Chapter 30 Epilogue
Ten years after a door had swung open on its noisy hinge and changed everything, Wren stood in a doorway again, this time at the club's anniversary celebration, watching Josephine run ahead to find her friends while Walt held tight to Cain's hand, uncertain on his feet.
"Ten years," she said, watching the compound bustle with familiar faces, decades of accumulated history stretching out before her. "Strange, being back in this building, thinking about how different everything looked the last time this anniversary came around."
"Different world," Cain agreed, watching Walt toddle toward the older kids near the fire pit, the same fire pit that had once represented nothing but the worst night of his life and now meant a hundred things, club celebrations, quiet evenings, the day he'd handed Diesel the patch.
Diesel found them, gray now at the temples, still steady after years as president. "Ten years. Feels like both no time at all and an entire lifetime."
Later that evening, driving home under a clear, starscattered sky, Josephine chattering in the backseat while Walt slept in his car seat, Wren reached for Cain's hand across the console.
"I never could have imagined, that first terrible night, that we'd end up here," she said softly. "This life. These kids. This whole complicated, beautiful family we built out of the wreckage."
"I think that's the whole point," Cain said, glancing over with the same steady warmth that had, over a decade of hard, deliberate work, rebuilt something broken into something genuinely, permanently sturdy.
"None of it was imaginable from where we started.
We just kept choosing it anyway, one honest day at a time, until eventually the impossible became simply, ordinarily true. "