Epilogue - One Year Later
Holly
The wind carried the smell of cut grass and rain, the kind that clung to headstones long after the storm was gone.
I knelt in front of the grave, tracing my thumb over the carved name, though I didn’t read it aloud.
My lips moved anyway—habit, not prayer. There were flowers from half the city tucked into the brass vase: grocery-store lilies, roses from somebody’s yard, one plastic sunflower a kid must’ve insisted on.
The wind moved through the cemetery trees with a long, low hush, like the world trying to quiet a crying child.
Behind me, footsteps crunched in the gravel. I didn’t have to look. Jackson’s boots had a rhythm I could pick out of a thousand others. Slow. Heavy. Present. My eyes never left the headstone. “I don’t know how to keep going without her.”
He exhaled—that long, quiet sigh that meant he was steadying himself before he spoke. “I think that’s the trick of it,” he said softly. “You don’t keep going without her. You keep going because of her. She didn’t teach us how to quit, Malibu. She taught us how to live messy and love loud.”
He took my hand and pulled me up until I leaned against him. My head found that spot beneath his jaw where the world had always made sense.
I pressed my forehead against his shoulder. “I miss her laugh.”
He smiled faintly, brushing his thumb along my jaw. “Yeah but she’s probably up there giving God pointers by now. Poor bastard.”
That earned a wet laugh from me. He always knew when to break the heaviness before it drowned me. I let myself breathe him in. He had become my safe place, one that smelled like soap and leather and the man who had chosen me in a thousand small ways over the last year.
He’d stopped drinking one day at a time until those days stacked into something solid.
Meetings. Calls. The ugly chairs and bad coffee, the texts with pictures of coin-colored tokens in his palm when he felt brave, and pictures of empty chairs when he didn’t.
He still shook sometimes. He told me when the dark got loud.
He put his hands where I could see them.
We had learned how to be not-ok together and still get up in the morning.
It had been two months without her, and every morning I still expected to hear her at the clubhouse door, hollering about somebody’s muddy boots or the price of eggs.
Instead we had casseroles from women who couldn’t think what else to do, and a chair at the big table no one would sit in, and the memory that the city had swallowed her in the middle of an ordinary day.
A drive-by, they said. Random, they implied.
No, we all thought, even if we didn’t say it.
Not random. Nothing about Hannah was ever random.
The story of it still lived in my muscles: the phone vibrating on the counter, Dalton’s voice stripped to bone, the way the clubhouse turned into a church and a hospital and a town hall without anyone calling for it.
The grieving that never seemed to stop. The after. God, the after.
The sky had that swollen look it got before it opened. He slid his fingers through mine. The ring he’d put there in front of the whole damn club flashed when a weak strip of sun broke free. It was simple and solid and heavier than it looked. Like us.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No,” I said, honest. “But let’s go anyway.”
We took the long path back to the truck, past names that belonged to people we’d fed and fought for and forgiven. The family plot wasn’t far from the clubhouse—a short drive, a lifetime away.
August didn’t have a stone yet. He still slept in the little back room where Hannah used to fold napkins and organize men, his breath thinner every day, his eyes always turned toward the door.
He’d started talking to her like she was just in the next room.
We all knew her absence was killing him and none of us knew how much longer he would hold out for.
On the ride back, Jackson kept his hand on my knee.
Wind lifted the edge of my hair where the window was cracked.
The city slipped by in fragments—bodegas, girls in school uniforms dragging their feet, a mechanic rolling out from under a car just in time to wave as we went by.
Atlanta didn’t stop grieving on your schedule.
It just kept moving around you, giving you something to push against so you didn’t float away.
The clubhouse came into view like a ship that had lost its figurehead. Same old sign, same ugly angel over the door with chipped wings, same bikes lined up like good soldiers. But the hum under the skin was off. We all knew who the heart of the place was.
Dalton stood on the porch, coffee in one hand, his other hand cupped around the rim like he could keep the heat from escaping.
He looked like a man trying to hold three different roofs up with his shoulders.
When he saw us, his mouth softened. He tipped his chin.
No big show. Just, I see you. Tired blue eyes that always tried to hide the hurt.
Inside, the place smelled like coffee and lemon oil and a hundred meals Hannah had taught the surfaces to remember.
Someone had tried to put things in order.
The bulletin board was newly pinned and squared.
The sink was empty, miracle of miracles.
Her coffee cup still sat by the pot, a relic no one was willing to touch.
Maria’s voice floated from the hallway.
“—no, you’re not lifting that, Diego. Your job is to admire me and pass me things when I ask you to.”
Jackson smiled into his cup. “She’s nesting.”
“She’s always nesting,” I said.
We followed the sound and found her on a step stool, rearranging framed photos on the hallway wall like she was conducting a symphony. Diego hovered behind her with a dish towel over his shoulder and the expression of a man who would fistfight gravity if it looked at her wrong.
“You two look like sin and trouble,” Maria called the second we stepped in. “Hannah’s probably yelling at you from Heaven to take your shoes off before you track mud through her clean floors.”
Jackson smirked. “We’ll risk it.”
Maria clicked her tongue. “Disrespectful.”
She stepped down carefully and smoothed her skirt, surveying the wall. The hallway had been slowly transforming under her command. Fresh paint in warm tones. New curtains. Little touches Hannah would’ve approved of, even if she’d pretended not to.
“You’re redecorating again?” I asked.
“I am reclaiming,” Maria corrected. “There’s a difference. Grief likes to sit in corners. I’m moving the furniture so it has nowhere comfortable to stay.”
Diego kissed the top of her head. “She’s been on a rampage.”
“Organized rampage,” she snapped. “Willow’s Harbor deserves to feel alive. So does this place.”
Jackson nodded once. “Hannah would’ve liked that.”
“She would’ve micromanaged it,” Maria said.
“But yes. Let me get this room finished. I’m going for a meadow theme.
Then I will make us all some lunch.” Maria had been themeing each room.
Oceans. Planets. And now meadows. The guests of Willow’s Harbor seemed to enjoy it, and it made her happy. So, we just let her do it.
Eventually, we all made our way to the kitchen.
Dalton drifted in and took the opposite stool, hunch loosening a notch in the kitchen light.
Mac followed a beat later, a clipboard tucked under his arm like he has been in the middle of something important.
. He looked older—grief carving a new set of lines around his mouth, a new steadiness behind his eyes.
He wasn’t trying to be August. He was trying to be the man the club needed now.
Those aren’t the same thing. He was learning.
“You two coming to the run tonight?” Mac asked, flipping a page. “Short one. Just to… say goodbye.”
Jackson nodded. “Yeah.”
“We’ll be there,” I said.
Maria slid a plate in front of Jackson first because she liked him best, and then one in front of me because she loved me more. Diego handed out water bottles like a man on a mission.
“You eat?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“You will,” Maria said firmly. “Hannah didn’t raise us to starve while we’re sad.”
Dalton snorted. “She’d haunt you personally.”
“She already is,” Maria said, glancing toward the hallway. “Every time someone leaves a coffee mug in the sink too long, I feel judged.”
Mac almost smiled.
The room felt fuller for a second. Not healed. Just held.
Footsteps sounded at the hallway door. Silas paused in the threshold like a man who’d learned doorways were power.
Tailored shirt, cuffs unbuttoned just so.
Hair too neat for this building. He carried a stack of folders and an expression that practiced concern in the mirror.
If charisma had a smell, it would’ve been his cologne—expensive and a little oily.
“Morning,” he said, voice warm enough to melt butter. “Brought the vendor bids for the fundraiser, Mac. And I got the city to expedite the permit for the street closure. Should be in by end of day.”
Mac’s relief was visible enough to make me feel petty. “Good,” he said, clapping Silas on the shoulder like a man thanking a neighbor for bringing in the trash cans. “Appreciate it.”
“Always,” Silas said, holding his hands up like don’t mind me, just helping.
He took the seat at the edge of the table—that sly not-in-the-center, not-too-far-away spot that let you hear everything and be seen as little or as much as you wanted.
He had a way of appearing exactly where the empty space was.
The day Hannah died, he’d been there with paper plates and a schedule and the names of three different pastors on his phone, and nobody asked how he knew what we needed.
You didn’t judge a man for handing you a life jacket while you were drowning.
You took it and breathed, and the questions came later when your lungs stopped burning.