The assembly was over. The students had gone back to class, still buzzing with excitement. Whispering to each other in the hallways.
Principal Hendricks had hugged me approximately fourteen times and showed no signs of stopping—until Brian physically escorted her toward her office.
Now it was just Maya and me, sitting on the edge of the stage, in the empty auditorium.
Her head on my shoulder. My arm around her waist. The ring glinted on her finger every time she moved her hand.
"You proposed to me in front of my students," Maya said.
"I did."
"And my colleagues."
"Yep."
"And Mrs. Patterson."
I grinned. "That part was intentional."
Maya laughed. Then went quiet. She looked at the ring, turning her hand so it caught the light. Simple. Perfect.
"I love you." She leaned in to kiss me. "Thank you for not giving up on me."
"Never." I pulled her closer, breathed her in. "You're stuck with me now, Mrs. Briggs."
She laughed against my lips.
I looked at her. Mascara smudged under her eyes. Hair messed up from my hands. The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
I was going to spend the rest of my life making her laugh like that.
Maya Cummins wasn't the girl who made a mistake at seventeen. She wasn't the woman whose husband left. She wasn't the tired teacher with the messy life and the walls built so high nobody could climb them.
She was the woman I loved.
She was going to be my wife.
And I would make sure she never doubted again that she was worth staying for.
Epilogue
MAYA
The morning of my wedding,I woke up thinking about Tommy Vickers.
I'd visited him the week before at the rehabilitation center. Nearly a year now since the fire, since I'd held his hand in that smoke-filled hallway and promised I wouldn't let go.
The change in him was remarkable. He'd gained weight. His eyes were clearer. He was working toward his GED and had started volunteering in the center's garden, coaxing vegetables out of the small plot behind the building.
"I like watching things grow," he'd told me, almost shy. "It's the opposite of burning."
I cried in my car afterward.
Sloane's article had done more than expose the failures that let Tommy fall through the cracks. It had started conversations. Policy reviews. A citywide task force on supporting aged-out foster youth. I'd joined the nonprofit's board, spending my weekends helping kids like Tommy find housing, jobs, and second chances.
But it wasn't enough. It would never be enough, not when there were still kids like Destiny wearing the same hoodie withthe broken zipper, asking what happens when they age out, bracing for the system to forget them.
Shane found me on the balcony of our new apartment, coffee in hand, watching the sun come up over Sunnyside.
