Epilogue
NICK
Six months later
The golden retriever is eating a hamburger off the table.
I watch it happen in slow motion: the careful approach, the delicate lift of the head, the precise extraction of the patty from the bun.
Then the shameless retreat across the yard with ketchup on her nose.
By the time I open my mouth to say something, it’s over.
She’s under the oak tree with her tail wagging, looking at me with an expression that says she knows exactly what she did and has no intention of apologizing for it.
“Bonnie stole another burger,” I call over my shoulder.
“Then you shouldn’t have left them unattended,” Ivy replies from the porch, where she’s sitting on the swing with a glass of lemonade and the chihuahua in her lap.
The chihuahua—Clyde, because she thought she was hilarious, and I didn’t have the heart to argue with her—is asleep on his back with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
He weighs roughly six pounds and rules this house with an iron paw.
Bonnie outweighs him by sixty pounds and defers to him in all matters.
There was no hope of stopping at just one, and I didn’t have the heart to shut down Ivy’s dream.
This is my life now. Stolen hamburgers, a six-pound dictator, and a woman on a porch swing who can disassemble a rifle in under a minute and also makes the best cacio e pepe I’ve ever tasted.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
The yard is full of people. Liam is manning the grill with the focused intensity he brings to everything, wearing an apron Aurora bought him that says Kiss the Cook. He pretends to hate it, but he wears it every time.
Aurora is in a lawn chair with her feet up, watching their daughter sleep in the portable bassinet next to her. Lily is now three months old, has her mother’s blonde hair and her father’s green eyes, and she already has everyone in this yard wrapped around her tiny finger.
Ethan is here, too, leaning against the fence with a beer and his sunglasses on, looking like he just walked off the set of something.
He’s talking to one of Liam’s guys about something that’s making both of them laugh.
Every few minutes, he looks over at the bassinet with an expression I’ve never seen from him before. Something soft.
The house isn’t empty anymore. We furnished it over the course of a month, Ivy and I, arguing over just about every piece.
She wanted something dark and minimal. I wanted something that actually looked like people lived here.
We compromised, meaning she won most of the arguments, and I won the ones she let me win.
The bookshelves in the living room are full.
There are photos on the mantel—new ones, of us, because the old ones belonged to people we used to be, and we decided to start fresh.
The kitchen window over the sink looks out onto the yard.
I stand at it every morning while I make coffee, watching the light change through the oak tree.
Sometimes Ivy joins me. Other times she’s already outside, sitting on the porch with Clyde, drinking espresso she makes on the machine she shipped from Milan.
She shipped a lot of things from Milan. The apartment is closed now, the passports destroyed, the wigs and the costumes gone.
She’s different now. She’s still sharp and guarded, still capable of a look that could cut glass.
But the edges are softer. She laughs more.
She lets people touch her without flinching.
Sometimes she calls Liam just to talk. Last week I walked in on her teaching Aurora how to make tiramisu while Lily slept in a carrier strapped to Liam’s chest, and I stood in the doorway and watched and thought, this is what it was all for.
The memories haven’t come back. We don’t talk about it much.
She still dreams sometimes—fragmented things, images without context, feelings without names.
Once, she woke up and told me she’d dreamed about a dock and a lake and a boy with dark hair, and she said it in a voice that was half wonder and half grief.
I held her, and I didn’t push, because pushing is how you lose her, and keeping her is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be good at.
Maybe the memories will come. Maybe they won’t. Either way, we’re building new ones, and the new ones are enough.
I reach into the pocket of my jeans and feel the small velvet box I’ve been carrying for two weeks.
Two weeks of waiting for the right moment, of talking myself into it and out of it and back into it again.
I considered a restaurant. A bridge at sunset.
Something grand, maybe, something worthy of her.
Then I looked at the yard and the dogs and the people I love eating food off a grill while a three-month-old sleeps through all of it, and I realized the right moment was never going to be a setting. It has to be a feeling. This one. Right now.
I walk across the yard to the porch. Ivy looks up at me, and whatever she sees on my face makes her set her lemonade down slowly. Clyde stirs in her lap before yawning and going back to sleep.
“What?” she asks.
I don’t kneel. She’d hate that. It’s too performative, too exposed. Instead, I sit on the swing beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch, and I pull the box out of my pocket.
The ring is simple. A single stone, nothing flashy. She’d hate flashy and probably throw flashy back in my face. This one is clean and elegant, and it caught the light in the jewelry store window the same way her eyes catch the light when she’s thinking about something she won’t say out loud.
She looks at the ring, then looks at me. Her lips part, but nothing comes out.
The yard has gone quiet. I don’t look, but I can feel them all watching. “I’m not going to make a speech,” I tell her. “You already know everything I’d say. You’ve heard it in every way I know how to say it.”
I hold the box steady, somehow. “So I’m just going to ask. Will you marry me?”
She looks at the ring for a long time. The porch swing creaks. “Yes,” she whispers.
I slide the ring onto her finger, and Clyde wakes up in time to lick both our hands. From somewhere nearby, Liam says, “It’s about damn time,” in a voice that isn’t as steady as he wants it to be.
Ivy leans into me. I put an arm around her and the chihuahua, and the porch swing sways. The yard is full of noise again—laughter, congratulations, while Bonnie steals a second hamburger now that everyone is distracted.
I look at the woman beside me and the ring on her finger. Here we are, in the life we built in a house I bought for a ghost. It’s now filled with dogs and family and the smell of charcoal and cut grass.
And it’s everything. The most ordinary thing in the world, but it’s everything that will ever matter.
Thank you for reading The Rook’s Obsession.