16. Epilogue
Epilogue
What Comes Next
Meredith
Cole and Jake came up for the night before Christmas Eve, grudging about it right up until they weren’t.
“This is the strangest family dinner I’ve ever been to,” Jake said, staring at an elf carrying a tray of roast goose past our table with brisk efficiency.
“You get used to it,” I told him, and meant it.
Cole watched Dash a long while across the table, some old wariness still sitting behind his eyes, but when Dash reached over without thinking and refilled Cole’s glass before his own, some of that wariness cracked, slightly, into something closer to acceptance.
“You hurt her,” Cole said, low, just between the two of them, “and I don't care how many walls you can put yourself through, I will find a way to make you regret it.”
“Understood,” Dash said, entirely serious, and something passed between them that looked, for the first time, like the start of respect instead of a truce.
“Standing invitation,” Santa said later, finding me by the fire with a plate of cookies he’d smuggled out of the kitchen earlier.
He healed up fine from the punch, and if he held any grudge over it he’d buried it deep.
“Every year. Both your brothers, if they’ll come.
Family belongs at a table, however strange the table. ”
“Even with the jolly-punching incident?”
“Especially with the jolly-punching incident.” He smiled, tired and warm at once. “It’s how I know he was worth the trouble of bringing here. A man who won’t fight for what’s his isn’t much of a man at all.”
I found Dash later, out past the workshop lights, looking up at a sky gone thick with stars, and slid my hand into his without a word.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Better than okay.” I leaned into him, watching my breath fog in the cold, watching the same aurora that had first made this whole strange life feel possible ripple faint along the horizon. “I think I actually like Christmas now. First time in ages.”
“High praise.”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Dasher.”
He huffed a laugh into my hair, and we stood there a long while, quiet, his arm around me, the whole compound humming behind us with the particular warm chaos of one holiday winding down for the big ride the next night.
“You ever think about it?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“What comes after you? Whoever takes over the name once you’re done?”
He was quiet but when he answered, there was no grief in it, only the steady certainty of a man who made peace with the whole strange shape of his life.
“There will be more,” he said, watching the sky, his hand warm and sure around mine. “I wasn't the first, and for damn sure, I won’t be the last.”