Epilogue
CALLEN
Three months later…
A FEW MONTHS. That’s how long it takes a bullet hole to become a story you tell at a barbecue.
We’re on the sand at Hilton Head in the first week of November, which sounds insane until you’ve done it. The water’s cold. The air isn’t. The crowds went home in September and the whole beach belongs to a handful of people, and a Yeti cooler full of beer.
The late-afternoon sunlight is going long and gold across the water like somebody tilted the world.
I have not been on this beach in ten years.
I was invited back in September to Hollie’s retreat, but I couldn’t bear to tear myself away from Sylvie as she recovered.
From everything. Her broken rib, stab wound, the bullet hole she got protecting me, and lastly, the heartbreak of my anger. It’s all faded now.
It’s taken a few months, but I think she finally believes it when I say I’ve forgiven her.
She’s forgiven me too. We’re a real couple now.
To the point that next year, for Hollie’s annual get-together honoring my SEAL brothers—I’ll bring my girlfriend.
Who knows? Maybe by next year Sylvie will be even more to me.
God, that salty breeze. It feels so liberating. I have not been on this beach in ten years, but now that I’m here, good luck tearing me away. I have been sitting on it since eleven o’clock this morning with a beer in the sand beside me, with nothing but time to spare.
“Look.”
Sylvie drops down next to me and shoves her phone in my face with the cat camera app open.
It’s always the cat camera. She checks it fourteen times a day, minimum, and she pretends it’s because she’s worried about the automatic feeder and whether Reginald is getting enough to eat. He’s a paté kind of cat, she complains. The kibble is killing him.
“He’s fine,” I say. We’re at the beach for four days all together. The cat will live.
Actually, he’s living his best life, ruling my apartment with an iron fist. Reginald is a Turkish Angora, pure white. He cost me an amount of money that is obscene, but the moment Sylvie locked on his blue eyes, I knew my fate was sealed.
I watch him on the live video feed for a few seconds. He is currently helping himself to the treat bag with his entire fluffy head inside it. As we watch, he pulls it out, looks directly into the lens with the expression of a Victorian gentleman who has been interrupted, and goes back in.
“Gluttonous,” I say. “He’s eating his way through twenty dollars of salmon crunchies.”
Sylvie laughs. “That’s freeze-dried wild-caught salmon from Alaska. It’s cute you think that bag only cost twenty dollars.”
I roll my eyes. This cat gets more and more expensive in every way imaginable.
He is a small white despot. He has destroyed one couch, two blinds, and a pair of my shoes.
When we’re home, he sleeps directly on Sylvie’s throat every night like a scarf.
When I get up in the dark at night, I can feel his eyes on me with an open expression of contempt, plotting my death.
Like mother, like cat.
Yeah, I can joke about it now. The way Sylvie and I started because I’m confident in the way it’ll end up.
“He looks like a Reginald,” she says, so proud of the name she picked out. I was thinking Snowball or Ghost or something, but that was not a hill I was willing to die on.
He does look like a Reginald, actually. Quite sophisticated when he’s not stuffing his face. Plus, I love the idea of Sylvie and I owning something together. She lives at my apartment, but it’s technically mine. Next year, we’ll buy something that’s ours.
I hand her back the phone and stare out at the ocean.
She stands up and pulls the shirt over her head.
There it is.
She’s in a black bikini and is slightly pale.
You can’t tan from a recovery bed which she’s lived in for a good while now.
The scars on her body are a map of the worst year of both our lives.
Right shoulder, two inches under the collarbone: the entry.
Puckered, pale, about the size of a nickel, and there’s a bigger one on the back that I can’t see from here.
It joins the other very faded scar on the other side of her chest the first time she was shot when she was only sixteen years old.
There are also shiny keloid scars on her left calf, back of the thigh. Her hip. I know them like the back of my hand. I kiss them every night.
The rib doesn’t show. Nothing shows for a broken rib. But she still can’t sleep on that side. She still hisses when she laughs too hard, but that’s tapering off as her bones seal the cracks from the inside out.
She turns around and catches me looking.
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“I’m not doing a face.”
“You’re doing the sad Labrador face, Callen, you do it every single time I take my shirt off. It’s very unsexy.”
Here’s what I don’t say, but I feel.
No more scars.
Every one of those is a place the world got its hands on her before I did. I don’t say it out loud, but I have made a private, stupid, entirely useless vow to a woman who does not need it, that nothing is ever going to touch her again.
No more fucking scars. For either of us.
I know what I am, and I know what she is.
I’m a good operator. A very good one. I was a SEAL and I was a Bureau man and I’ve been in more rooms with suits and ties than I can count. I was built to take orders and rely on leadership.
Sylvie’s rogue. That woman crossed four lanes of traffic with a broken rib, ran up ten flights of stairs as if she were flying, and put herself between a bullet and my skull.
I have spent three months quietly making my peace with something.
She’s not the one who needs protecting.
Sylvie protects me.
She’s been doing it since long before I knew what she was doing. Whether she understood it or not. Falling in love with me was the reason we survived. It’s the reason we will survive. She’ll do it until the day she dies, and the best I can hope for is to be standing close enough to be useful.
The sun catches something and throws a sharp light in my eyes. The diamonds. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen her without them. They are a part of her ears now.
“All right.” Sylvie plants her hands on her hips. “Who’s getting in the water?”
“Not happening,” Lance says from my right.
He doesn’t even look up. He’s flat on his back with a hat over his face and his ankles crossed.
“You pussy. The water is only a little cold, Lance.”
“I hope an Arctic shark eats you out there,” Lance says to Sylvie, from under the hat.
She scoffs. “Arctic sharks in South Carolina?”
“I hope one travels just to bite you.”
She rounds on Linc and Eden.
“Come on. You two. Up.”
“No thanks,” Linc says.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s fifty-eight degrees.”
“Is it because you can’t swim?” Sylvie tips her head, and I know that face, and I brace for it. “You do look a little dense, Linc. Do you sink?”
There’s a pause as the insult sinks in.
“I second the shark statement,” Linc says.
Eden’s laughing so hard she has to put her drink down in the sand.
It’s a testament to their relationship that Linc even answered. It’s the deepest form of affection he has.
It took a little while for the whole team to warm back up to Sylvie. But she’s earning it. Slowly. In front of everybody. She’s working on relationships; building a family.
I pull my shirt off. “I’ll get in with you, baby.”
“Aww.” Lance lifts the hat. “Still pussy-whipped, huh? Enjoy the honeymoon phase, you two.” He nudges his wife with his elbow. “It doesn’t last.”
Cricket doesn’t even turn her head.
“Why do you insist on staying in trouble?”
Everybody chuckles at Lance’s scolding. It’s bizarre to hear the symphony of our laughter. Normally, when we’re all gathered like this, it’s bad news. A mission, often critical. But here we dabble in normalcy. How real friends and family would spend time together.
The emotion of it wraps me up, holds me tight. This feeling of pressure in all the right places comes without warning lately. I’ll be doing something completely ordinary—making coffee, watching a woman argue with a cat—and a response of nerves bubbles up in me.
Ten years I ate dinner standing over a sink.
Alone.
But now I have something to lose. Everything to lose. Of course that comes with pressure.
“Vesper’s coming,” Eden says, pointing left.
There’s a figure down the beach. She’s slight in the distance, walking up along the tide line where the sand’s hard, still a good hundred yards out.
Every single person on this blanket sits up because Vesper said she wasn’t coming. She couldn’t make it to the little family retreat. Yet here she is.
Lance is on his feet.
Then Cricket says, “No fucking way.”
Even Linc furrows his brows in confusion.
“That can’t be…” Lance murmurs.
“Holy hell,” Cricket says. “That’s her body?”
They aren’t jaw-dropped to see Vesper. They’re shocked to see Vesper in a swimsuit.
A plum-colored string bikini, and she is walking up this beach in it like she’s walking into a briefing, spine straight, chin level, expression neutral, carrying nothing but a towel.
Nobody says a word as she approaches.
I have known this woman a long time. I have seen her in black.
I have also seen her in black, and in black, and once, memorably, in a slightly different black.
Vesper could be colorblind for all we know.
And until this very moment, I couldn’t have picked her figure out of a lineup.
But she has one…as it turns out, an extremely good one.
“Vesper,” Cricket says as she reaches our huddle, barefoot, and looking uncomfortably human, “you have tits like that, and you bury them in suits?”
Vesper blinks at Cricket. Then surveys all of us. Nine people frozen in various postures of shock on a beach blanket.
“It’s a beach,” she says.
Nothing.
“Is it not?” She looks around, and for the first and only time in recorded history, Vesper looks uncertain. “Everyone is wearing swimwear.”