Epilogue #2
“El Cuchillo is the only reason I’m still moving. He gets me out of bed. He does the exercises. He signs the paperwork and packs the apartment. He knows how to survive leaving something that feels impossible to live without.”
The room blurred through the tears I refused to wipe away.
“Maybe Milwaukee will silence that rage long enough for me to find myself again. Maybe it won’t.
Maybe this is who I am now.” I looked at the people who’d carried me through the worst six weeks of my life.
“But I have to fucking try because I don’t know how much longer I can stay here and keep feeling this dead. ”
Briggs stood. “You aren’t dead.”
“Feels close.”
“You’re hurt.”
“I know.”
Cade came around the table. “El Cuchillo isn’t the only one keeping you alive.”
My gaze moved across all of them.
“No,” I admitted. “I know, some reasonable part of me knows that. Rage is just easier.”
“You have us,” Easton said.
“You’ll always have us,” Rider added.
Aura wiped beneath her eyes, and Bliss had already stopped trying to hide her tears.
Cade stopped in front of me. “We want Ryan back too.”
The words struck deeper than I expected.
“I don’t know how to be him anymore.”
“Then we’ll keep reminding you until you remember,” Cade said. “Milwaukee doesn’t get to erase him.”
“I’m going there because there isn’t anything of her yet.”
“She isn’t the only person who made Ryan who he is.”
My eyes moved across the room again. Cade was right. Charm’s fingerprints covered Kimball Falls, but so did theirs. This city held every version of my chosen family, and leaving it meant stepping away from more than the woman I couldn’t forgive.
Nobody told me I was running because they understood that I was. They also knew I didn’t have another way to survive it yet.
My attention moved toward Briggs. “The books you took from the lodge are still in your closet at Hockey House?”
His expression changed. “Yeah.”
“Take them to her.”
“Ryan.”
“Wait until I’m settled in Milwaukee and there isn’t anything else of mine here for her to find. Then give them to her.”
Briggs studied me. “You sure?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll hold them until you are.”
“I’m never going to be sure.” My good hand tightened around the back of the empty chair. “Just take them to her.”
Cade glanced toward the bar. “There will always be a trace of you here.”
“I know.”
Bliss reached across the table and placed her hand near my brace without touching it. Six weeks earlier, she’d looked at the fingerprints darkening Charm’s skin and believed I hurt her. I saw it in her face before Charm ran into the second cabin.
Aura believed it too.
I didn’t blame either of them. Charm left barefoot in my jersey, carrying her clothes, with bruises shaped like my hands darkening her thighs. Then they watched me destroy everything I could reach.
Charm told them what happened before sunrise.
She told them she slapped me, beat her fists against my chest, clawed my back, and begged me to let her keep fighting after I’d already decided we were finished.
She told them the marks on her body didn’t come from me assaulting her.
They were the wreckage left by two people who used each other to finish an argument neither of us knew how to survive.
Bliss and Aura no longer believed I’d physically attacked Charm. That understanding didn’t absolve what happened in the kitchen, and none of us pretended it did.
I wasn’t sure I would ever forgive myself for that night.
“Ryan,” Bliss said quietly. “There’s something you should know before you leave.”
Every muscle in my body locked. “What?”
“Charm is safe.”
The room narrowed around the words. I kept my good hand flat against the table and fought the instinct to demand every detail.
“What does safe mean?”
“She entered a residential treatment program for her eating disorder, body dysmorphia, anxiety, and panic attacks. It reached a point where she knew she couldn’t manage it alone.”
My lungs stopped working properly. “When?”
“Recently.”
“Where?”
Bliss hesitated, and the urge to know became so violent that my chair shifted when I struck it with my leg.
“Don’t.” I pressed my palm against the table. “Don’t tell me where.”
Her eyes filled. “She gave me permission if you wanted to know.”
“I don’t.”
The answer tasted like a lie and a boundary at the same time.
“She wanted you to know she was getting help,” Bliss said. “She didn’t want you to think she was doing it to convince you to come back.”
“Is she?”
“What?”
“Doing it to get me back.”
“No.” Bliss’s voice was gentle enough to hurt. “She knows her treatment can’t depend on whether you forgive her.”
“Make sure she remembers that.”
Bliss flinched, but I forced myself to continue because Charm deserved more than a treatment plan held together by the hope that I might change my mind.
“It has to be for her. Push that every time she talks about me or starts believing getting well is a road leading back to us. She deserves to get better even if I never become part of her life again. She deserves a future that doesn’t depend on whether I can trust her.”
“Ryan—”
“I can’t be part of her recovery.” My throat closed around the words. “I thought loving her meant I could open every locked door and stand there until she walked through. I know better now. I can open the cage, but I cannot make her walk through it.”
Bliss’s tears spilled over.
“I can’t promise I’ll forgive her,” I continued. “I can’t promise that time, treatment, distance, or anything else will make me trust her again. Charm cannot build her recovery around the idea that some healed version of her earns me back.”
“She knows,” Bliss whispered.
“Make sure.”
“I will.”
I looked at my brace while every instinct inside me fought the boundary I needed to hold.
Part of me wanted her location. I wanted the name of the center, the visiting hours, and every detail about the people responsible for feeding her when she said she wasn’t hungry.
I wanted to know who sat with her through panic attacks and whether anyone understood how quiet she became when the hatred inside her turned inward.
Wanting those things didn’t give me the right to enter her treatment or make myself the reward waiting at the end of it.
“I hope she gets better,” I said. “I hope she builds something so good that she no longer needs me to make any part of it real.”
Aura wiped beneath her eyes. “She won’t forget you.”
My hand pressed against Encanto through my shirt.
“That isn’t the same as needing me.”
“No,” Aura said. “It isn’t.”
I was created out of love. My father loved my mother, and through all his failures, I believed he loved me too. My mother loved us both enough to keep going after he died. I was blessed to have her until I was eleven.
Then the world took her, and brutality raised whatever survived.
Foster homes taught me that food could be withheld, doors could lock from either side, and every promise came with an expiration date nobody had to disclose.
Hockey taught me to hit before I was hit.
The barrio taught me never to show anyone where the wound was deepest. By the time I was old enough to understand what love should be, I’d already learned that it came after survival and after the instinct to cut away anything capable of killing me.
Charm reached the part of me that remembered those first eleven years. She found the man created out of love beneath the one raised in brutality.
He wasn’t dead, even if he felt that way tonight. He was broken, furious, and lost somewhere beneath El Cuchillo’s armor. I didn’t know whether Milwaukee would help me find myself or only give me somewhere else to hide.
I only knew remaining in Kimball Falls would keep ripping open the same wound.
“I should go.”
Rider stood first but didn’t pull me into him immediately. He looked at me with the quieter understanding he carried beneath every joke, and for the first time that night, he seemed unable to find one.
“You’re going to call,” he said.
“Probably.”
“Every day.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Twice a week.”
“Once.”
“Three times.”
“That isn’t how negotiating works.”
“It is when you’re emotionally compromised.”
I laughed, but Rider’s expression remained serious.
“You’ve always been there for me,” he said. “Even when I was too fucked in the head to understand that I needed anyone. You never asked me to explain myself before you showed up.”
“You don’t owe me anything for that.”
“I know. That’s why it mattered.”
My throat tightened.
Rider looked toward the others. “I’ll keep an eye on these assholes.”
“Definitely watch Briggs.”
Briggs lifted both hands. “Why am I always the designated concern?”
“Because trouble sees you and believes it has found a father figure,” Rider said.
I clasped Rider’s shoulder. “Take care of them.”
“I will.”
“And let them take care of you too.”
His expression shifted. “I’ll try.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
Rider pulled me against him, and I barely protected the brace before his arms closed around me.
“Thank you for always being there,” he said against my shoulder.
“You too, brother.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“You better do the same.”
When Rider released me, Aura was already standing. Easton’s hand caught hers before she crossed the space, and she looked back at him.
“Give me a second,” she said.
He released her reluctantly.
Aura stopped in front of me, her eyes red and her sharp mouth trembling despite everything she did to control it.
“I’m sorry I thought—”
“Don’t.”
“You deserve to hear it.”
“You saw your best friend hurt. You were supposed to think the worst of me.”
“She told us the truth.”
“So did the marks.”
“They weren’t the whole truth.”
“They usually aren’t.”
Aura wrapped her arms around me. She held on longer than I expected, and my good hand settled against her back.
“Don’t fuck this up with Easton,” I said quietly.
She pulled away enough to look at me. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“He and I are fine.”
“You two have spent every day since getting together acting like every disagreement needs a winner. Stop that shit.”