Epilogue
SLOANE
Two weeks later, the Jeep still isn’t completely free.
Rhys says the mountain’s “thinking about it,” which apparently passes for optimism in Hollow Peak.
“Good thing I got the extra rental insurance.”
“Good thing,” he snorts, shaking his head.
I stand beside him near the edge of the washout, arms folded against the early morning cold while fog drifts low between the pines.
The Wrangler sits half-buried in mud below us, exactly where it’s been since the storm, one tire finally visible again after three straight days of digging, winching, and Rhys swearing creatively at geology.
“You know,” I say dryly, “most people would call this totaled.”
Rhys tightens the cable another inch. “Most people don’t know Jeeps.”
“That sounds like a cult.”
“Pretty much is.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. The sound hangs strangely in the mountain air. Still unfamiliar enough that Rhys glances at me like he’s surprised to hear it, too.
He looks better. Not healed. I’m not sure men like Rhys Ward ever heal cleanly. But he’s lighter somehow and more present.
He sometimes sleeps now, though not always. And he still wakes at sudden thunder. When helicopters pass overhead or radios crackle unexpectedly, his eyes narrow, jaw tensing. And he still carries on entire conversations in silence.
But he always comes back to me.
The article I’m working on sits open on my laptop. The cursor blinks at the end of the last paragraph, unfinished.
My eyes sweep to the window where fog drifts across Hollow Peak, as if the mountain itself has finally exhaled.
I take a deep breath and then reread the piece. The official reports called the ambush a failed extraction during a rapidly deteriorating operation in hostile territory. One where multiple Marines got killed, and others returned carrying injuries no report could fully document.
That part is true.
I wrote about fractured intelligence. Impossible command decisions. The burden left on survivors forced to choose between orders, instinct, and the men beside them.
That part is true, too.
What I don’t write is Phoenix… not all of him. Not the pieces I still don’t understand, the ones I likely never will.
Not the possibility that my brother stepped willingly into something larger than the rest of the team understood. That he made choices in those final hours that cost lives based on a terrible, impossible calculus I can’t solve because I don’t have all the variables.
And not the look on Rhys’s face when he finally told me. Because some truths don’t belong to the world. Some only belong to the people who survived them.
I stare at the blinking cursor. The families deserve answers. But I’m no longer sure anyone survived with enough truth to give them.
After weeks here—after hearing the cracks in the survivors’ voices, after watching Rhys wake from nightmares he still can’t escape—I no longer know if every truth heals the people left behind. Sometimes survival depends on the story you can bear to live with.
The floor creaks quietly behind me. Pine and leather thread the air. I don’t turn around. I don’t have to.
Rhys pauses in the cabin door. He still carries silence carefully like it bruises easily.
“How’s the writing going?” he asks.
I shrug. “Been better.”
He steps closer, coffee mug in hand. His beard is shorter than when I first met him. But he still looks feral around the edges, as if the mountain refuses to fully let him go. Or maybe he doesn’t want it to.
“Figure we could add a second room here, a writing office for you, once some of these storms slow down and the roads are passable again. Maybe a bedroom for privacy.”
“You have big plans for this place.” I grin, cheeks heating.
“Guess I’m thinking long-term. If this still feels right to you.”
“More right than ever,” I say.
“Good.” His mouth works now, and then he says, “Maybe someday, we could add on a little nursery, too.”
Our eyes meet, and now we’re both grinning.
His eyes drift to the laptop screen, but he doesn’t ask to read it. Doesn’t ask what I decided. That burden is mine, just like his has always been his.
“The families deserve something,” I whisper finally.
Rhys nods once slowly. “I know.”
“But not this?” I ask quietly. “Not all of it?”
His jaw flexes. “I don’t know, Sloane,” he says, honest and tired. “That’s the problem.”
I lean back in the chair, looking out the window toward the misty mountains. Toward the place where everything broke apart and where I found him.
The truth didn’t set anything free. But it brought me here.
“I built my career believing the truth could always be uncovered if you dug deep enough. Now I’m not sure war leaves behind truths clean enough to recover.”
He looks down, Adam’s apple working before he says, “I don’t know whether Phoenix was saving lives or sacrificing them. Maybe he didn’t know either.”
Even Rhys only carries pieces of what happened that day. Guilt isn’t the same thing as certainty.
I could write a version that sounds complete. But that would be the biggest lie of all.
The families deserve honesty. But honesty and certainty aren’t always the same thing. And that’s why some stories survive in fragments.
Because nothing’s ever that simple.
War transforms people into symbols after they die—heroes, villains, sacrifices. But the living have to carry the contradictions, live with the things that evade simplification.
Maybe that’s the cruelest part of survival. The moment you learn that truth doesn’t always arrive whole. Maybe it never does, really.
With Phoenix, no one ever had the whole story. Not the reporters, the survivors. Not Rhys or even Phoenix. Some of it died with the men who never came home, and I’m finally willing to accept that.
Because that’s the truth.
I follow him outside once the fog burns off revealing verdant forest. We’re back to where we started, staring at a half-buried, half-lost Jeep.
Rhys braces his boots harder against the mud and works the winch again. The cable groans sharply. The vehicle shifts maybe half an inch. Then stops.
He curses under his breath.
“You know,” I say, smiling to myself. “For a mountain ghost, you’re kind of stubborn.”
His gaze flicks to me briefly. “Kind of?”
I laugh.
The wind lifts softly through the trees, carrying the scent of pine and cold earth and distant rain. Colorado. Beautiful one minute. Brutal the next.
I understand now why Rhys came here… and stayed. Weathered things survive differently here.
The cable suddenly jerks loose with a violent snap.
“Shit.”
Rhys stumbles backward slightly, catching himself before the line whips past his shoulder.
Instantly, my heart jumps into my throat. “Oh my God, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he grumbles too quickly.
I shake my head, walking toward him anyway. “You always say that.”
“Because it’s usually true.”
“Not remotely.”
He exhales softly through his nose, his expression caught somewhere between irritation and amusement.
I stop in front of him, my boots already soaking into the rusty mud. I’m close enough to see the faint silver line of the scar disappearing beneath his collar. The same arm I bandaged with shaking hands while we both pretended we weren’t already falling apart.
Rhys studies me quietly, as if trust is something he’s relearning inch by inch.
“Are you still sure about this?” he asks finally.
I glance once toward the cabin and the unfinished article. Toward the mountain roads slowly drying, bathed in morning light. Then back at him.
The man I came here to expose. The one who carries guilt as penance and grief as a second heartbeat. Who forgave my brother enough to spend years hating himself for surviving.
“Yes,” I say softly. “I’m not leaving you. Ever.”
Something shifts behind his eyes then. Small. Almost invisible. Relief flickers there.
Rhys’s hand brushes lightly against mine. I lace my fingers through his. “Good, cause I’d follow if you did.”
I lean up on my tiptoes, brushing his lips with mine. “I know.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“You’re that possessive when you want something.”
That earns a soft groan from him. “Speaking of wanting,” he says, hands tightening at my waist.
“Really?” I whisper seductively. “Don’t want to interrupt you and the winch.”
“Really,” he says with a big grin, sweeping me off my feet and trudging toward the cabin, boots heavy with mud.
The mountains stretch endlessly around us, wrapped in fog and sunlight and the remnants of storms that never fully disappear.
Maybe people are like that, too.
Maybe they’re like the mountains that way—scarred by weather, altered by what they endure, still standing anyway.
I didn’t find the story I came looking for. Instead, I found the man still carrying it—and somewhere along the way, he became impossible to leave behind.