Epilogue
Annabelle
Fifteen months later
It’s December, and for the first time in my adult life, I’m not afraid of the cold.
I used to hate summer because my mother died in it, all that heat and light demanding I be a person when I had nothing left to be one with.
Now I stand on the penthouse balcony at six in the morning with a coffee going cold in my hand, watching the city wake up still dark and frostbitten, and I feel something close to peace.
Funny what changes when you stop drowning. Even the weather forgives you.
It’s properly over now. That’s the thing I keep turning over, the way you keep pressing a bruise that’s finally healed just to check it doesn’t hurt.
Finn and his unit pulled the whole rotten network up by the roots over the spring, every name in Maeve’s notebook and a dozen she never found.
The ones who paid, the ones who looked away, the one above Briggs that nobody knew was there until the files cracked open.
Some of them are in prison. Some of them aren’t anywhere at all.
I’ve stopped asking which men did the maths on that, because I already know, and because I sleep better than I have in years, regardless.
The machine that ate my mother is scrap.
There’s no one left at the top of it to fear.
So I thought the quiet would feel like an ending. I braced for it, the way I brace for everything. The day the last of them went down, I sat in this penthouse and waited for the grief to come back now that there was nothing left to chase.
It didn’t.
We just became the thing we already were, only on purpose this time.
The file is open on the kitchen island when I come back in from the balcony. Maeve’s handwriting in the margins, my research clipped to the front, three sets of blue eyes already on it.
This is my job now. I find them.
Years of cataloguing other people’s stories made me very good at finding the ones the world filed under closed.
The women nobody made a fuss about. The cases that died quietly because the man at the centre of them golfed with the right people, or paid the right invoices, or simply looked too respectable for anyone to believe the worst. I sit in the library of databases Ethan bought me access to, and I read between the lines the way I once read my mother’s case, except now I’m not drowning. I’m working.
“Daniel Vasey,” I say, tapping the photograph.
A soft, smiling man in a good coat. “Three women came forward over nine years. All three retracted. One moved abroad, one stopped returning calls, one died in a way the coroner called misadventure, but her sister calls something else. The detective who buried it took early retirement to a villa he shouldn’t be able to afford. ”
Aidan picks up the photo and studies it with the flat, patient attention of a man deciding where to start. “He looks like a geography teacher.”
“They always do,” Maeve says, not looking up. “That’s the whole trick of it. Nobody believes the soft ones.”
She comes most mornings now. Still prickly, still on a short lead, still apt to call Ethan a controlling little tyrant over breakfast, which he is.
But she comes. She got three sons back, and she’s not wasting it any more than the rest of us are.
Some mornings, I catch her watching me make the coffee.
I know she’s seeing my mother, and I’ve stopped minding.
Somebody in this world should remember Christa wanted things. I’m glad it’s her.
“Maeve and I have built his week until we could walk it blind.” I sip the cold coffee and don’t flinch at my own voice. “No fuss, no mess, no story for the papers to chew on. Just a respectable man who isn’t anywhere anymore, and three women who finally get to stop checking the locks twice.”
“You make it sound like a spa weekend,” Aidan says.
“I make it sound like a plan,” I say. “One of us has to.”
Ethan smirks. “She’s not wrong.”
“We’ve got two hours until it’s too light. Let’s move out,” Aidan says.
We do. Quietly, quickly and efficiently.
Half an hour later, I’m in the car with Maeve, parked on the dark lane two hundred yards from the cottage, the heater off, because a running engine is a thing people notice.
I’m not the bait this time. There’s no need for bait with a man who lives alone and answers his own door.
I’m here because I asked to be, because I will not be the woman who sends three men into the dark and waits at home pretending she doesn’t know what they’re for.
If this is our life, I look at it with my eyes open. All of it.
Maeve passes me the flask without being asked. “You don’t have to watch.”
“I know.” I take a sip. “I’m watching anyway.”
“Your mother would have a fit.”
“My mother,” I say, “would be in the cottage holding the torch.”
That gets a short, surprised laugh out of her, and then she goes still, because the porch light has gone dark, which is Callan, and that means they’re in.
It doesn’t take long. The good ones never do.
I sit in the cold with my mother’s watch heavy on my wrist, because I wear it now, I stopped saving it for best, and I think about three women, a coroner’s lie, the way the soft ones always look like geography teachers.
When the porch light comes on, that’s Ethan, and it means it’s done.
They come out unhurried. Three dark shapes against the snow with their hands empty and their faces calm. Callan reaches the car first, opens my door, crouches so we’re level, his cold fingers finding my jaw, searching my face for the cracks before I’ve even found them myself.
“All right?” he asks.
I take stock of myself, honestly, the way the therapist Ethan finally stopped arguing about taught me to. I check for the old flood, the static, the pull towards the dark that used to live behind my ribs like a tenant who’d never leave.
It isn’t there.
What’s there instead is something quieter, harder, entirely mine. It’s a flat, level certainty of a debt being paid that should have been paid by better people years ago, and wasn’t, so we paid it.
“I’m all right,” I say, and mean it. “Three more women get to sleep tonight.”
“Four,” Callan says, and tips his head at me, and I understand. Me too. My mother’s daughter, who used to keep a blade in a bedside drawer and a journal full of dead ends, sleeping the whole night through.
Maeve gets out and slips into the car parked three hundred yards behind. We drive home through the snow, the five of us in two cars, ordinary as anything.
Maeve peels off towards her place when we reach the city, one hand lifted out of the window.
She has her own flat now, three streets over, close enough to come for breakfast and far enough that Ethan doesn’t have to watch her chew.
That’s reconciliation, Deveaux style. A short lead and a spare key, neither of us mentions.
The penthouse is warm and dark and ours. Aidan goes straight for the shower. Ethan checks the locks Callan already checked. And I stand in front of the shelf where the box lives, journal closed, butterfly remembered.
“You’re doing the thing,” Ethan says behind me.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you stand at the box and think too loud.” His hands settle on my hips, careful even now, and his mouth comes to the side of my neck. “Come back to bed. You’ve been up since four.”
“Is that an order?”
“It’s a request.” His teeth graze my pulse, and heat rolls down through me, slow and certain. “I’ve learned the difference. Don’t make me unlearn it.”
I turn in his arms. A year ago, I couldn’t have done this, stood in my own skin in the dark and wanted something out loud. I do it now like it’s the easiest thing in the world, because with them it is.
“I want all of you,” I say. “I always want all of you. That’s not going to stop being the answer.”
Aidan calls from the bedroom, wet and shameless. “Was that my name, little bell?”
“You wish.”
He’s out of the shower and across the room, a towel slung low, smirk in place. Callan turns from the window, and the cold drops off him the way it only ever does for me.
They take me to bed and take me apart, slow this time, no danger left in the world to rush us until the next one.
Ethan’s mouth is on my breast, his fingers buried deep, drawing the first cry out of me.
Aidan falls between my thighs, devouring me like he’s got nowhere to be and nothing to prove, his tongue working my clit until I’m fisting his hair.
He moves aside so Callan can slide into me with his eyes locked on mine, his forehead dropping to mine as he thrusts deep.
“Mine,” he breathes. “Ours.”
“Yours,” I gasp back. “And you’re mine. Say it.”
“Yours.” His rhythm breaks, savage and sweet. “Always have been. Always.”
I come with all three of them around me, on me, in me, their names torn out of me one after another.
“Good girl,” Ethan murmurs into my hair.
This is the rest of my life. Not the ending I was racing towards in a bedsit four years ago with a journal full of dead ends and a blade in the drawer.
A different one. A better one. Mine, chosen with my eyes open, surrounded by my monsters, my mother’s memory and the strange, dark, tender family we built out of all that blood.
I’m not afraid of the cold. I’m not afraid of the dark.
And I’m not afraid of summer anymore.
I lean back into the warmth of them, these terrible men who pulled me out of the water and never once let go. I close my eyes, and I let myself be exactly as held, as loved, and as alive as I am.
It’s everything.
It’s enough.
It’s the end of the story I thought would kill me, and the beginning of the one I get to keep.
I sleep the whole night. I always do now.