Epilogue
“I still say this is too soon for you to be moving around like this,” I grumbled as Rune followed me into my old bedroom.
The whole house felt oddly foreign all of a sudden. Even though I’d spent years in it and only a few weeks at the clubhouse.
It just… it wasn’t home anymore.
By the time we got there, Spike and Cain (mostly Cain, since he was the more handy of the two) had been working on the place for days—throwing out the fridge food, donating the pantry staples, packing up sentimental items, and putting all the furniture out on the lawn with “Free” signs on them.
They’d also patched up the hole I’d kicked in the wall, repaired the railing, and even fixed a leaky faucet, and started a deep clean.
“If by ‘moving around,’ you mean sitting my ass in different rooms, I’m going to have to disagree with you on that.”
“You didn’t have to come at all.”
“Sure I did.”
“You’re supposed to be taking it as easy as possible so we are ready to fly out next week.”
“I’m fine. Got the all-clear from three different Hailstorm doctors.”
“But that might change if you overdo it.”
“Yeah, I’m clearly taxing myself,” he said, waving at the bed he was sitting on.
I was being overprotective, I knew.
But I’d almost lost him. I was not willing to do anything that might make that happen again.
We’d been quite a pair the past couple of weeks.
We were both forced into bed by his mother, cousins, and some of the aunts.
And as much as I was not accustomed to being taken care of, it had been nice to be able to just focus on sleeping and healing without having to think about what to get for food or who was going to do the laundry.
Hell, one of his aunts—a business owner herself—had taken over my business temporarily. And improved upon it.
But I had a little extra recovery time on Rune, so I’d been antsy to get back to the duplex and get some packing done.
Temporarily, I would be moving into the clubhouse.
Until we both decided it was an appropriate time to start discussing something that was just ours.
Even if, in our hearts, we’d clearly already made up our minds.
I caught him twice looking at properties when he thought I was sleeping.
Which was funny because I’d been doing the exact same thing when he was passed out.
My world had been so small for so long—work, my sister, the duplex, revenge—that I don’t think I even realized how cramped I’d been feeling, how pinched at the edges.
Until I started seeing Rune and dreaming again.
Suddenly, the world had burst wide open.
Anything was possible. I could expand my cleaning business.
Hell, I could hire someone else to run it so all I had to do was collect my paycheck.
I could do whatever I wanted. Sleep in late.
Take midday naps. Plan a future with a man I never could have seen myself with a year ago.
“I just want you to be extra careful. We have lots of plans coming up. I don’t want to have them derailed because you just had to help me carry a box that I am perfectly capable of carrying myself.”
Aside from visiting my sister, most of those ‘plans’ of ours just involved being able to actually leave the clubhouse. Go to the beach. Take a walk. Have dinner at Famiglia. Get drinks at Chaz’s so I could meet more of Navesink Bank’s finest criminals.
But still, I wanted to do them. There was still so much for me to learn about this new town I was going to be calling home. I was eager to get started. Hence, packing up the duplex, even though I had months to go on my lease.
Chip was packing up too.
He’d taken some convincing (mostly from Sofia, who I’d tapped to help me), but he’d eventually been talked in to moving into the general area of Navesink Bank too.
“I’ve always thought about retiring at the beach,” was what he’d told Sofia after insisting he planned to die in the duplex for almost an hour.
We’d found a really nice retirement village a short ride from the beach that he’d found ‘acceptable enough.’ Maybe he was about as cuddly as a cactus, but he’d saved my life and had been something like a grumpy grandfather to my sister and me the whole time we’d lived next door.
So once we were back from California, we were taking another trip up to move him down and get him settled.
Then that would basically be it for my life in northern New Jersey. I’d be more of a central shore person from that point on.
I couldn’t wait.
“Put that down right now,” I snapped when I caught Rune trying to grab a box off my nightstand to bring downstairs.
His smile was slow and cocky.
“I’m kind of liking this bossy thing. You know,” he said, reaching for my hip and pulling me close, “we really should break this place in before we say goodbye to it. It’s only right.”
“You’re not supposed to be taxing yourself.”
“I won’t be,” he said, a smirk stretching wider as he stepped backward until he was sitting off the bed and pulled me onto his lap. “I’m gonna let you do all the work.”
Rune - 3 weeks
It was almost as if Sofia glitched once I was done telling her the whole story.
Carmen had started to freeze up when trying to explain it.
So I, who had less emotional stock in what Sofia felt about it, chugged on.
I told her everything from my time in Puerto Rico and witnessing a murder to her sister trying to kill me, to her cousin shooting me.
I just left out any bits that might incriminate me or the club.
“Sof, I know you’re a soap star now,” Carmen said. “And those long, dramatic pauses are your bread and butter, but come on.”
“Wait, so they’re just… on the run now?” Sofia asked after what felt like a whole minute of being frozen in place, mouth agape, eyes wide.
“We have no idea where they are,” I confirmed. It wasn’t a lie. The club had handled the bodies. We were in the dark about where, geographically, their cousins were.
“But you guys are, you know, safe?”
“Yeah. We’re good. And you’re safe too,” I assured her.
Sofia exhaled hard and nodded. “Okay then. Well, thanks for stopping lying to me. I know you guys could have just kept it going. I appreciate you not doing that.”
“I’m sorry I kept it from you for so long,” Carmen said.
Sofia reached out to grab her sister’s hand. “I know you are always trying to protect me from everything. But I’m grown now. You don’t need to do that anymore. I’d really like it if you could see me more as a peer than a little sister.”
Carmen winced. “I have been doing that, haven’t I?”
“You have. But it was from a place of love, so I didn’t mind. But now that we’re so far away, I want radical honesty from you. And you,” she said, looking at me.
“You got it,” I agreed. “Now, give me my present.”
Carmen - 6 months
I had buttery yellow paint soaked into my jeans, my shoes, my shirt, and splattered down my arms and in the tips of my hair.
How did I manage to drop an entire gallon of paint in the parking lot of the home improvement store, you might be wondering? Yeah, well, so was I. One moment, it was there in my hand. The next it was at my feet, all over me, all over my car, and covering the cement.
Thankfully, the employees jumped into action, showing up with these magic paint wipes that got everything off my car before I had to live with a permanently stained vehicle.
I also managed to get some of it off my clothes and body, but it was all too much for a puny bag of wipes to handle.
So I had garbage bags covering my seat as I drove home.
Home home.
Not the clubhouse.
Rune had bought a sweet little two-story house just on the outskirts of Navesink Bank a few weeks ago.
We didn’t have much to move in with, so we’d slept those first few nights on an air mattress on the primary bedroom floor while we waited for furniture to be delivered.
In our free time, we worked on the house.
Which was where Rune was—putting down new tile in the primary bathroom with his father as Cain sanded and refinished the floors in the living room.
Rune got the place for a song exactly because it needed a lot of sprucing up.
But Cain and our inspector assured us that the bones were good; it was just the aesthetics that needed some work.
Which we were intrigued by anyway. As a neat freak and a professional cleaner, we had very strong ideas on what types of materials should—and shouldn’t—be used in builds or renovations.
So we were fixing those types of things as we went. As well as painting and decorating.
Except, now, I was the one painted.
I was halfway up the driveway when Cain and Rune came walking out of the open door.
Cain spotted me first, shooting me a sympathetic smile. “Well, at least it’s a nice color.”
Rune glanced over, paused, then threw his head back laughing. A small one escaped me as well as he came over toward me, reaching for my hips. “No, it’s still all wet.”
“Luckily, I’m filthy too,” he said, pulling me flush against him and pressing his lips to mine.
“Alright. I’m heading out.”
“We’re in the middle of a project,” Rune objected.
“I have a feeling this little interaction is going to end up with you insisting you help Carmen clean all the paint off. And I don’t need to be here for that. It really is a nice color,” he said to me before making his way to his bike.
“You know, it would be hard for you to see all the spots…”
“The bathroom is under construction.”
“The guest one, in all its pink tile, isn’t.”
I slipped my hand into his, and we walked into our new home together. Where we got cleaned up together. Then we spent the night eating Chinese and painting our kitchen.
It was the best night of my life.
Then again, every night with Rune was.
Rune - 3 years
“What’s the two-dimple smile for?” Carmen asked, looking up at me from the couch.
She was sprawled with her swollen ankles up on the ottoman, a bag of the pickle chips she was obsessed with was propped on her rounded belly, a remote in one hand and a large iced tea in the other.