EPILOGUE
Miley’s POV:
The cardboard boxes were lined up along the living room wall like row after row of silent, brown tombstones.
Every single one of them was taped shut with thick, clear packing tape that caught the pale afternoon light, sealing away the fragmented remnants of a life that felt like it belonged to a completely different person.
I stood in the center of the completely empty living room, the heels of my boots clicking hollowly against the bare, scuffed hardwood floors.
The apartment—the one I had shared with Terra, the one that used to be filled with the rich scent of her favorite coconut hair oils, the sound of her loud, infectious laughter, and the constant, bright energy of our shared dreams—was entirely dead.
The walls were bare, leaving behind only the faded, pale squares where our framed photographs used to hang.
It was a physical manifestation of a vacuum, an empty shell where a tragedy had rewritten my entire reality.
"Miley," a soft, cautious voice murmured from the doorway.
I didn't turn around immediately. I didn't need to.
I already knew the gentle cadence of that voice; it had been my only consistent anchor for the last several weeks.
I looked toward the doorway and saw Angela standing there.
She was wearing a simple denim jacket, her dark hair pulled back loosely, her quiet, deep eyes tracking my movements with an intense, watchful devotion.
She didn't press into my space. She didn't offer a cliché phrase about how everything happens for a reason.
Because she knew, better than anyone else, that there was absolutely no reason for a monster like Malik to gun down an innocent girl on a public sidewalk outside a coffee shop.
"The movers just finished loading the first wave of furniture into the van downstairs," Angela said softly, her hands slipping into her pockets as she stepped further into the room. Her introverted, careful nature made her move with a deliberate gentleness, as if she were terrified a loud noise might cause me to shatter. "Gabriel and Kelly are down there right now. They’re... they’re taking care of the rest of Terra’s things, Miley. Like you asked."
A heavy, tight knot formed in the center of my throat, and I looked down at my own boots, my long box braids falling forward to shield my face. "They took all of it? Every single piece?"
"Yeah," Angela replied, her voice dropping into a tender, soothing register. "They packed up her wardrobe, her books, her shoes... everything. Gabriel said they’re driving it straight over to her sister’s place, and whatever the family doesn't want, they’re going to handle the disposal.
You don't have to touch a single thing, Miley. You don't have to look at it."
"Good," I choked out, a cold shudder running straight down my spine.
"Because I can't, real talk, Angela. I am straight-up too broken to look at what was once hers. If I touch one of her sweaters... if I catch a whiff of that vanilla perfume she used to spray on her wrists before we went to sleep... I’ll lose my mind. I’ll dissolve right here onto these floorboards, and I don't think I’ll ever be able to stand back up. "
Angela crossed the room then, her quiet steps making almost no sound at all.
She stopped just an inch away from me, her warm, familiar scent of lavender and fresh soap cutting through the stale, dusty air of the abandoned apartment.
She didn't wrap her arms around me—she knew that sometimes, when the grief was this loud, a sudden touch felt like an assault.
Instead, she just stood beside me, a solid, unwavering wall of pure support.
"You don't have to touch it," Angela whispered, her eyes locked onto the side of my face with a fierce, protective loyalty. "That’s why we’re here. Me, Kelly, Gabriel... we’re your shield, Miley. Helisa made sure of that, too."
The mention of Helisa’s name brought a strange, heavy wave of profound gratitude to my chest. The tech billionaire, the global icon, the woman whose corporate empire I had just signed my life away to join, had completely transformed into something else entirely over the last few weeks.
She hadn't acted like a detached CEO managing a public relations crisis. After the brutal reality of Terra’s funeral—a beautiful, heartbreaking service that Helisa had paid for entirely out of her own pocket—the billionaire had looked into my tear-stained face and made a sacred, terrifyingly intense vow.
“No one else passes away on my watch, Miley,” Helisa had told me, her voice cutting through the funeral home's heavy silence like a steel blade. “Not you. Not your friends. Not anyone who matters to this circle.”
And she had kept that promise with a terrifying, absolute precision.
Helisa hadn't just protected me; she had systematically wrapped her immense, untouchable blanket of security around Terra’s surviving family members.
She had personally reached out to Terra’s aunts, her cousins, and her only older sister—a quiet, hardworking nail technician who had suddenly found herself entirely alone in the world.
Terra’s parents had passed away when she was just a little girl, meaning she had practically grown up embedded in the fiercely protective embrace of her maternal extended family.
At the funeral, I had met aunts I never knew existed, cousins who wept openly over the casket, and an older sister whose face looked exactly like Terra’s, a resemblance that had nearly driven me to my knees with grief.
Helisa had stepped in like a maternal guardian angel to all of them, setting up trust funds, reinforcing their home security, and ensuring that the financial wreckage of a sudden death wouldn't crush them.
She had practically adopted our entire circle of survival, treating me less like an intern with a promotion and more like a daughter she was fiercely determined to shield from the predators of the world.
"Helisa’s legal team called my phone about an hour ago," I muttered, my fingers tracing the silver E-Tech logo on the keycard clip attached to my belt. "It’s official, Angela. Malik got life. No parole. No appeals. The bastard is going to rot behind bars until his heart stops beating."
Angela let out a long, slow breath, her shoulders dropping slightly. "Thank god. Helisa’s connections in the judicial system really pushed the DA to go for the maximum sentence without dragging you through a long, traumatizing trial."
"Yeah," I said, a bitter, hollow laugh escaping my lips.
"The system actually worked for once, all because a billionaire put her boot on the scale. But you know what’s crazy, Angela?
It doesn't make me feel happy. It doesn't make me feel relieved.
Malik can spend the next fifty years staring at a gray brick wall in a maximum-security cell, but that doesn't warm up the concrete outside that Starbucks.
It doesn't bring Terra back to life. It just means the monster is in a cage, but the wreckage he left behind is still sitting right here in my chest."
"Justice doesn't cure grief, Miley," Angela said softly, her deep, internal wisdom cutting straight to the core of my trauma. "It just closes the door so you can finally start processing the pain without having to look over your shoulder every five seconds."
I looked around the empty living room one last time, my eyes tracing the dark wooden molding near the ceiling. "I need to go out on the balcony, Angela. Just for a minute. Alone. I need to say goodbye to the only part of this place that didn't know how to bleed."
Angela nodded instantly, stepping back to give me the space my soul desperately required. "I’ll be right here in the hallway. Take all the time you need, Miley."
I turned away from her, my heavy boots dragging against the floor as I walked toward the glass sliding doors that led out onto the small, rusted fire escape balcony. It was time to close the book on this entire chapter of damnation. It was time to say goodbye to the ghosts.
***
The afternoon air outside on the balcony was sharp and crisp, carrying the familiar, chaotic symphony of the Manhattan gridlock below.
The roar of yellow cabs, the distant shout of a street vendor, the low rumble of the subway beneath the pavement—it was all so loud, so completely indifferent to the fact that my world had been completely rearranged.
I leaned my forearms against the cold, rusted iron railing of the balcony, looking out over the sprawling landscape of brick buildings and fire escapes. The wind pulled at my long box braids, whipping them across my face.
A familiar, low coo-coo sound echoed from the corner of the metal railing.
I turned my head and felt a soft, bittersweet smile tug at the corner of my lips.
It was him. The same gray pigeon with the iridescent green-and-purple feathers around his neck—the one that had been visiting this balcony for the entire two years I had lived here.
He was sitting there, his small black eyes tilted toward me, entirely unbothered by the boxes or the moving trucks down below.
He was just a small, simple creature who came to my ledger looking for nothing more than a handful of leftover breadcrumbs.
"Hey, little guy," I whispered, my voice cracking slightly as I reached out a trembling finger, gently rubbing the soft, sleek feathers along his back.
He didn't fly away. He just cooed softly, leaning into the warmth of my skin. "I’m leaving today. I’m going to miss you, you little hustler.
You were the only thing out here that stayed the same when everything else went down in flames. "
I reached into the pocket of my oversized hoodie and pulled out a final handful of crushed crackers I had saved from a takeout order, spreading them along the metal ledge. The bird immediately began to peck at them, entirely focused on his simple survival.