Epilogue
The highway stretches endlessly ahead, pine trees blurring past the passenger window, their shadows flickering across the dashboard every few seconds.
My gaze drifts to the passenger-side mirror.
For months, I’d avoided my own reflection whenever I could.
Every glance had turned into another reminder of everything taken from me.
Every bruise. Every scar. Every version of myself I thought I’d lost. Now…
I don’t look away. For the first time in a long time, I don’t hate the woman staring back at me.
She’s survived things that should’ve broken her.
And somehow…she’s still here. My phone buzzes in my lap.
Sarah
Girl! Group got interesting this week…
Another message pops up before I can answer. Wolff glances at me briefly before looking back at the road.
“It’s Sarah, from group.” I unlock my phone and scroll.
Sarah
Police came today.
They were asking if anyone had talked to Emily’s ex recently.
That’s FOUR now, AJ.
Four women from OUR group whose abusers have disappeared.
Another text appears almost immediately.
Sarah
Isn’t that…weird?
These assholes spent YEARS getting away with everything.
Now they’re just…disappearing?
The detective wouldn’t tell us much, but he kept asking if the women had anything in common besides the support group.
A slow smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. I lock my phone and look over at him.
“You know…you could come with me sometime.”
“Where?” he asks.
“Group.”
“No.”
The answer comes so fast it makes me laugh. “You didn’t even think about it.”
“I did.”
“You answered in under a second.”
“Didn’t need longer.”
I reach across the center console until my fingers brush the back of his hand resting on the gearshift. He turns his hand over, lacing our fingers together.
“I’d rather get shot than sit in a circle talking about my feelings.”
He squeezes my hand before bringing it to his mouth and pressing a quick kiss against my knuckles.
“Apparently, the police showed up at group this week.”
His thumb stills against the back of my hand.
“That’s what Sarah was texting me about.” I scroll through the messages again. “It’s the fourth woman in our support group whose abuser has disappeared.”
I glance over. His eyes never leave the road. “I mean…don’t you think that’s a little weird?”
Silence.
“I join a support group for survivors of sexual assault and, suddenly, the men who spent years hiding behind money, lawyers, political connections, and powerful last names start vanishing?”
Another mile disappears beneath the tires.
“Some of these women spent decades trying to get someone to believe them.” I shake my head.
“Police reports disappeared. Witnesses changed their stories. Cases got dismissed. Now, the same police department that’s ignored them for years is suddenly scrambling because the abusers are the ones going missing. ”
The corner of his mouth twitches.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that…would you?”
“No.”
“Really?” I press.
“Mm.”
“So that’s your official statement?”
His fingers tighten around mine for just a second. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I study his face, my thumb grazing a fresh cut across his knuckles that definitely wasn’t there yesterday. “Hypothetically…if someone was making rapists disappear…”
His eyebrow lifts almost imperceptibly. “Hypothetically.”
“Would it hurt? Whatever happens to them…do they suffer?”
He brings my hand to his mouth again, his lips brushing my knuckles as he speaks against them. “They meet someone worse.”
A warmth spreads across my chest.
Some people spend their lives wondering if monsters exist. I fell in love with one. And somehow, the safest place I’ve ever been is in his shadow.
The highway stretches ahead of us, washed in late afternoon gold. Jackal is sprawled across the back seat, snoring like he didn’t try to climb into Wolff’s lap twice before we even got on the freeway.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have believed any of this.
Not this road trip. Not Wolff driving with one hand on the wheel and the other wrapped around mine. No waking up beside him every morning in a house that somehow became ours without either of us knowing how to say it out loud.
Not Jackal stealing Wolff’s side of the bed and getting away with it.
That’s still my favorite part.
Wolff can make grown men piss themselves with a single look, but one German Shepherd mix with too-big ears and a dramatic sigh has him trained like a house pet.
Every morning, Jackal drops his food bowl on Wolff’s chest. Every morning, Wolff glares at him like he’s considering homicide. Every morning, he gets up anyway.
The car slows as we turn off the main road and into a quiet neighborhood lined with big trees and houses set far back from the street.
I wasn’t sure how to bring Miranda up again after everything.
His family. His past. The pieces of him he keeps locked behind steel and silence.
When I moved the last of my things into Wolff’s house, he found the folded note Miranda had given me tucked inside one of my books.
The address.
The date of Jake’s memorial.
He stared at it for a long time, then set it on the counter and walked away.
The date came and went. I didn’t push. I didn’t mention it again. Then, a month ago, an invitation arrived in the mail. A cream envelope, covered in blue train stickers. A child’s handwriting crooked across the front beneath Miranda’s neat one.
It sat unopened on the kitchen island for almost two weeks.
Then one morning, Wolff picked it up, slid a knife under the flap, and read it without saying a word.
Now we’re here.
The truck rolls to a stop in front of a large brick house with blue balloons tied to the mailbox and a paper train taped to the front window. Bright little flags line the porch railing. Somewhere inside, children are screaming and laughing, the sounds faint through the closed windows.
Wolff cuts the engine and sits with his hands on the wheel, his knuckles going white from his grip. I don’t say anything immediately. I’ve learned that sometimes silence is the only way he knows how to breathe.
A full minute passes.
Then another.
“Wolff. We don’t have to do this.”
His eyes stay fixed on the house.
“We can leave. Right now. We can drive somewhere else. Get terrible coffee. Let Jackal puke in your back seat again.”
Jackal lifts his head at his name, then immediately drops it back down.
“We can—”
“Marry me.”
For a second, I genuinely think I heard him wrong. “What?”
His grip tightens on the steering wheel. “This isn’t how I wanted to ask.”
My heart stutters.
He still isn’t looking at me. His face is pale in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times. Not from blood loss. Not from pain.
Fear.
“I had… I had this whole fucking thing planned… Dinner, candles. Jackal had a bowtie; he hated it.”
My mouth falls open, in awe and shock. His eyes finally cut to mine, and whatever I see there steals the breath from my lungs.
“I can’t walk in there…I can’t face them, my past, the kid they remember…” He drags in a breath. “Not unless I know I have you in my future.”
“Wolff…” I whisper.
“You deserve better than being asked in a fucking car outside a six-year-old’s birthday party.
” He reaches into his jacket pocket with an unsteady hand and pulls out a small black velvet pouch.
“And if you want something else, I’ll get it.
Anything. Diamonds. Bigger. Fancier. Whatever the fuck people are supposed to buy for this. ”
He opens the pouch and drops two gold rings into his palm. The entire world stills around us. It can’t be—I reach for the smaller of the two with shaking fingers, barely touching the metal.
“That’s…”
“Our rings from Russia,” he says.
Our fake marriage. Our fucked-up cover. The thing I threw away because I couldn’t stand looking at it. The thing that belonged to the worst and most impossible parts of us.
“How did you…”
“I went back and found it.”
After I threw it away.
After I thought I was throwing him away with it.
“Didn’t know why. Hated myself for it.” His thumb rubs over the edge of the band. “Still couldn’t get rid of it.”
A tear slides down my cheek.
“I know it started as a lie,” he says. “I know it came from hell. But it was the first thing that ever made me think about having a life with you, and I couldn’t… I couldn’t let it be only that.”
Shifting in my seat, I can’t wait a second longer. I grab the front of his shirt and kiss him.
He makes a rough sound against my mouth, one hand sliding into my hair, the other closing carefully around the rings so he doesn’t drop them. When I pull back, I’m crying and smiling and probably look like a disaster.
“Yes,” I rasp. “I’ll marry you.”
His forehead drops against mine with relief. “Good.”
I laugh through another tear. “That’s all you’ve got?”
His mouth brushes mine. “I’m working on it.”
He slides the ring onto my finger, and it fits like it was never supposed to belong anywhere else. We sit there for another minute, forehead to forehead, while children laugh inside a house full of his ghosts.
Finally, Wolff opens his door.
I step out too, smoothing my hands down my dress while he lets Jackal out of the back. The dog immediately shakes himself and then trots toward the house. I reach for Wolff’s hand, and we walk up the steps together.
Before we reach the door, it flies open. A little boy with messy blond hair barrels out—
“Uncle Dylan!”
The boy crashes into his waist, arms wrapping around him with complete, fearless joy. Everything in Wolff tenses.
Miranda appears in the doorway, one hand flying to her mouth. Another woman stands beside her, eyes wide and already wet. The little boy pulls back suddenly, face falling.
“I’m sorry. Aunt Miranda said I shouldn’t touch you unless you said it was okay. I forgot.”
Wolff looks down at him. Then his hand lifts, slow and awkward, and settles on the boy’s small shoulder.
“It’s okay.”
The boy’s whole face lights up again. “Really?”
Wolff nods, and the kid hugs him again, tighter. Wolff’s arm slowly moves around him. Miranda starts crying in the doorway.
I stay one step behind him, my hand still in his, watching the man who once told me that he didn’t know how to love stand on a porch with his nephew wrapped around him and try anyway.
“Do you want to see my train cake?” the boy asks, already grabbing Wolff’s hand. “You can meet my friends too!”
Wolff glances back at me with panic, and I bite my lip to keep from laughing. “You’ve faced worse,” I tell him.
The boy tugs him into the house, and Wolff lets himself be dragged. I follow slowly, my hand brushing the ring on my finger.
He’s still Wolff.
Still sharp edges and silence. Comes home with blood on his hands—a monster men fear in the dark.
And I’m still me.
Cracked in places that may never heal smoothly. Still carrying things no one should have to survive.
We don’t get back what was stolen from us. Not our childhoods. Not our innocence. Not the versions of ourselves who might have existed if the worst people had never found us.
But somehow, against every rule and every warning and every sane fucking reason, the worst parts of us found each other.
And loved anyway.
Maybe that’s not clean. Or pretty. Maybe it never should have worked. But as Wolff softens with his nephew, and Miranda wipes happy tears from her eyes, and Jackal steals a sandwich off a table full of excited children—
I think maybe happy endings don’t have to be soft.
Sometimes they have teeth.
Sometimes they come limping out of Hell, covered in blood, holding your hand like it’s the only thing keeping them human. Sometimes the worst thing that ever happened to you leads you straight to the person who makes you want to live.
Wolff looks back at me from across the room.
I smile.
And this time, nothing in me hurts when I do.