Epilogue #2
They all know what ‘both of them’ means.
Rose, who has been standing between Devil and Lucy with Mr. Rabbit and the solemn focus of a child attending something important she hasn’t been fully briefed on, assesses the situation and determines her next move.
She walks across to Roam, and reaches up.
He lifts her without looking down, the automatic ease of a man for whom the motion has become instinct-deep. She settles against his shoulder and looks out at the yard with the regal composure of a three-year-old who has been waiting for the part where she’s included.
“There she is,” Scout says.
The laughter that moves through the yard is warm, genuine, and a little ragged at the edges. It’s the laughter of people who need the release.
“Hi,” Rose says to the yard, generally.
Creed allows the full smile. The one even he can’t contain.
Devil’s hand finds mine and squeezes once.
I don’t trust my voice to do anything useful, so I don’t ask it to.
***
The evening goes long, the way good evenings do, not dragging, but unwilling to end.
The light fades from gold to purple and then to the warm dark of a compound strung with lights and full of people who know how to be together.
Memphis sits with Reaper for an hour, the conversation low and occasional, two men taking each other’s measure without making a project of it.
Rock stays on the tablet until the two-hour time difference catches up with him, raises a hand, and cuts the feed.
Scout refills everyone’s drink at a rate that is not medically advisable and remains cheerful about it.
Rose falls asleep at nine, folded against Roam’s side on the bench at the edge of the yard.
Mr. Rabbit is somewhere underneath her. He doesn’t move.
He sits with one hand at her back and talks to whoever comes to talk to him.
The dog tags at his neck catch the light when he turns, and the yard goes on around them.
My yard.
My compound.
My family.
The correction comes easier now. The old arithmetic, mine as a word that applied only to Rose, still trying to run sometimes in the background. The new arithmetic is still new enough to register, wide enough to hold all of this, and worth the adjustment.
It’s late when I notice Winchester.
He’s been at the edge of the yard for the last twenty minutes, which is not unusual. Winchester occupies the perimeter of social situations the way he occupies everything, with the air of a man who is present without being absorbed. What’s unusual is the direction he’s facing.
Nova is by the back fence. She came with the other women from the strip club and has been here all evening with the easy sociability of someone comfortable in her own skin and honest about her reasons for being where she is.
She’s wearing something green that makes the yard’s string lights warmer when she moves through them.
She isn’t looking at Winchester.
She’s clearly aware he’s there.
The conversation between them takes place from fifteen feet away. No words cross the distance, nothing visible from where I’m standing, except the particular quality of two people deciding something simultaneously from opposite sides of the same question.
Then she looks at him.
He doesn’t look away.
She says something, too low to carry across the yard. Nothing changes in her expression, but the moment carries the quiet gravity of a question she’s been waiting a long time to ask.
His answer is brief.
Her chin tilts, the slight movement of someone absorbing information they maybe expected. She turns back toward the fence, away from him.
Winchester’s glass goes down.
Not set. Down. On the table beside him, without looking to see where it lands, he moves.
He crosses the yard, a large, deliberate man who has made a decision and is now simply carrying it out.
The destination is clear. Nova doesn’t turn around until he’s close enough that she would have heard him coming, close enough that the light catches the chrome of his watch and the set of his jaw.
I look away.
This one isn’t mine to watch.
Roam’s arm comes around me from behind. One arm is over my shoulder, pulling me in against his side, his chin against my temple, the way he does when he’s not thinking about it. Rose sleeps on his other side, barely anchored, trusting the world to hold her.
The compound is quiet now, the late quiet, the version that follows a good night. Somewhere behind me, something is beginning. Behind me is whatever comes next.
In front of me is the yard, the lights, and the Florida sky filling with stars above the tree line.
Roam’s arm tightens slightly. “You good?” he says.
The laugh comes up the way it does now—easy, unannounced, the reflex of a woman who has found enough reasons for it that it lives close to the surface. “So long as I’m with you and Rose,” I say. “Better than good.”
He’s quiet for a moment, the stars hold still.
Then, so low it’s almost just a breath, “Home.”
TO BE CONTINUED