EPILOGUE — HOME A YEAR ON #3
I want to go back and find her on that gravel lot.
I want to crouch down beside her while she counts by hundreds waiting on her father's headlights, terrified, eleven times losing count, certain every set of lights is the white van.
I want to put my hand on the back of her neck — the good way, the way my father does it, the way that undoes what Sister Agnes's hand did — and I want to tell her the thing she could not have survived believing at twenty and gets to live inside of now.
You're going to make it. Not just out. All the way to a life.
You're going to be a survivor for ten years, which is its own cage, and then a truck's going to break down six miles east of a town you'll build out of a wreck, and a man's going to read your bar in a breath and never once look at you like a thing he wants to take.
You're going to learn that the opposite of being taken isn't being alone — it's being held by people who'd let you go any time and choose every day not to.
Your father is going to walk you down an aisle in front of the mountains.
A whole town is going to come down a road for you.
And you're going to lie in your own bed on the night you marry the right man and tell him you're carrying a baby that belongs to nobody but the two of you, and you're going to watch a man who held the line fifteen years cry with his hand on your stomach.
And you are going to understand, finally, all the way down, the thing you bled across that sage to find out and couldn't have believed:
You are not a vessel. You are not a Blessed One.
You are not Sister Mary and you are not the rabbit and you are not the runaway and you are not the survivor on guard.
You're Sloane Mercer, who became Sloane Mathison the day she chose to, on her own two feet, the way she's done every single thing that ever mattered.
You are a woman who built a life out of the ash of a bad one, and won the war that came to take it, and gets to keep it. All of it. Forever.
Eight miles. The road was only ever eight miles, and you ran it, and look where it goes.
The sun comes over the ridge. The water tower goes from gray to gold.
Rena flips her sign and lifts a hand through the glass.
My father's light is on over the back of the store, and he's expecting me, and he doesn't know yet that he's going to be a grandfather, and I'm going to tell him this morning over a coffee he'll pretend he just happened to be carrying, and Walt Mercer is going to have to look down at his coffee a long, long time.
I run home. To a house I locked last night out of a habit that's finally, quietly dying.
To a husband asleep in our bed with his hand still drifting toward the middle of it in his sleep, looking for me, finding the place I'll be.
To a ring an old woman kept in a drawer sixty years waiting for somebody worth it.
To the whole bright unguarded rest of it.
Ten years ago I was a barefoot girl on a gravel lot, praying a man would pick up the phone.
I made it.
The runaway came home — and this time it isn't for now, and it isn't enough. It's for good, and it's everything, and there is nothing, nothing at all, behind me.
I let myself in. I don't lock the door.
I don't even think to.
Because some women never break.
The End
Thank You