the light goes long, there will be a fire in the pit, marshmallows on actual sticks, a fire Kir built that actually works, and somebody is finally going to roast one right.
I set down my lemonade and go down the steps to join my family, because that’s what this is now, all of it, mine, chosen, built out of the worst raw materials a life ever handed anyone, made into a home regardless.
Sevastian holds Krista up to me as I cross the yard, and she lunges for me with her whole frosting-covered body, trusting completely that I’ll catch her, the way she has never had one reason in her short life not to trust. I catch her.
Of course I catch her. I press my face into her sticky neck and breathe her in.
Over the top of her head my husband looks at me with an expression that ten thousand frightened men have never once seen. The desert holds us, warm, gold, ours.
Everything in this life turns to dust eventually. The wine runs out, the fire goes to smoke, the people we love get handed back to the sand whether we’re ready or not. I learned that out here in the dark a year and a half ago, watching a man die in the headlights, sure I’d be next.
But I learned the other half of it here too, in the light, with a baby in my arms, a found family loud around me, a good man’s hand at the small of my back.
Yes. It all turns to dust in the end.
What we build in the meantime, though, in the little while we get between the dark and the dark. The love, the people, the names we carry forward. The homes we make out of the hardest ground there is.
That part was worth every single grain of it.