Epilogue
BIANCA
After a month of soft shirts and gray sweatpants, Weller comes home wearing a tie.
Today he’s back in a dark suit with his hair perfect and a leather folder tucked beneath one arm. He closes the front door quietly behind him.
From the kitchen, Freddie is telling Megan that putting hot peppers in peach cobbler would not improve it.
Clara has taken over one end of the table with bowls and foil, and Winston is moving the chairs she told him not to move.
My parents are supposed to be here in twenty minutes with the last of the things from my old room.
I go to Weller.
“How bad?”
“It wasn’t bad.” He bends to kiss my forehead. “The documents are drafted. The attorney wants independent review before anything becomes irrevocable.”
“That sounds responsible.”
“I thought you might approve.”
His voice is even, but the folder edge is bending beneath his thumb.
I slide it out of his grip before he permanently bends whatever’s inside. Weller watches me flip through the first pages like they might become self-explanatory if I glare hard enough.
“Which part gives us the evil mountain lair?”
“There is no mountain lair.” The corner of his mouth pulls up.
“The assets my father inherited and controlled will go into three separate structures,” he says.
“One for legal defense and emergency relocation, one for medical and housing support, and one for direct grants administered by survivor-led organizations. The boards overlap as little as the attorney could make them. Neither I nor anyone related to me can hold a majority appointment.”
He says it like he’s discussing drainage around the house. Tiny black numbers march down the pages, but behind them are women leaving home with one bag, omegas sitting across from attorneys they didn’t have to beg for, and furnaces that can break without six people being moved before dark.
“What about your money?” I ask.
“The money I earned separately remains mine.”
“And your mother?”
His fingers leave the cuff link.
“She has her own fortune.”
The answer is too clean. I wait.
Weller looks past me toward the kitchen, where Megan has apparently escalated to threatening the cobbler with chili oil.
“She hasn’t contacted me, and I don’t expect that to change.
The people who raised me were paid by my father.
My mother preferred me once I could attend a dinner without interrupting it. ”
He doesn’t sound angry. That would be easier. Sometimes I wish I could get inside his head, but mine is scary enough.
“Come upstairs.”
His eyebrows rise. “Your family will be here shortly.”
“I’m not trying to seduce you.”
“I’m disappointed.”
The dry answer almost works. Then he looks down at the leather folder in my hands, and I take his wrist before he can reach for the cuff again.
“Upstairs, Wells.”
I lead him into the office. A stack of legal files sits on top of my bow case, which may be the most accurate possible summary of my life now.
Weller closes the door but doesn’t lock it. I put the folder on the desk and reach for his cuffs.
“I can do that.”
“As you’ve demonstrated. Hold still.”
The first link comes free. A tremor moves through his fingers, small enough that I might miss it if I hadn’t spent years watching for every crack in him and pretending I wasn’t.
He watches my thumb pass over his knuckles.
“You don’t have to explain it,” I say.
He looks down at our joined hands. “I should be able to.”
“Why?”
“Because I spent four hours explaining to strangers why every clause matters.”
“They were being paid to listen. I do this for free.”
I free the second cuff link and work the knot of Weller’s tie loose. The silk slides beneath my fingers, dark green and perfectly smooth. When I pull it from his collar, he catches my wrist.
“It won’t be enough,” he says. “For what he did to her.”
“It can’t be enough for Juliette,” I say. “But someone else will get a chance because you did this.”
“A lot of people,” I add. “With that many zeroes.”
I drape his tie over the back of the desk chair. His gaze goes back to the folder.
So I put both hands against his chest and lean into him.
For a second, his hands stay at his sides. Then his arms come around me carefully and tighten until my cheek presses against the open collar of his shirt. He smells like teakwood and me, and I really, really like that.
“Bianca!” Megan yells from downstairs. “It’s time for our pee-on-a-stick party. Hurry up or I’ll pee on all of them!”
Weller’s chest moves beneath my cheek.
“Ignore Megan,” I tell him, pulling back and leaving the top button of his shirt undone. “Everything is perfectly fine. Take a few minutes. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
His hand closes around my hip before I can step away. “Are you worried?”
The pharmacy bag seems to appear between us even though it’s still downstairs.
“No.” I shrug. “Nothing about my body suggests I’m pregnant.”
“You can tell me if you are.”
“A little,” I admit. “Not because I think it’s positive. Because everyone keeps acting like a plastic stick is about to issue a binding decision on the rest of our lives.”
His thumb moves once against my hip. “It isn’t.”
“Tell that to the hostage negotiation happening in our kitchen.”
“Ezra is managing it.”
“That’s not comforting. She’s his weakness.”
I kiss him before he can make the reassurance worse, then leave him with his open collar and the fortune he refuses to keep.
Megan is waiting outside the downstairs bathroom with the pharmacy bag clenched in one fist. She pinches the soft part of my arm. “Get in the bathroom, bitch.”
There is no reason to expect anything except one line.
My hand still shakes when I put the test on the counter.
Megan sets the timer on her phone and turns it facedown. “Do you want a distraction?”
“Tell me why you were trying to ruin Freddie’s cobbler.”
“It needed depth, but sadly Ezra interfered. You know he’s the fun police.”
She sits on the edge of the tub, stretching one foot into the narrow space between us.
I stay by the sink because sitting feels like it would make this more serious, and I am being extremely normal about the whole thing.
Normal people stare at bathroom tile hard enough to memorize the faint gray veins.
Normal people listen to everyone in the next room attempt not to listen.
No one is talking now.
“They’re terrible at this,” I whisper.
“Ezra told them to leave us alone. Owen asked him to define alone.”
I cover my mouth, but the laugh escapes anyway. “What did he say?”
“That if he could hear you breathing, he was too close. Owen called that, and I quote, ‘fucking stupid.’”
The timer hasn’t gone off. I reach for Megan’s phone, and she slides it behind her hip.
“It has been at least four minutes.”
“Ninety seconds.” Megan gives me a flat look. “Your concept of time is broken.”
We wait. The house shifts around us: a cabinet closes, someone crosses the kitchen, and the ocean pushes against the shore beyond the dunes.
I can smell all four alphas through the door, each scent too sharp beneath the coffee and warm fruit.
Ezra’s herb-garden calm cuts through them.
It would be funny if my stomach weren’t pulling tighter by the second.
The phone vibrates.
Megan stands but doesn’t reach for the test. “Your call.”
I turn it over.
One line.
“Negative,” I say.
“Yeah, I figured.”
I laugh. I briefly picture a second line appearing, and every part of me still recoils from what it would demand now. I’m enjoying it just being us for now.
But I keep looking at the place where that line would be.
Megan’s hand moves once over my back. “You can be relieved and weird about it.”
“I am not weird.”
“A little, but that’s why I love you so much.”
I straighten and wipe beneath my eyes even though I’m not crying. “I want to go tell them before Owen comes through the wall.”
We leave the test on the counter and open the door.
My four are gathered around the kitchen island with Ezra, exactly as promised. Weller has changed into a dark T-shirt. Freddie has a knife in one hand and half a peach beneath the other.
“As expected, it’s negative,” I say, and everyone’s anxiety seems to evaporate.
“For the record,” Tristan says, “remaining casually indifferent about this has been painful.”
Megan pushes between Owen and the counter to steal a peach slice. “He probably had one ear against the bathroom door.”
Freddie laughs. Outside, tires grind slowly over the shell drive.
“That’s Mom and Dad,” Winston calls from the front room.
The kitchen breaks apart around the arrival. Freddie returns to the peaches before Clara scolds him about leaving the knife near the edge. She’s already in mom mode.
Dad gets out first and waves as if he hasn’t seen me in years instead of since last week. Mom is already opening the back door. The trunk rises behind them, revealing three cardboard boxes and enough folded clothes to suggest she ignored every instruction about bringing only what mattered.
Dad’s charges were finally dropped twelve days ago, after Montgomery died and the case against him came apart.
“Honeybee.” Dad meets me halfway across the drive and folds me into a hug. “Tell your mother there was no reason to bring your sixth-grade science fair ribbons.”
Mom closes the back door with more force than necessary. “They’re something to be proud of, Greg. Our daughter is a smart cookie. She always has been.”
Mom reaches us and stops a step away. Then she touches my hair. “You look rested.”
It’s the kind of thing she would have said before.
“I am,” I say, and hug her.
She holds me too tightly and lets go before either of us has to make the moment carry more than it can.
Winston takes the heaviest box from Dad despite Clara telling him not to.
He’s refusing to use his crutches and isn’t the steadiest on his feet yet.
Owen takes it from Winston without a word.
Winston hooks two fingers under one flap; Owen shifts the box out of reach.
Dad walks past both of them carrying two boxes stacked to his chin.