Epilogue Eliana
TWELVE MONTHS LATER
farm to table /f?rm to?o ?tāb?l/: adjective
Twelve months later, I sit on the back porch of a modest farmhouse outside Austin, Texas.
Bastian built me a swing and I promptly embedded the imprint of my ass on it.
Every night, he finds me out here, rocking to my heart’s content.
The evening air carries cicada music and the scent of honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass.
It’s thick and syrupy-sweet, the kind of summer smell that settles into your skin and stays there.
In my arms, my daughter sleeps. Seven pounds, four ounces when she arrived screaming into this world. She’s closer to twenty-five pounds now, a biscuit dough beauty made up of chunky thighs, auburn hair, and the bluest eyes the world has ever seen.
Or so they tell me.
I don’t need to see to know my baby girl is beautiful.
From inside the house, Sage laughs at something.
I’m assuming it’s his girlfriend Kenna, who has a gift for putting a smile on his face.
That’s less rare than it used to be, and we have her in large part to thank for that.
The two of them met at UT Austin, where Sage is studying computer science.
Kenna is pre-med, brilliant, and quite possibly the only person on earth who can match Sage’s stubbornness.
I like her. More importantly, Bastian likes her, which is saying something, given his track record with anyone who gets within ten feet of his brother.
The sound of dishes suggests someone is cleaning up after dinner.
Music plays softly through the screen door, some country station Bastian discovered three months ago and now refuses to change.
He thinks he’s a cowboy, apparently. Last week, I caught him humming along to a song about pickup trucks and dirt roads while he made breakfast. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that wearing boots doesn’t make you Texan.
These sounds are the guiding posts of my new life, and I’ve memorized every note.
It’s so different from Chicago, but I don’t miss the city that raised me.
We left it behind with smoke in the air and blood crusted under our fingernails, and that’s been the best thing that ever happened to any of us.
Mom called last week. She does that now—calls just to talk, not to ask for money or unload her latest crisis onto my shoulders.
She’s in San Diego at the moment, catching a tan with her new boyfriend.
Sobriety looks good on her, and she’s decided that things have settled down enough for her to take a little weekend trip with the beau. I’m happy for her.
Unlike the others, though, this call had a purpose: She wanted to press me again about the experimental procedure my new doctor mentioned. The one that might restore partial vision.
I said no. Same answer I gave three months ago. Same answer I gave six months before that.
She didn’t push. That’s new, too—Georgia Hunter learning when to let things lie. She just said, “Okay, baby. I trust you,” and moved on to talking about how funny the seals at the beach are.
I’ve been struggling to articulate why I’m refusing the procedure, even to myself.
It’s not that I don’t want to see my daughter’s face.
God knows I’ve traced every curve of it with my fingertips.
It’s that I’ve spent the last year building a life that doesn’t require sight.
And somewhere along the way, I discovered something unexpected.
I’m happy.
The darkness isn’t a prison anymore. It’s just where I live. And I live well there.
The screen door creaks open. Bastian’s offered to fix it a million times, but I’ve asked him not to, because I like knowing when someone’s coming. Not that he could ever take me by surprise—some days, I swear I smell him from miles away. Wintergreen on the breeze riffling through the hills.
It’s strong in my nose now as he crosses the porch and settles next to me. His hand finds my knee and squeezes once. Neither of us speaks right away.
We’ve learned to be comfortable in silence.
Back in the early days, every conversation felt like a fencing match, all parry and thrust, neither of us willing to yield an inch of ground.
Now, we can sit here and listen to the grasshoppers without needing to fill the space between us with anything other than breath.
Our daughter stirs against my chest, makes a snuffling sound, then settles again. Bastian’s hand goes from my knee to her back. I feel the swing move as he leans closer and presses a kiss to the top of her head.
“She asleep?” His voice is low, careful not to wake her.
“Finally. Took three lullabies and a minor hostage negotiation.”
“Good thing I taught you how to sing.”
I laugh. “You sing like a dying goat, Mr. Egotistical. No one’s mistaking you for Frank Sinatra anytime soon.”
He just chuckles in response. He knows I’m kidding. Hell, half the nights, I make him sing me to sleep, even if he’s just finished putting our baby down with an hour of songs himself.
I let my head come to rest on his shoulder and he loops an arm around me to snuggle me closer.
The path from that burning building to this quiet porch wasn’t straightforward.
Nothing with Bastian Hale ever is. I think about the choice he made in that FBI field office, still bandaged and broken from his final confrontation with Aleksei.
Without the boss, the Bratva empire crumbled.
The feds swept through what remained and threw all the stragglers into cells for life.
And when the dust settled, they gave Bastian an option.
He could “come back to life” as Bastian Hale—reclaim his name, his company, the empire he’d spent a decade building from nothing. Or he could “stay dead” and disappear into witness protection with a new identity and a clean slate.
He chose the latter.
“I spent thirty-five years building a life I didn’t want,” he’d told me from his hospital bed, voice rough from smoke inhalation, half his body wrapped in gauze to keep the burns from getting infected. “I’d rather start from nothing with you than have everything without you.”
I’d cried then. Ugly, messy tears that soaked his hospital gown.
I’m not crying now.
Now, I’m just grateful.
The baby stirs and Bastian takes her. “I’ve got her,” he murmurs. “Hey there, little one. Hey, Svetlana.”
The name had been my choice. It means “light” in Russian. When I’d suggested it after a long, hard labor, he’d gone so quiet I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. But then his voice came out choked and strange, and I realized he was crying.
“It’s perfect,” he’d managed. “She’s perfect.”
Now, I listen to him settle the baby against his chest, hear the soft shushing sounds he makes, and I know that he meant it. Svetlana fusses for another moment, then quiets, seemingly satisfied with the change of scenery.
It never fails to make me melt, hearing him like this. The titan of Hale Hospitality, now reduced to absolute putty by a baby the size of a bread loaf. The mighty Bastian Hale, brought to his knees by spit-up and midnight feedings.
The evening deepens around us. I feel it in the cooling air, in the change of sounds as day creatures yield to night ones. Owls and crickets, bullfrogs and bats. All this life in the night.
Bastian’s hand finds mine. His palm is warm and rough, calloused in new places from the carpentry work he’s taken up. He built Svetlana’s crib himself. Built me this swing. Built us a life, plank by plank, nail by nail.
“The sky’s doing that thing you like,” he says.
I smile. “Tell me more.”
And he does, painting the horizon in words. How the tangerine strokes along the horizon line give way to daubs of indigo above. Gilt-edged clouds thickening way off, signaling rain to come in the night, but for now, all is clear and the first star is just starting to shine overhead.
This is our ritual now. We sit here every night as the sun goes down and he describes it to me. He’s become my eyes. And somehow, it’s made both of us see more clearly.
“Remember that morning at the lake?” Bastian asks.
I nod. Of course I remember. How could I forget? Eighty-seven days left on my countdown, sitting on cold concrete, watching a sunrise I thought might be one of my last… I’d been so afraid then. I thought the dark was something to be feared.
“I remember thinking I needed to memorize everything,” I admit. “Like I could hoard the light somehow.”
“And now?” he asks.
I consider the question seriously. The swing creaks beneath us. Svetlana makes a soft sound against his chest, dreaming about whatever it is that babies dream about.
“Now, I know you can’t hoard light,” I say finally. “You can only let it warm you while it’s there.”
Bastian’s silent for a long moment. “I used to imagine this, you know,” he says finally.
“When things were bad, I’d go somewhere in my head.
A kitchen full of sunlight. A porch swing.
You and a little girl with my eyes and your hair.
I thought it was just a fantasy. Who would’ve thought I could be so wrong? ”
I seize up. He’s never told me about that night before. Not the specifics, anyway. He’s mentioned the torture in broad strokes, brief, vague descriptions of what was done to him, but never what was happening inside his head while it happened.
I turn toward him, my free hand touching his jaw, rough with evening stubble. “And now?” I ask with a tease, echoing his question from a second ago.
He covers my hand with his. “Now, I’m living in it. And it’s better than anything I imagined.”
The warmth fades from my skin as the last of the sun slips below the horizon. I feel it go, that gentle withdrawal of heat, like a hand lifting from my cheek.
I don’t mourn it, though. Tomorrow, there will be another sunrise. Bastian will describe the way the light breaks over the hills, the diamond dabs of morning dew, how the sky blushes pink before surrendering to blue. I’ll feel it on my face, and that will be enough.
That will be more than enough.
I lean into my husband’s side. Svetlana sighs between us, milk-drunk and content. Together, we breathe in the scent of home—wintergreen and sawdust and baby powder, honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass and the fragrant warmth of Bastian’s skin.
The darkness settles around us like a blanket, and I let it hold me.
I know I’m safe here.