Epilogue
Cara
There are thirty-one people at Sunday dinner, and I know because Emily counted twice, Harrier counted once and got into an argument with her about whether children should count as half a person because they eat less.
"That's not how math works," Emily says from across the clubhouse.
"It's exactly how math works." Harrier points a fork at her.
"Then you're wrong at math."
Rook nearly chokes on his beer. I lean back in my chair and let the chaos wash over me, because this is what Sunday dinner has become, an argument nobody started on purpose that somehow lasts through dessert.
It started with eight people. Now we need three tables pushed together, and there's a place at the end of the middle one that's always set and never filled, a small ceramic dish of the peppermints Carrot used to steal off Harrier's desk sitting where his plate would go.
Nobody decided that formally. It just happened, the second week after, and it's stayed every week since, and nobody's ever needed to explain it to anyone new who joins us at this table.
His mother comes most months now. Not every week, grief doesn't work on a schedule that convenient, but often enough that Emily's learned exactly how she takes her coffee and Harrier's learned to stop swearing the second she walks in before he catches himself and does it anyway, which makes her laugh every single time in a way that used to make Falcon flinch and now just makes him quietly, fiercely glad.
She sat in Carrot's old seat once, the first time, and none of us said anything, and she never has again, choosing instead to sit beside whoever needs the company most that week, which is its own kind of tribute to a boy who never once thought about himself first either.
Harrier's been campaigning for a fourth table ever since Maggie started bringing two of the women from Haven House most weeks, along with whichever prospects discover there's free food and decide that counts as an invitation.
Falcon says if Harrier drags in a fourth table, he can clean underneath all of them himself. The campaign's stalled, for now.
Emily catches me watching and narrows her eyes. "What?"
"Nothing."
"That was a look." She smiles at me.
"I don't know what you mean."
She turns to Sarah, who's helping Frankie cut a cake big enough to feed the whole yard. "Cara's doing the thing again."
"What thing?" Sarah looks confused.
"Looking happy and pretending she isn't." Emily is pissing me off now.
Falcon's voice comes from behind me, carrying another chair over. "She does do that."
"Whose side are you on?"
"Mine,” he says.
"Wrong answer."
He sets the chair down beside mine. "Move."
My eyebrows go up. "Excuse me?"
He closes his eyes the second the word leaves his mouth, and across the table Harrier points at him without looking up from his plate.
"Dollar," Harrier says, laughing.
"I asked her to move." He’s trying to backtrack.
"You said move." He’s right, Falcon did say that.
Zip glances at the whiteboard behind the bar, where a jar sits under a sign in Emily's handwriting that reads FALCON'S CONTROL ISSUES. "That's definitely a dollar."
Falcon digs a bill out of his pocket and drops it in on his way past. "You're all assholes."
"Twenty-eight dollars," Vulture says, lifting his beer.
"What was that for?"
"Insulting your family."
"You insult us every day."
"I'm President. Different rules." He's smiling into his glass, and Falcon shakes his head and sits down beside me anyway, and his hand finds mine under the table without either of us making a thing of it.
Merrick's picture still hangs on Condor's monitor sometimes, a loose thread none of us pretend has been fully tied off.
It took four months to run him to ground, in the end, a joint effort between Sterling's contact and a federal task force that finally had enough to move without tipping him first. He's in a cell now, awaiting trial, and the network under him is still being pulled apart one shell company at a time.
Nobody at this table believes the fight's finished.
We've stopped needing it to be finished before we let ourselves live, and we've stopped pretending that living and grieving have to happen on separate days.
Some weeks they happen at the same dinner, sometimes at the same table, sometimes in the same breath, and that used to feel like a contradiction. It doesn't anymore.
Haven House is full now, the four women who came out of that warehouse and two more who found their way to us since, through channels I helped build with women who understand exactly what it costs to ask for help.
Emily's still at the transition property, permanently now, with curtains so aggressively yellow Falcon complained about them for exactly six seconds before Emily threatened to rename the whole house after him out of spite.
Sarah splits her time between there and the clubhouse, working three days a week at a bookshop downtown with identification papers Sterling helped her rebuild from nothing.
None of it happened because one conversation fixed everything.
It happened because a hundred small conversations kept happening, week after week, and nobody stopped showing up for them, including the hardest one, a man standing in a grieving mother's living room and refusing to leave until she'd said every angry word she needed to say to him.
Falcon leans toward my ear. "You disappeared."
"I’m just thinking," I say.
"That’s dangerous."
"That's not a control issue."
"Wasn't trying to make it one." He nods toward Vulture, who's still smiling at his beer like the argument's already won. "It's insulting."
"That jar doesn't cover insults."
"Vulture changed the rules."
I laugh and pull my hand free just long enough to steal a bite off his plate, which earns me a look I've come to recognize as one part exasperation and two parts something warmer that he's stopped bothering to hide from the whole table.
After dinner the crowd spreads out the way it usually does.
Some head for the bar, a knot of prospects claim the pool table, kids commandeer one corner with a deck of cards nobody bothers explaining the rules of.
Falcon and I end up on the back porch with the cold coming in off the yard, my cardigan is pulled tight, his jacket draped over my shoulders anyway because apparently some habits never fully die.
"I've been thinking," he says.
"That usually goes badly."
"Probably." He leans against the rail, and there's something in his face I haven't seen there in a while, not nervous exactly, careful. "Your room."
"What about it."
"You're never in it."
True. Some nights I sleep down the hall from his, not because he asked me to give up my own space, because I stopped needing the door between us the same way I used to.
I kept the room anyway, because some part of me still needed to know I could walk back into it whenever I wanted, and he never once made that a problem.
"Are you evicting me?"
"No." He looks out at the yard instead of at me. "I talked to Vulture about the land past the north line."
I go still. "You talked to Vulture."
"Asked if it was available. That's all."
"You didn't pick a house."
"No."
"Plans? Builder?" I need to make sure he’s hasn’t done everything before coming to me.
"Do I look like a man who picks furniture?"
"You look like a man who'd order the whole thing in black leather."
"That sounds practical," he says, and I laugh, and he turns to face me properly. "I'm asking if you'd want to think about it. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Whenever."
A house. Ours, close enough that this family stays exactly as loud and exactly as ours as it is right now, far enough that we get something that belongs to just the two of us at the end of a long day.
"I'd like to think about it," I say.
"Yeah?"
"Yes."
"No secret construction," I add.
"I promise."
"No five-foot security fence."
"Four?"
"Falcon."
"We'll discuss it," he says, and I shake my head, and he pulls me in against his side, and I fit there the way I've stopped questioning.
"Can I ask you something?" I say, into the quiet.
"Anything."
"When did you know we'd be okay?"
He thinks about it longer than I expect. "I didn't, not for a long time. There were nights in that hospital bed I wasn't sure I'd earned the right to want it anymore, patch or no patch."
"And now?"
"Now I think I stopped needing to know how it ends.
I just needed to keep making the next decision better than the last one, and let that be enough, one day at a time.
" He glances toward the window, where Carrot's mother is laughing at something Harrier said, sharp and real and entirely unguarded. "Some weeks that's easier than others."
"I know."
"But it's still enough."
"That sounds suspiciously healthy."
"Knox has been talking to me."
"What?"
"Got you," he says, and I hit his chest, and he catches my hand laughing, and I take it back and hold on instead of letting go.
Inside the clubhouse, Harrier's shouting something about cake, and Emily's shouting back that he's had two pieces already, and Vulture's telling both of them to shut up, and nobody listens to him even a little.
Behind us the whole ridiculous, loud, hard-won family keeps breathing through the walls, the way it will tomorrow, and the day after, through whatever Merrick's trial brings and whatever comes after that, because that's what we do now.
We don't wait for the danger to end, or the grief to finish, before we let ourselves have this.
Falcon presses his mouth to the top of my head. "Ready?"
I look through the window at thirty-one people, and one empty place set for a thirty-second, who are somehow, impossibly, mine, and I take his hand.
"Yeah."
He opens the door and lets me go through first, not because I need protecting and not because he needs to lead. Just because we're going the same way. Together.
And this time, neither of us has to wonder if the other one is coming home.
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