Epilogue
brOOKLYN
Ayear to the day after a man put a needle in my neck and a ring on my finger I never agreed to, I marry him again. On purpose this time.
We do it at our estate, on the bluff over the Potomac, in the gold light of a late afternoon with every door in the house standing open behind us.
There’s no gun. There’s no stranger whose name I have to learn off an officiant’s lips.
There’s no hidden blade strapped to my thigh and no part of me calculating exits.
There’s just a small ribbon of grass between the old plaster walls, and the whole impossible braided family folded into white chairs.
My father, who walks me out and hands me over with a look at Lorik that has finally, after a year, stopped being a threat and become something closer to a dare; my mother, already crying, who taught me that love and rage don’t take turns and then taught me that neither do love and peace; my little brother in his first real suit looking like he’d fight God for me; Dom, Ciera, and Krishna; Ren and Sasha; Drini, weeping openly, who I made stand up front because he’s family too now, he was always going to be family.
And standing up front, one on each side of us, the two who stayed with us in the dark long before any of this reached the light.
Harley, my maid of honor, my only real friend, who spent a whole year not knowing whether I was alive and never once stopped waiting up for me.
And Cas, Lorik’s best man, his chosen brother, who saved my husband from that warehouse and brought him to save me from the gray.
My person, and his. The two who proved, long before either of us could believe it, that some people don’t leave.
And where the altar would be stands the priest. The same one.
Father Mathis, the soft, gray-haired man Lorik collected at the point of a gun a year ago and made bless a wedding with a pistol leveled at his trembling Bible, while I shook beside a stranger in a dress made of nothing.
Nobody forced him to come back this time.
I found him myself. I drove out to his little parish, knocked on the rectory door with two empty hands, and asked him, with no gun anywhere in sight and the door standing open behind me, if he would do it again.
On purpose this time. He started crying before I finished the question.
And now, at the end of that ribbon of grass, in the open light where I can see every line of the face I once fell in love with as a silent voice through a phone—my husband.
Waiting. Not certain. He will never be fully certain, I’ve made my peace with that.
A boy gets put on a plane at seven and some part of him stands at the end of every aisle his whole life half-expecting to be left.
So I do the thing I have decided to spend the rest of my life doing.
I walk to him. On my own feet, at my own pace, choosing every single step where everyone can see me make it.
I wrote my own vows.
“The first time we did this, I didn’t know your name,” I tell him, and my voice carries in the gold quiet.
“I’d fallen in love with a masked man and woken up married to a stranger, and it took me a long, ugly, beautiful year to find out they were the same impossible man.
So I want to say the part out loud that I never got to say the first time.
” I take both of his hands. “I know exactly who you are now. The stalker. The monster. The man who hunted me and the man who’d die before he’d unsay he loves me.
All of it. Nothing hidden, nothing soft-pedaled, no mask anywhere on either of us.
And standing here in the light, knowing every last terrible true thing—I choose you, Lorik Kovaci.
Today, and tomorrow, and every ordinary day after, I’m going to keep walking back to you on purpose.
Not because anyone planned it. Because I want to.
That’s the only vow that was ever going to mean anything from me, so it’s the only one I’m making: I’ll keep choosing you, in the light, forever. ”
He has to take a moment. The most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard stands in front of his whole new family and has to take a moment, and nobody laughs, because every person in those chairs has watched what it cost to get him here.
“I spent my whole life,” he says finally, “certain I was a thing that gets used and put down. And then I built an entire lie because I couldn’t believe a girl like you would ever pick a man like me if I gave her the choice.
” His thumbs move over my knuckles. “You found out everything. You found out the worst of it, in the cruelest possible way. And you chose me anyway, out loud, with your eyes open, with the door wide open behind you the whole time.” His voice doesn’t break, but it’s close, and he lets me see it’s close.
“I don’t have a vow grand enough for that.
So here’s the small one, the only one that’s true: I will keep the door open for the rest of my life.
Every day. You can walk out of any of them, any time, and I will let you, with my hands open.
Because I finally understand that the only love worth having is the kind a person could leave and chooses not to.
I’m yours, Brooklyn. In the light. Where you can always see me.
Choose to stay or choose to go. I’ll just be grateful, every single day, for the ones you choose to stay. ”
I put his rings back on his finger. He slides the pink diamond back onto mine, then the matching band behind it, and this time it means the opposite of what it meant when I took them off. This time it’s a sentence too. I came back. I keep coming back.
Then Father Mathis says the words he was forced to say a year ago, the ones he once croaked out with a gun trained on him.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife.” This time his voice doesn’t shake.
This time the Bible is steady in his hands and there’s no weapon anywhere in the room, and the tears running into his collar are nothing like the ones he cried when Cas walked him out into the dark that first night, sick with what he’d been made to bless.
For a year, I think, he believed he’d married a frightened girl to her cage.
I wanted him to see the rest of it, to watch me marry that same man with my whole heart and my eyes wide open, so he’d never have to carry that night again.
“You may kiss the bride,” he tells Lorik, and this time he’s smiling when he says it.
He doesn’t ask permission to kiss me. He’s learned the shape of me too well for that.
He just reads it on my face, the way he reads everything, and when I tip up onto my toes he meets me halfway, in the open, in the gold light, in front of everyone, and the kiss is nothing like the betrayal at the altar a year ago.
There’s no trick in it. There’s nothing underneath it but exactly what’s on top.
The whole family is on their feet and Drini is sobbing and Cas pats Lorik on his back, saying nothing and everything at the same time, and I am marrying my stalker in the daylight with all the doors open, and not one single thing about it is hidden anymore.
Later, when the last guest is gone and the house is finally quiet and ours, he takes me upstairs.
And he makes love to me slow in the dark of a room with the doors unlocked, careful and unhurried and reverent, the way he’s learned I need it on the nights that are about something bigger than wanting.
Learning my body all over again like it’s the first honest time every time, his hands open, mine open, nothing between us, both of us choosing it with every breath.
He brings me apart gently and gathers me back and brings me apart again, and when he finally lets himself go it’s with my name in his mouth like the only prayer he ever learned, buried as deep in me as a man can be, the way he always is, the way that’s only ever been ours.
And then we do the thing we have always done. The thing I understand now we’ll do until we’re old.
We stay joined.
He doesn’t pull away, and I don’t let him, and we lie there in the warm dark tangled into each other with him still inside me and my heart slowing to match his and his slowing to match mine, breathing each other’s air, the last of the daylight gone and the doors standing open and the whole long bloodthirsty year finally, finally behind us.
We don’t talk. We don’t need to. We just stay, connected, fused, refusing to let even an inch of cold space back in between our bodies, because this, in the end, is the thing neither of us ever knew we were starving for our whole unchosen lives, and it turns out it was never really about the sex at all.
It’s about not being separate. It’s about there being one person in the world who will not let go first.
“Don’t move,” I murmur into his throat, the way I have a hundred times, the most naked sentence I know. “Just stay. Like this. A little longer.”
“As long as you want,” my husband says into my hair, the way he always does, both arms locking me closer, keeping us joined, keeping us one thing instead of two. “All night. The rest of my life. I’m not going anywhere, Brooklyn. I’m never going anywhere again.”
And I believe him. Completely. With my whole open eyes.
Two unchosen people, who spent their whole lives certain they’d always end up alone in the dark, wrapped around each other in the warm, in a house full of unlocked doors, still joined, still choosing, still refusing to come apart.
It’s the safest I have ever been.
And not one single bit of it was ever taken.
All of it, every last piece, was given.