Epilogue
DAISY
Three Months Later
I wake up to the sound of an aggressive whisper-fight. Which, as it turns out, is louder than regular talking.
“You can’t just call it vibes-based science,” Maya hisses.
I hear Taylor gasp theatrically then stomp a foot. “Fine. Then I’ll call it science.”
“You cannot write ‘the moon told me’ in an expedition log.”
“But the moon did tell me. It is a fact. Science is facts.”
Maya sighs.
“If you two don’t shut up, I’m going to take the incense away,” Owen calls out from the bunk below, sounding half asleep and very over it.
“NO!” they shout in unison.
The Mystery Machine is parked at a random New Mexico RV park after a mini sabbatical for all of us.
After the Bigfoot case wrapped, Taylor went back to Oklahoma to see her folks and help her little brother with his latest dirt bike build.
Jax headed to Chicago to crash with some film school friends and returned with new equipment.
We were already pretty close to Maya’s family on the Hualapai reservation near the Grand Canyon, so she took some time to hang with them.
Owen went back to his apartment near Vegas to move his stuff into storage.
And Miles Adler and I drove the Machine to LA to tie up loose ends there.
Unhinged and inevitable at the same time, it felt so surreal showing him my apartment, my life, the studio. Like introducing two versions of myself who should’ve hated each other. LA Daisy and Desert Daisy.
One built out of polished edges and expensive lighting and carefully controlled narratives.
The other was covered in dust, swooning over a paranormal investigator, and drinking crappy coffee simply because of the man who made it.
Miles took it all in with the same unnervingly earnest attention he gives any research.
Watching him walk through my network’s office nearly killed me. Partially because it confirmed he’s a Los Angeles ten. Partially because he approached the whole thing like an anthropologist dropped into an alien civilization.
At one point he leaned toward me and whispered, “Everyone here looks plastic.”
“They’re scared of irrelevance,” I assured him.
He nodded solemnly. “That tracks.”
But he still fit.
Not in a he belongs here way.
More in a he refuses to perform for anybody, but everybody likes him anyway kind of way.
Marissa loved him. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, because she weaponized it and still does.
“Miles, tell Daisy she deserves boundaries.”
“Miles, tell Daisy she can’t survive on iced coffee.”
“Miles, back me up here—editing it this way would be better, right?”
Seeing Miles in my apartment felt stranger than seeing Bigfoot in the wash.
No exaggeration. There he was, opening cabinets for salt and pepper that don’t exist, standing barefoot on expensive hardwood floors in a T-shirt from Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway.
Meanwhile, downtown LA blinked outside my windows like a different planet.
I watched him move through my space, instinctively bracing for discomfort. For the moment he’d feel too out of place—or I would. And I’d panic, realizing this was all a mistake.
But instead, he looked around once and said:
“You know what this place needs?”
Alarm bells. More monitors? Color-coded storage systems?
“What?”
“Plants.”
I stared. “You looked around my luxury apartment and thought: foliage.”
“It feels really… devoid of life.”
Three days later, there was foliage. Turns out he was right.
That was the first step toward my apartment feeling more like home.
Then shoes near the door. A mug that moved between the sink, the coffee table, and the nightstand.
His sweatshirt draped over a chair. Maps spread across my kitchen island beside podcast notes.
His glasses left somewhere, then him roaming around, blind, trying to find them.
Me learning that he sleep-talks when stressed—mostly about batteries.
Once about beef jerky. One deeply concerning incident involving “electronic voice phenomena.”
Love is wild. The strangest part, though? The future started sounding normal.
One night, standing barefoot in my kitchen eating Thai takeout straight out of the box, Miles looked up from his noodles and said, “What if we split time?”
I blinked, thinking he meant the space-time continuum. “What?”
He shrugged as if we were casually debating the virtues of pad thai versus pad see ew. “LA sometimes. Road sometimes. Oklahoma when we need to regroup.”
I kept staring, noodles hanging from my chopsticks mid-air.
“You like the road,” he added. “But you’re going to need a home base here to keep the business running, right? Also, your shower is life-changing.”
“You’re making long-term plans because of my shower?”
“Water pressure matters.”
I laughed so hard I nearly cried.
Then I realized he meant it. An actual future.
It would be messy but practical. And most of all, it would be real. Expeditions and coffee and missed exits and podcast deadlines and tiny bunk beds and random Tuesdays.
Us.
He caught my expression.
“What?”
Nothing. Everything. The terrifying knowledge that you want something enough to stay for it.
“You know,” I said, “you’re suspiciously calm about dating an undateable podcast host.”
He leaned back against the counter.
“You came back,” he said, shrugging. He said it like it was simple. One plus one equals two. Like maybe love wasn’t some impossible leap after all.
Maybe it’s all in the simple, small things.
Someone learning your coffee order. Building shelves in your apartment because your organizational system is “vibes.” Texting flight times.
Making room in the closet without making a speech about it.
Believing someone when they say they’re scared and staying anyway.
He reached over and stole one of my noodles.
I slapped his hand, feigning shock as a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth.
He did it again.
I chuckle to myself as I think back to that moment. He stole some noodles; I stole his clothes off his body, and we fell back into my bed. My unnecessarily enormous bed. I’d find myself constantly reaching for him in my sleep. Quite the opposite of where we are now.
Sunrise spills pale gold through the bunk curtain. Dust floats lazily in the light.
Behind me, Miles shifts in his sleep. His arm tightens around my waist as if his subconscious had filed me into a color-coded, laminated folder labeled “important.”
His face is tucked into the back of my neck, breathing into my hair.
His glasses are crooked on the shelf above us.
My chest does that thing again. The thing where it aches a little in the best way.
Because somehow, against every instinct I’ve ever had, this became my life.
Not tailored to an audience, but tailored to me.
My apartment in LA has the plushest mattress, the softest sheets, the best plumbing—Miles was right about that—and the most accommodating doormen on the West Coast. This still feels more like home.
We’re in the middle of New Mexico this week. Owen’s leading this case. A rancher reported lights and a military presence. It aligned with some of Owen’s thoughts from Area 51, so when he pitched it, we all agreed.
Miles stirs behind me as Taylor and Maya keep bickering about expedition logs.
“Are they… fighting?” he says, his voice laced with sleep.
“Bonding,” I whisper.
He presses closer, squeezing me, and I turn in his arms to face him. He makes a sound that suspiciously resembles disagreement. “Five more minutes.”
His hand glides over my back. It’s a familiar gesture now, as if I belong to him and this moment belongs to us.
The realization still catches me off guard sometimes.
That someone can know the weirdest and ugliest parts.
The parts people taught me to hide. The messy, defensive, emotionally avoidant, accidentally-too-much parts. And stay.
His eyes blink open slowly. The brown has amber flecks that always make my breath catch. He’s soft in a way he pretends not to be. Despite his methodical ways, I see the magic.
His hair sticks up violently. I thought I couldn’t love him more, but his disheveled morning self proves me wrong yet again.
“You’re staring,” he says.
“Your hair looks weird.”
“I heard a rumor that you like weird.”
The rumors are true. His mouth twitches. Then he reaches up and tucks loose hair behind my ear. Thumb brushing my cheek once on the way down.
It’s small and easy. My favorite kind of closeness.
“You hungry?” he asks.
“In what way?” I ask, an eyebrow lifting. He kisses me, softly. His tongue traces my bottom lip, and I part for him, a hand reaching into his wild hair, tugging gently.
“Get a room,” Owen growls from the bunk below us before stumbling out of bed toward the kitchen.
Miles ignores his brother, pulling back slightly to place a sweet kiss on the tip of my nose.
“For food, Bennett.”
I laugh.
From somewhere up front, Jax says loudly, “For the record, if aliens abduct me, I expect financial retribution.”
Owen calls back from the kitchenette.
“Best I can do is paperwork, kid.”
Taylor snorts. Maya sighs the sigh of a woman carrying civilization.
Miles groans. “Sorry about them.”
“Unfortunately, I love them.”
And it’s true. I do.
Splitting my time between the Machine and my apartment took a huge leap of faith, professionally if not personally. But there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not grateful I left The DL to launch this offshoot.
It took Marissa and me agreeing to be uncomfortable together, knowing the transition wouldn’t be easy.
But over time, our style changed. Slowly at first, as we wrapped the first series on Bigfoot.
Then all at once. No more polished hot takes.
No more pretending that honesty with my audience meant oversharing while revealing nothing.
The imprint—my baby—has become something stranger in the best way. Stories about longing. Mystery. Belief. People chasing impossible things because something in them refuses to stop reaching.
The Bigfoot season ended without the big ending listeners craved. There was no big reveal, no footage, and no proof. Just the promise of hope.
I did mention the consequences of faking evidence and fabricating storylines for money, and I promised we would never do this.
Listeners read between the lines, and Ridgefield’s crew was essentially canceled, with networks dropping his show and brand deals being cut short.
That was never the focus, though. I ended it with the heartfelt story of Miles and his family, followed by open-ended questions and more “what ifs.”
The internet lost its mind. Some listeners got angry. Most obsessed harder. And—thank fucking God—most stayed. As it turns out, honesty is more addictive than spectacle.
I never told them what happened. Still won’t. But sometimes listeners write things that make my chest ache. Messages like:
Your show made me call my dad again.
Or
I don’t know if I believe in Bigfoot, but I think I believe in people again.
That one actually made me cry.
What made me cry more was Maya giving me my own Strange Terrain hat, matching theirs. Owen got one, too—he’d lost his at Area 51, so she got him a replacement. With both of us officially joining the Strange Terrain Division, things are getting pretty cramped in the Machine. But we’re making do.
I plan to propose getting a second RV for podcast production—and ideally, that RV would have a bigger bed—but we’ll see how the imprint does first.
Miles stretches beside me, grabbing his glasses. He slides them on and my whole body melts traitorously. Love is humiliating, but I don’t care. Call me a masochist.
“Coffee?” Owen’s voice carries back along with the smell of a fresh cup.
Jax cheers.
Taylor mutters, “Thank God.”
Letting go of Miles, I turn and slide out of the bunk as he shifts behind me to do the same.
I’m stretching, arms above my head, when he grabs my wrists and holds them above my head, pushing me back against the wall.
He bends down to kiss me again, deep and slow, then strides into the kitchenette for coffee.
Left breathless and with too many people clamoring for coffee, I step up to the front window to look out.
Endless desert. Morning light. Dust rising gold from a side-by-side UTV speeding through the trails beyond the campsite.
The world feels bigger now. Scarier, too, but in a good way.
Somewhere out there, something enormous still walks beneath these stars.
If something the entire world laughed at can be real, what else have we been wrong about?
How many mysteries are still waiting for someone curious enough to look?
How many impossible things are just undiscovered truths?
Outside, the world stretches vast and unfinished. Not because it's unknowable, but because there's still so much left to find.
The future still feels uncertain. But for the first time in my life, it doesn’t scare me.
It feels full of possibility.