Epilogue - One Year Later #2
I didn’t have proof of anything. Not even a shape to my unease.
Just a small prickle along the back of my neck when his eyes landed on me and slid away, like he saw me as part of a calculation, not a person.
He’d always been around the edges—August’s oldest friend, the uncle who brought good cigars and bad advice.
I had never paid him attention because men like Silas assumed women like me were standing too far back to matter. That’s how they miss us noticing.
“Meeting at three,” Mac said, flipping pages. “We’ll nail down the route and the press.”
Silas smiled. “I can invite Councilman Reyes—he loved Hannah. It’d be a good look.”
Maria’s jaw went tight. “It’s not a look.”
Silas spread his hands, apologetic. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” she said, and went back to her plate like cutting a man open with a fork was beneath her. I could tell Maria at least shared my sentiments.
Jackson’s knee pressed into mine under the table. A small, careful question. You good? I nodded once. Good enough.
The day moved the way days do when there’s too much to do and not enough of the right person to do it.
People came by with envelopes and hugs and a hundred stories that started with “You know what she said to me once?” Men who had never cried wiped at their eyes, angry about it.
Women who had never been welcomed anywhere but here sat at Hannah’s table and ate second helpings and laughed too loud because here they could.
Kids ran through the side yard and got yelled at by three different bikers who then handed them popsicles.
August slept through most of it. When he woke, he asked for her like she’d gone to the store, and we told him the truth again, soft as we could.
He nodded and stared at the ceiling and whispered something that made Dalton swallow hard and leave the room.
One of us would tuck the blanket around August’s thinning shoulders and kissed the top of his head and pretended not to see how bones were winning.
Sometime after lunch, rain finally spat once and gave up.
The heat came back angrier for having been interrupted.
Jackson found me on the back steps, elbows on my knees, watching a line of ants transfer an entire feast crumb by crumb.
He sat behind me and bracketed me with his legs, his chest to my back, his chin on my shoulder.
I leaned into him like I’d been built for that angle.
“You holding?” he asked.
“Like cheap tape,” I said.
“Still works if you double it.”
He smelled like soap and road. His heart thudded steady against my spine. I could feel his breathing change when his thoughts did. He had tells now. He let me have mine.
“Meeting tonight?” I asked.
“Yeah. After the run. My sponsor wants me to share.” He huffed. “I hate sharing.”
“You’re good at it,” I said. “You make the hard parts sound survivable.” I turned my head so my mouth brushed his stubble.
He kissed the spot under my ear, a promise more than anything.
We stayed quiet until the shadows lengthened and the mosquitoes got cocky.
Out front, engines rumbled and died in waves.
The club gathered like weather. By dusk, the bikes were lined two deep, chromed bones catching the porch light.
Men hugged like they were bad at it and pounded backs like they weren’t.
The women settled into chairs with fans and secrets.
Dalton stood on the porch and talked numbers and safety and respect into the air until it felt like a benediction.
Mac added logistics. Silas drifted just close enough to place a hand on Mac’s shoulder at the end, like the punctuation mark a sentence didn’t strictly need.
The run was short and bitter sweet. A loop past the hospital where we’d waited for news that didn’t come.
My father knew the surgeon who had tried to save her.
I heard him tell Mom one night that the whole surgery team went quiet when the machines told them it was too late.
Past the church with the hand-painted sign that said “Love is a verb,” and meant it.
Past two storefronts Hannah had nagged into donating to every coat drive since forever.
Past Momma Laverne’s who had shut down the restaurant for a week, opting to send plate after plate to the clubhouse.
Her way of trying to fill the hole in everyone’s hearts.
The air tasted like cut grass and gasoline.
I rode behind Jackson, arms around him, forehead to his spine, the way we’d learned to breathe together when nothing else made sense.
People on sidewalks lifted their phones and their hands. Some put palms over hearts. Some cried. Every hat taken off and held over saddened hearts that mourned a woman who had changed this community so thoroughly.
Back at the clubhouse, someone put out food without being asked.
Someone else lit the hanging bulbs Hannah had insisted on stringing across the yard because joy should be visible at night.
The world softened at the edges. Maria held court on the porch with her feet up on a spare chair, telling exaggerated stories about Hannah teaching her how to stretch a dollar and feed twenty people with one skillet.
“She’d haunt your pantry if you wasted food,” Maria declared, waving a fork like a baton.
“Terrifying,” Dalton muttered.
“She was terrifying,” Maria corrected, softening. “And generous. And loud. And impossible to ignore.”
When it got late, the crowd thinned. The mechanics stayed to argue about a part only they cared about.
The mothers left in clumps, calling threats and blessings over their shoulders.
Silas shook hands on his way to his car, smiling that soft, unearned smile.
He bent toward me when he passed, the way men did when they thought getting lower made them less threatening.
“Beautiful turnout,” he said. “You did Hannah proud.”
“We all did,” I said. Her funeral felt like forever ago but tonight, it felt like Hannah was still with us.
His gaze flicked over my shoulder toward Jackson and back to me, calculating something I didn’t get to see the end of. “Of course,” he said, and walked away with a little wave that suggested we were friends. I couldn’t keep my lip from curling.
“Cabron,” Maria muttered at my elbow.
“You don’t even like that word,” I said.
“I’m expanding my vocabulary.”
Jackson came up behind me then and slid his arm around my waist, palm flat over my stomach like a claim.
He nodded toward the far end of the lot where the sky had gathered itself into something darker.
Heat lightning flared along the line of trees like someone taking pictures of us without permission.
“What’s on your mind, love?” he asked, low.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I keep thinking about…everything. How fast it all shifted. How August looks past me when I stand right in front of him. How Mac talks like he’s reading a map he didn’t draw. How Dalton holds his shoulders like they’re carrying a roof.”
I was rambling, but he listened the way he always listened now—entirely, without complaint. “It shifted,” he said. “You’re not wrong. We’ll keep shifting with it.”
“I don’t trust him,” I said before I could talk myself out of it, eyes still on the tree line where lightning kept flashing without thunder.
“Silas. I know that sounds…I don’t know.
Petty? Paranoid? He’s always around when there’s a gap, with the exact right fix.
He smiles too much. My gut doesn’t like it. ”
Jackson’s thumb stroked absent circles against my hip. “I’ve learned to trust your gut.”
“I never paid attention to him before,” I said, which was its own confession. “He was just August’s friend. I assumed the men had their male things and I’d stay out of it. But I see him now. I see how he positions himself. How he watches. I don’t know what that means.”
“It means we keep our eyes open,” Jackson said. “And we don’t borrow trouble. If it’s coming, it’ll get here on its own.”
“Comforting,” I said, dry.
He smiled into my hair. “I can do better.” He angled me toward him so I had to look at his mouth, his eyes, the scar that softened when he was dead serious.
“I fought my war. I know what my ghosts look like in daylight now. If another war shows up—club politics, city snakes, whatever—then we fight the one in front of us. Together. I don’t care if the sky cracks. You hear me?”
I did. I heard the weight of every meeting coin in his pocket, the creak of every chair in every circle where he’d said his name and then said it again.
I heard August breathing thin and Maria laughing and Dalton’s jaw grinding and Mac quietly redrawing maps.
I heard Hannah’s voice in every corner: Feed them.
Love them. Tell the truth. I heard my own heart, stubborn and sore and still beating.
“I hear you,” I said. “And just so we’re clear? If the sky cracks, I’m throwing the first punch.”
“Malibu,” he said, smiling that smile he only smiled for me. “I’d pay to see it.”
Thunder finally grumbled from far off, late to the party. The air went more still, like everything knew to make space. The porch bulbs glowed soft. Somebody inside turned off the radio and left the lights. The clubhouse hummed like a tired thing still willing to work.
We stood there and watching the horizon, his hands on me, my hands on him, two people who had screwed up and learned and kept choosing anyway.
Grief didn’t shrink. It stretched and made room for the rest of your life to fit beside it.
Maybe that was the trick Hannah had known all along—love big enough to hold sorrow without letting it drown the table.
Out past the trees, the sky flickered again—silver behind black. You could smell the rain coming the way you sometimes smell trouble: mineral and electric, metallic on the tongue.
A storm was coming.
I didn’t know its name yet or how it would break or who would be standing where when it did. I just knew this: whatever it was, whatever tried to tear through what we’d built, we’d face it together.