Epilogue #2
One afternoon, I visit the ocean. The waves crash hard enough to drown out every thought.
I walk barefoot along the waterline, salt wind tangling my hair.
The tide pulls against my ankles, and for the first time, I don’t flinch at the sound of something roaring.
I collect a shell, small and cracked, and slip it into my pocket.
A reminder that even broken things can survive the tide.
That night, Xander finds it on the nightstand. “Pretty,” he murmurs, tracing its jagged edge.
“It’s proof,” I tell him. “That it’s possible to be shattered and still whole.” His eyes darken with something that looks like pride.
Sometimes I still wake up in the dark, heart pounding, convinced I hear Damien’s voice. Trauma doesn’t vanish.
It transforms.
Nightmares lose their teeth.
Memories lose their edges.
The past stops tasting like blood.
I am learning to live in a body that no longer feels like evidence.
The old fear creeps in like smoke. But Xander’s hand finds mine under the sheets, and the illusion dissolves.
I remind myself that he’s gone. The monster doesn’t live here anymore.
When I look in the mirror now, I don’t just see the bruises that once marked my skin.
I see scars, the ones that no one can see, the ones I have to live with.
But scars aren’t weaknesses; they’re proof.
Proof that I lived, proof that I fought, proof that I rose from the ashes and refused to be consumed by the fire.
Xander wraps his arms around me, pressing his lips to the back of my neck, and I let myself lean into him.
I don’t feel like I’m drowning. I feel like I’m breathing again.
He whispers something against my skin, words I don’t quite catch, but I don’t need to.
I already know their shape. Love, belonging, home.
We spend that evening on the balcony. The city hums below us, alive and restless, and I’m not afraid of the noise.
I rest my head on his shoulder as the sky fades to violet. “I used to think peace meant silence,” I tell him. “But it’s this. It’s knowing I’m safe in the noise.”
He nods, brushing his thumb along my jaw. “You are. Always.”
The scars will always be there, etched in my skin, my mind, my soul.
There is a part of me that feels like coals under the ash, quiet, smoldering, waiting.
Sometimes I practice saying his name in the mirror, feel how the syllables tighten my jaw, and then let them go.
It is not vengeance that rules me now; it is reclamation.
I rehearse being fierce enough not to tremble when his name flutters in a headline.
That controlled fury is a muscle. It keeps me from dissolving into fear again.
I am learning to be angry and also honest with myself about the cost of acting on that rage, about how I might trade parts of my soul for a moment of satisfaction.
So, I build other rituals. Running at dawn until my legs remember rhythm, calling Isla and telling her truths out loud, writing lists of everything he stole and then reassigning those items into the pockets of my future.
But scars aren’t just reminders of what broke me. They’re proof that I survived.
Isla brings casseroles and bad reality TV and the kind of sarcasm that cuts through grief.
She is my tether to a world that isn’t only about the aftermath.
We walk our dogs until they get tangled, and in those tangles I find the humor I’d forgotten.
She knows the exact time of my flare-ups and the right movies to play when I need to cry into popcorn.
She says things bluntly. ‘You look like hell, but in the best way.’ It lands like balm because it’s real.
My friends become a chorus. Small rituals, check-in texts, offers to come for coffee.
They don’t require polished explanations.
The community around me is not dramatic; it’s steady, ordinary, and immeasurably kind.
In their presence, the edges of my fear soften.
I learn to let others carry the weight sometimes, and the relief is a kind of revelation. And I will never forget that I rose.
Rising doesn’t mean the ache is gone. It means I am learning to live with it differently.
A book on my nightstand rather than a locked chest under my bed or a scar that hums but does not define the song I sing.
I keep a notebook labeled ‘Futures’ where I paste tickets and scribbled ideas, tiny proof I will travel again, that the future can be selected in deliberate colors.
Xander and I invent rituals to remind ourselves of where we came from and where we are going.
A single candle on the first of each month, or a friend we invite for dinner to remind us we belong in a world of more than two people.
Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and don’t flinch when my reflection meets my gaze.
Sometimes I still reach for my phone and find it empty, and panic crawls in, but usually, I breathe, and the panic eases because I have built a life that will not let me fall without hands to catch me.
There is darkness still, but it no longer has the whole room.
There is light too, small, stubborn, luminous, and now I know how to keep it alive.
One day, I will tell the story of what happened to me, and it will not ache.
I will speak it like a warning, like a battle cry, like a birthright.
I am not healed.
I am healing.
And that is enough.