Epilogue
VI
The gate still grinds the same ugly way it always has.
Metal on metal, the same complaint it's made since the first day I walked through it with new boots and a worse plan.
I stand there a second and let it clang shut behind me the way I've done a hundred times now.
Six months since we ended Lydia Vance, since her name went everywhere and her money froze and my father's name got said out loud again by people who'd spent years calling him a disgrace.
Six months, and in here nothing has changed at all.
Same dim corridors. Same stale electrical smell.
Same busted light outside the old sporting goods unit that nobody will ever fix, because fixing it would mean admitting we live here.
The Rot is exactly what it was.
I'm the one who came out different.
I've just come from my father.
Sundays are ours again. We never really decided it, we just started doing it.
I show up, he's there, and for a few hours we're a father and daughter in a city that did its damnedest to erase both of us.
He's got two small rooms on the north edge now, nothing fancy, with a window that catches the morning light.
He makes coffee somehow worse than the Rot's, which I would've thought wasn't possible, and we drink it anyway and argue about nothing.
Here's the part I never say out loud. For all those years I thought he was dead, the thing I missed most was stupidly small.
Sunday mornings. The phone ringing without fail.
His voice before I'd even gotten up. I used to lie awake in here counting all the Sundays I didn't get, like if I collected enough of them he'd have to come back.
Now I don't get a phone call. Phones are paperweights out here, useless as they've been for ages.
So no calls, but I get him. My dad. The actual man in an actual chair, grayer and thinner but breathing, humming some Zeppelin song off-key while the coffee goes cold.
I mourned a ringing phone for years. What I got back was so much bigger than that.
I never knew shit can land in your favor sometimes.
He's met the guys. All three. That was its own kind of afternoon.
My father the former mayor sizing up the three most dangerous men in the Rot, and the three most dangerous men in the Rot trying, for maybe the first time in their lives, to be liked.
Armen called him Mr. Renner. Sting called him sir.
Rogue had him laughing inside ten minutes, because of course he did.
Dad doesn't fully get what we are, the four of us.
But he stopped needing to understand everything around him a long time ago.
He looked at me, saw I was safe and chosen and home, and that was enough for him.
It's more than enough for me.
Tonight the Skylight Room has more bodies in it than it's built for.
Mara's got her legs thrown over Kade's lap like she was born there, needling Sting about something silly, and Kade's wearing that look he still doesn't know he wears every time she opens her mouth.
Six months ago those two were working overtime pretending not to notice each other.
Now his boots live by her door and nobody says the words "moved in," because saying it would make Mara roll her eyes so hard she'd sprain something.
But the boots are there, and that's its own kind of vow.
She catches me watching and grins. Two decades of being each other's person, all of it in one look.
The same look that's carried us from splitting a smoothie as kids in the food court one floor down to this, whatever this is—two girls who walked into a dead mall with nothing and somehow walked back out with everything.
She didn't have to come find me when the world decided my family was poison.
She came anyway. She stayed. I'll spend the rest of my life unable to pay that back, which is fine, because she'd deck me if I tried.
Last month, she finally sent word to her mother.
A few lines, nothing more, just that she was alive, safe, happy, and by the way, don't come looking.
She let me read it before it went. I thought about the woman I met at the perimeter fence a lifetime ago, gripping the wire, begging me for news I didn't have.
She has it now. Whatever else is broken between them, she gets to stop wondering.
Rogue is quiet in his corner, and I know that particular quiet by now.
There's a letter in his jacket. I know because I watched him put it there, and I watched him touch the pocket twice on the way in, the same way he used to touch that scrap of metal before it became the ring on my hand.
It took him five months and every contact the guys have to run down one address in a town three states from here.
He wrote first. He got an answer back. He hasn't told me what it said and I haven't pushed, because some things you keep in the back room until you're ready to carry them out front.
And I, of all people, know how to wait on a father.
We leave in two weeks. All four of us. He doesn't do it alone. He promised me that on Delaney Street with a ring, and I promised him the same, and neither of us has ever broken a promise made to the other.
He looks up and finds me across the room, throwing me his sexy half-smile.
I cross to him and fit myself under his arm and feel the letter crinkle in his pocket, and the ring catches the low light off the grimy glass panels overhead.
My mark. His whole history melted down into something I get to wear.
I came here to find a dead man.
I found a living one instead. And on Sunday I'll walk over to his place, and he'll put on that same terrible song, and I'll know every word.
But that's Sunday. That's out there.
In here, tonight, Rogue's arm comes around me. Armen says something dry. Sting almost laughs. A cushion sails across the room and nobody flinches.
I have a best friend who chose me, three men who decided a long time ago I was theirs, and a version of myself I wouldn't trade back for any clean, safe, ordinary life on earth.
The gate can grind all it wants. I'm not going anywhere.
This is home. These are mine.