Epilogue
WHAT THE MOUNTAIN LEFT
The scars on my hand have turned silver.
I notice them every morning when I tape up.
The black thread is long gone—replaced by clean medical sutures, then nothing at all, just the raised seam of what I did to keep us alive.
A roadmap of the shack. A constellation of pain.
I run my thumb over it before I start the ritual.
Every time. It’s the closest thing I have to a prayer.
Clara is asleep in the next room.
She moved to LA three weeks after I signed the contract. She didn’t ask permission. She didn’t make an announcement. She just showed up with two bags, a coffee maker, and the same expression she had when she told me to get out of the way so she could stitch my hand. Practical. Stubborn. Alive.
We don’t talk much about the mountain. We don’t need to.
It lives in the scar on her shoulder—a puckered burn mark she doesn’t hide, doesn’t explain.
It lives in the way she checks the windows before she sleeps.
The way I leave one of them cracked, even in January, because the sealed warmth still feels like a trap.
We are not healed. We are not the same people who got on that bus.
We are what the cold made us. And it turns out that’s enough.
I pull the first strip of tape from the roll.
Left hand first. Over the knuckles, between the fingers, back across the palm.
The ritual hasn’t changed since I was sixteen, when my father put me on skates and told me to hit anything that moved.
It won’t change. It’s the only thing I know how to make beautiful.
Clara appears in the doorway.
She’s wearing one of my practice shirts, her hair loose, a coffee mug held in both hands.
The burn scar is visible above the collar—she stopped covering it two weeks ago.
She watches me tape my hands with the focused expression she uses for everything that matters.
She’s not saying anything. She doesn’t have to.
She knows what the tape means. She was there when these hands learned their cost.
"Home game tonight," she says.
"Yeah."
"Petrov was asking if you’re starting the fight or finishing it this time."
I almost smile. "Tell him I’m flexible."
She crosses the room. She sits beside me on the bench—this cheap wooden thing I dragged in from the garage because I can’t tape in a chair, I need the height—and watches my hands work. Right hand now. Over the knuckles. Between the fingers.
She doesn’t touch. She knows the ritual is mine. She just sits close enough that I can feel the warmth of her, the coffee steam curling between us, the quiet weight of someone who knows exactly what you are and decided to stay anyway.
That’s the thing about the tether.
In the shack, I thought it would unravel in the light.
I thought we’d drift—that the dark had made something between us that couldn’t survive the ordinary world.
I was wrong. The tether didn’t unravel. It just changed what it was made of.
Not survival anymore. Not the desperate proof-of-life grip of two people buried alive.
Something quieter. Something that holds weight without needing to announce it.
I tie off the tape on my right hand. Press my thumb over the last loop.
"Saints and monsters," Clara says softly.
I look at her.
She’s looking at my hands. A small, complicated smile on her mouth—the one that isn’t broken, but remembers being.
"That’s what I said. On the mountain."
"I remember."
"Were you listening?"
"I’m always listening."
She leans over and presses her mouth to the tape on my right hand. Not the scar. The tape. The new thing.
I look out the window. LA in January—palm trees and indifferent sunshine and nothing that looks like a mountain anywhere. The sky is the wrong shade of blue. It doesn’t care about me at all.
I don’t need it to.
I stand up. I roll my shoulders. My bad hip complains the way it always does, a low, chronic ache I’ve made my peace with. My shoulder carries its old damage forward into every shift. The hand—stitched by Clara on the floor of a burning shack—is wrapped in white and ready.
I am not healed.
I am standing.
That’s the whole game.
Keep something alive.