Eddie’s Epilogue
Eddie’s Epilogue
One day, without warning, you’ll stop mid-step and realize: This is who I am now.
Not the man who ran from his own hunger. Not the one who kept love at arm’s length, convinced it would undo him. Not even the one who thought he could survive on silence and routine, pretending need was a weakness he could bury.
No. You’ll look around and know the truth: you didn’t starve. You didn’t burn. You didn’t break beyond repair. You loved—and you survived it.
We look back not just to grieve, but to honor the wreckage we crawled through to get here.
I look back at the years I wasted—nights filled with ghosts, with regrets cut deep enough to carve my ribs open—and I see how badly I mistook punishment for protection.
How I convinced myself that craving both of them made me reckless, wrong, undeserving.
But the body doesn’t lie. Hunger doesn’t forgive. It waited until I had no choice but to face it—until Cleo walked back into my orbit, changed but still luminous, and Barret stood there with his eyes on mine, daring me not to remember how it felt to belong to him too.
And I didn’t run.
Now it’s been months since Dorian died in that cell. An accident, they called it, though no accident erases what he did. Cleo doesn’t whisper anymore when she says she’s healing. Barret doesn’t hide the way he looks at me. I don’t hide either.
Nights stretch differently now. Not with silence, but with laughter—Cleo’s soft, B’s low, mine finally unguarded. The house is full in a way I never believed possible, in a way that answers the ache I once mistook for something dangerous.
The truth is, I wanted it all. Her gentleness and his fire. Her resilience and his defiance. I wanted what we built in the wreckage of our fears. And now—I have it. Not perfectly. Not without scars. But fully.
So when I stop mid-step these days, when that familiar thought creeps in—How did I become this version of myself?—I don’t look away.
I know the answer.
I became this because I stopped running. Because I said yes. Because love, in the end, wasn’t the fire that destroyed me. It was the home I had been reaching for all along.
The house is quiet tonight, Lake Washington stretched like black glass beyond the windows.
From the sound system in the next room, one of Barret’s unfinished tracks drifts through the house—searching, a melody still finding its shape.
It seeps into the walls like a pulse, threading through everything, reminding me of who we’ve been and who we’re still becoming.
Cleo’s laughter carries from the kitchen, brighter than it used to be, no longer tentative. Barret’s voice follows, low and warm, and together they make something that sounds almost like music itself.
I lean in the doorway and watch them. Cleo perched on the counter, stealing fruit with that playful grin, Barret pretending to scold her while cutting more just so she can win again.
She catches me watching, her smile softening, and when Barret turns, his eyes hold the same welcome.
They don’t need to call me over—I already belong.
She stretches her hand out, Barret shifts, and I step into the space between them.
Her lips brush my cheek, but before I can turn toward her, Barret leans in.
His mouth finds mine—firm, certain, tasting faintly of the strawberries he’d just cut for her—and the kiss steals the air from my lungs.
Cleo’s fingers curl into mine, tethering the three of us together.
When Barret pulls back, I turn and find Cleo’s mouth. The kiss is softer, lingering, filled with all the things we thought we’d lost but somehow carried back to each other. Barret stays close, his hand at the small of my back, holding us in the same breath.
I’m not sure if dinner is ready, but maybe we’ll eat each other first, like we often do—because hunger has more than one meaning here—before settling down at the table. A meal. A home. A future that doesn’t scare me anymore.
The music drifts through the house, blending with Cleo’s quiet laugh as she leans into both of us, and I realize this is the harmony I’d been reaching for all along. The ache that once hollowed me out has finally found its sound.