Epilogue
The door slammed against the wall, rattling the lamp, and then Lily burst in. Barefoot, hair a wild mess, cheeks flushed as if she’d run a marathon, she held Doc Fluffbutt out with both arms, like presenting a Thanksgiving casserole.
“Mom! Oh my God—look!” she blurted, breathless, words tumbling out. Doc Fluffbutt hung suspended, his legs splayed at four impossible angles, his eyes open just enough to fix on her face and convey that he knew, he remembered, and he was keeping a record.
Libby blinked, her mind struggling to catch up. Half-tangled in Finn’s arms, her face damp with tears, body pressed against his, her brain couldn’t reconcile the raw intensity of the last twenty minutes with the sight of her daughter holding a cat.
Her eyes darted to Finn.
To the cat.
Back to Finn.
“You saved the damn cat?” she asked, her voice still rough from crying, still thick with everything that had just happened between them, and then she laughed.
Finn didn’t look remotely apologetic.
He shifted slightly against the headboard, one arm still draped around Libby’s waist, the other lifting in a lazy, unhurried shrug as he pushed a hand through his hair. His posture conveyed the casual indifference of a man who found nothing unusual about his choices.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rough with sleep and exhaustion, but carrying that dry, deadpan delivery she’d learned meant he found himself more amusing than anyone else in the room, “we’re battle buddies now.
Doc and I survived a horde of the dead, crawled under a trailer together, and kayaked twenty miles in the dark.
You don’t abandon a man after that. Even if he licks his own butt. ”
Libby stared at him.
“You… what?”
A single, suspended beat stretched between them.
Lily’s focus drifted from the cat to the man in the bed.
Her eyes widened, her mouth falling open as the impossible registered.
The cat was forgotten; Doc Fluffbutt scrambled free and landed with an indignant thump.
For a half-second, she just stood there, staring.
Then she launched herself forward.
She crossed the space and threw herself at Finn with a force that knocked the breath from his lungs in an audible grunt, her arms wrapping around him, her face burying itself against his chest, her entire small body trembling with a violence that had nothing to do with cold.
“Thank you,” she cried, the words muffled against his shirt, wet and broken and fierce all at once. “Thank you, thank you, thank you—I’m so glad you’re okay—I thought you were—I thought—”
Finn’s breath caught—just for a moment, something raw flickering across his face before he could stop it—and then his arm came around her, pulling her in close.
He didn’t say anything for a second. Just held on.
“No man left behind, not even a cat,” he said, his attempt at humor fading. His voice lowered. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Doc Fluffbutt, momentarily abandoned and unimpressed by the emotional chaos unfolding around him, gave a single indignant meow that communicated volumes about his feelings regarding the quality of service on this island, then hopped onto the center of the bed with the proprietary confidence of a creature staking a permanent territorial claim and began grooming himself with aggressive nonchalance.
The moment didn’t last.
Bare feet hit the hallway at a dead sprint.
Fiona didn’t knock. Didn’t slow. She caught the door frame with one hand, used it to swing herself through, and crossed the room in three strides—slamming into Finn hard enough to drive him back against the headboard with a crack that shook the wall.
“You idiot!” she shouted, and her voice broke on the last syllable.
Then she hugged him.
It was a clinging, desperate weight—not gentle. Her arms locked around his neck, her face pressed hard against his shoulder, her whole body curved into his as if to physically anchor him to this world.
“I thought you were dead,” she said into his shoulder, the words muffled and raw. “I thought—God, Finn, I thought I left you there. I thought I left you and you were gone and I’d never—I kept hearing you tell me to go and I went and I shouldn’t have—I should have—”
“Hey,” he said. One hand came up and cradled the back of her head, his fingers threading into her hair, holding her against him. “You did exactly what you should have done. You got on that boat. You got the girls out. You did the right thing, Fi. The only thing.”
“It didn’t feel right—” she started.
“It never does,” he said quietly. “But it kept you alive. It kept all of them alive. That’s what matters.”
Libby sat in the middle of it all—Lily still pressed against Finn’s side, her crying quieting into hiccupping breaths; Fiona clinging to his neck; the cat settled at the foot of the bed, licking his paw with serene indifference.
Not just survival instinct and military training, and the particular hardness that had calcified in him over years of not having anyone to lose.
Family.
Messy, loud, stubborn, fiercely loyal family.
The kind Libby had spent her whole life wanting and never quite finding.
Fiona finally pulled back, both hands coming up to grab Finn’s face between her palms, squeezing his cheeks slightly, forcing his eyes to hers.
“You’re real,” she said, half statement, half question, her voice still unsteady. “You’re actually here. This isn’t—I’m not dreaming this.”
“Still annoyingly alive,” he muttered through slightly squashed cheeks. “And you’re crushing my face.”
She let out a shaky laugh that turned.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she said, releasing his face but keeping her hands on his shoulders, gripping hard.
“No promises,” he said automatically, the words coming out with the reflexive ease of a man who’d made deflection into an art form.
She smacked his shoulder.
Hard.
The bad one.
His arm screamed with pain, and he winced, jaw clenching, breath hissing between his teeth—
“Okay—some promises,” he amended quickly, rolling the shoulder with a grimace. “Jesus, Fi. You pick the one with the hole in it.”
“Good,” she said fiercely. “Remember that next time you consider dying.”
The commotion in the hallway resolved into voices, and then Lock appeared in the doorway, Callan a step behind him.
“Well,” Lock said, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. “We heard what sounded like a door being torn off its hinges, followed by screaming, crying, and a physical assault. Thought we’d come investigate.”
His eyes moved across the room, taking in the tableau: Lily tucked against Finn’s side, Fiona gripping his shoulders, Libby beside him, the cat presiding over it all from the center of the bed.
And Finn. Alive.
“Unbelievable,” Lock said, shaking his head. “All the Ward siblings back in one room. I’d almost forgotten how loud you are.”
Callan moved to the opposite side of the frame, his posture mirroring Lock’s.
When he spoke, his voice held something else. Something that cut through the warmth in the room like a cold draft through an open window.
“Almost,” he said.
One word.
It hung in the air.
Heavy. Sharp.
It didn’t need explaining.
Almost all the Ward siblings.
Brenna.
She looked at Finn. The arm around her waist didn’t move—it just went rigid. His jaw set. The openness in his eyes, which had been startling in its rarity, pulled back from the edges inward, the way a tide withdraws before something larger arrives.
The question Callan had raised settled in the air.
Libby looked at Finn, saw the hard set of his jaw and the way his gaze went distant, staring at something only he could see.
The weight of it pressed on her: the terrifying hope that one more person was still fighting their way here, measured against the crushing silence from the mainland that felt more and more like the only answer they would ever get.