The weight I’d been carrying since the basement finally eased.I didn’t realize how much fear I’d stored until it let go.
I started being seen around town.At the diner.At the hardware store.At the small park where the kids played and nobody asked questions they didn’t need answers to.
Women waved.Men nodded.
I wasn’t Dante’s ol’ lady or property or anything.Not in how they called me out, but yes in the way they treated me.More than anything though, they all tried and succeeded at accepting me.
Here in Dreadnought, North Carolina, I was just Nita.
One afternoon, as we sat on the porch watching the sun sink low and gold over the trees, Dante reached for my hand like it was instinct now, not need.
“You’re happy,” he stated.It wasn’t a question.
“I am,” I admitted.“I didn’t expect that.”
He exhaled slowly.“I was scared you’d hate it here.Or worse pretend you didn’t hate it but regret coming here nonetheless.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder.“I don’t belong less here.I just belong differently.”
His arm tightened around me, solid and sure.
For the first time since DC, he looked like a man who believed the future wasn’t something waiting to take from him.
Just something waiting to be built.And I was right there beside him.Not as a compromise.
As a choice.
Epilogue
LOCO
Three months changed everything.
Not in the loud, explosive ways people talk about when they mean transformation.No headlines.No blood.No sirens.Just mornings that came softer than the ones before.Just a woman in my kitchen wearing one of my shirts like it belonged to her.Just a future that stopped feeling like something I had to outrun.
Nita belonged here now.
Not because she had bent herself to fit my life, but because we’d built a rhythm that made space for both of us.Her mornings started early, coffee already brewing by the time I came in from a run.She worked from the small office we turned into hers, walls slowly filling with notes, maps, reminders of the woman she was long before she met me.
The senator was a ghost story now.
Officially retired.Quiet.Unreachable.Whatever pressure he had tried to apply had evaporated under scrutiny and distance and the kind of influence that never left fingerprints.The club hadn’t celebrated.They didn’t need to.Problems like that didn’t end with champagne.They ended with silence.And he was forever silent in a way that couldn’t be traced because he wouldn’t be found.
Peace followed.
The clubhouse had accepted her in a way that surprised even me.Not because she tried, but because she didn’t.She showed up honest.Held her own.Didn’t ask questions she didn’t want answers to.The men respected that.
So did I.
The ring sat heavy in my pocket as the sun dipped low, that familiar North Carolina gold bleeding across the sky.I had carried it around for a week, waiting for the right moment.
There wasn’t one.
There was just the moment you decide to stop waiting.
We were out back, the air warm, cicadas humming like the world’s slow heartbeat.She sat on the porch swing, bare feet tucked under her, romance book in her hand.I leaned against the railing, watching her the way I had started doing without realizing it.
“You’re staring,” she said, smiling without looking up.
