I'd spent my whole life thinking I was alone, that being a Dane meant being isolated, meant carrying weight no one else could understand.
Turned out I'd been wrong about that.
Turned out family was bigger than I'd known, more resilient, more willing to show up than I'd given them credit for.
And maybe that was worth all the rest of it.
Worth the secrets and the lies and the manufactured origins.
Worth learning that nothing about my existence had been accidental.
Because at the end of the day, standing here with brothers who shared my blood and my purpose and my complicated history?—
I wasn't alone anymore.
And neither was Sophie.
And that meant something.
EPILOGUE
SOPHIE
Ilearned the rhythm of Dominion Hall faster than I expected.
The place had its own heartbeat—quiet in the mornings, purposeful by midday, laughter echoing off stone in the evenings when the wives gathered in the long kitchen like we’d all known each other for years.
It didn’t feel intimidating anymore. It felt lived in. Alive.
Home, in a way I hadn’t predicted.
Wyatt and I were still in the suite they’d given him—our suite now. We’d started looking at houses around Charleston, small ones with porches and oak trees and space for a dog we hadn’t adopted yet but both knew we eventually would. Still, every night we ended up back in that room with the framed photograph by the window—him, me, and Jonesy smiling like the world had never learned how to break people.
And every night, we touched.
That was the thing I hadn’t anticipated. We’d always been physical as kids—shoving shoulders, tugging sleeves, leaning into each other during movies—but this was different. Now, if we were in the same room, we found each other without thinking. A hand at my waist while I chopped vegetables. My fingersbrushing his back when I passed him in a hallway. His thumb hooked in my belt loop while we talked to someone else, like he needed proof I was still there.
We were physical touch people.
We’d always been physical touch people.
We just hadn’t known what it meant before.
The wives noticed, of course. They teased us gently, but there was recognition in their smiles, too—like they’d all gone through the same discovery at some point. Natalie called it “Dane gravity.” Isabel said it was just what happened when two stubborn people finally stopped pretending they were only friends.
The brothers had folded Wyatt in faster than he’d expected. Faster than I had expected. I’d watched him shift from guarded to amused to genuinely relaxed as he learned their rhythms, their jokes, their stories. The half-brother thing became less of a shock and more of an expansion—like someone had added rooms to a house he hadn’t realized he owned.
And me?
They treated me like I’d always been there.
Ethan—Mayor Natalie Dane’s husband—let me ride Flapjack twice. Flapjack was enormous and gentle and deeply unimpressed with human drama. The Dominion Hall stables had become one of my favorite places to wander in the late afternoons, the smell of hay and leather grounding in a way city air never quite was.
Wyatt had been gone for a few days. Texas. Visiting his mom, checking on things at the ranch in Valentine, handling loose ends he’d put off for too long. He’d called every night, voice softer than usual, telling me about sunsets and fence lines and how his mother had smiled when he showed her my picture again.
“She remembers you,” he’d said. “Not perfectly. But she remembers you.”
I’d held the phone to my chest after we hung up, heart full and aching at the same time.
