10. EPILOGUE ONE YEAR LATER
EPILOGUE: ONE YEAR LATER
MAEVE
The sign on the station door reads SNAKE CANYON SEARCH AND RESCUE, and underneath, in letters I still haven’t gotten tired of, DIRECTOR M.
VALENTINE. I kept the name. People ask about that sometimes, gently, and the answer is simple: it was my name before it was ever his, and I did too much good work under it to hand it over.
The department across town has new leadership now, elected and cautious and allergic to personal mythology, which is exactly what a sheriff’s office should be.
Deputies train with my teams on the regular joint drills without any of the old turf nonsense. Tessa Ward wears a corporal’s chevrons these days and runs their side of the radio net, and when something big comes in, the county doesn’t brace anymore. They just go to work.
Interview Room Two doesn’t exist anymore, by the way. The department renovated the whole interrogation wing during the changeover, new layout, new doors, pale paint, the works. Tessa told me once, watching my face, and I could tell she expected it to be some kind of triumph for me, the room erased.
I have never gone to look. I don’t need to.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about healing: it doesn’t require reclaiming every space somebody contaminated.
The room can be repainted or bulldozed or turned into a break room, but it makes no difference, because the room isn’t the wound and it never was.
The wound was trusting a version of a man that didn’t exist, and you don’t fix that with drywall.
You fix it the slow way, with work and time and people who show up, until one day you realize the nightmares have gone from every week to every month to rare, and the voice in your head that used to ask if you lost control has gotten bored and left.
Wade’s name comes up now and then, a footnote.
He’s somewhere south, I believe, doing something in private security.
Harper I know nothing about, and the nothing is a gift.
They took seven months of my life and nearly the rest of it.
They get no more real estate in my head. The rent came due, and I evicted them.
The house is mine now, a real one this time, bought outright with my own money on a ridge road with the canyon in the windows.
The divorce finalized in the spring, and the day the decree came through Meredith took me to lunch and raised a glass of iced tea and said, “Daylight, witnesses, clean hands. You did it exactly right,” and I let myself be proud of that for a whole afternoon.
Luke Mercer is asleep in my bed when the call comes in, which is a sentence I still sometimes lie awake enjoying.
A year in, and the thing between us has none of what I used to live inside.
No secrets, no locked rooms, no version of events to maintain.
When we disagree, and we disagree plenty, two stubborn people with strong opinions about rigging and helicopters and whose turn it is to cook, he never once treats it as disloyalty.
He argues his case, loses gracefully about half the time, and never keeps score.
My professional authority isn’t an insult to his manhood.
It’s just the org chart, same as his license is when we’re airborne.
Earlier tonight, after dinner, he reached for me and then stopped, mid-motion, and checked in with his eyes, as he still does every single time, a year in, even though the answer has been yes for months. That pause. That half-second where my answer is genuinely the deciding vote.
I spent eighteen years married to a man who took my consent as furniture, as part of the room. Luke treats it as a door he waits to be invited through, and I cannot tell you what that does to a person, being asked instead of assumed.
I said yes. I say yes. It’s a good word now, mine again.
I said it again when we were already in bed, his mouth warm against the side of my throat. “Yes,” I whispered, and felt him smile against my skin.
He kissed his way down my body like he had all the time in the world, pausing at every new place to look up and wait for the next quiet confirmation.
When he settled between my thighs and breathed against me, the question was still there in his eyes.
I answered by sliding my fingers into his hair and nodding.
The first slow stroke of his tongue made my back arch.
He was careful and thorough, learning me all over again the way he always did—no rush, no assumption that last time’s map still held.
I came apart under his mouth with a broken sound that was half his name, half gratitude, hips lifting into the steady pressure of his lips and tongue until the pleasure crested and left me trembling.
I pulled him up before I could fully catch my breath.
He came willingly, letting me roll him onto his back so I could return the gift.
I took him into my mouth with the same deliberate care he had shown me, tasting salt and heat, listening to the way his breath fractured when I hollowed my cheeks.
His hand rested light at the back of my head—present, never pushing.
When he warned me he was close I didn’t pull away; I only looked up and met his eyes, giving him the same silent yes he always gave me.
He came with a low, helpless groan, one hand fisting the sheets, the other still gentle in my hair. I stayed with him through it until his body finally softened and his fingers stroked through my hair in quiet thanks.
Twenty minutes later, we started over, this time taking it slower, his hips rolling against me and the next orgasm arriving stronger, together, powering through the both of us like a summer storm.
Afterward we lay tangled in the dark, and there was no performance in it, no secrecy, no power keeping score, just two people who chose each other in daylight and kept choosing, and I fell asleep on his shoulder with the windows open and the canyon breathing cool night air over the whole town.
Then the radio on my nightstand lights up, because it’s the canyon, and the canyon keeps its own schedule.
“All units, Snake Canyon Search and Rescue. Climber down on the east face of Hanging Rock, injuries reported, night recovery requested.”
I’m up before the second tone. Years of conditioning, feet finding the floor, gear bag already staged by the door because it always is.
Beside me Luke is awake and moving too, no groaning, no do you have to, no suggestion that the county’s emergencies are an imposition on our evening.
He just pulls on his boots and reaches for his own jacket, because the bird’s at the county pad and the pilot’s in my bed, and a team is waiting, and this is simply what our life is.
“You’re flying,” I say. “East face at night, I want eyes from above.”
“You’re rigging,” he says. “That face is all loose rock.”
“Don’t tell me my business, Mercer.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Valentine.”
We grin at each other in the dark, pulling on gear, and it’s not lost on me that this, right here, is what it was supposed to feel like all along. Two people, one job, no scoreboard.
The fire lookout is our staging point, the same turnout where I once sat in a truck with my marriage in pieces and the valley oblivious below. I park in almost the same spot, and I get out into the cold, and the canyon opens up ahead of me, black and vast and demanding, as it has my whole life.
Below, lights are already moving on the east face approach. Radios crackle. Tessa’s deputies have the road, Carlos has the rope teams checking in, Luke’s helicopter is spooling up on the pad behind us, and everyone, everyone, is waiting for the same thing.
Wade once made me doubt my own memory, my own judgment, my own grip on what was real. He built a whole story in which I was the unstable one, and he got the county to star in it.
That story is dead. This is what’s true: the night is cold, the rock is waiting, somebody’s kid is hurt on that face, and every person here is looking at me to say what comes next.
I key the radio, and I tell them.
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