She shrugs, her shoulders brushing against my chest. “We called him Mr. V. I didn’t put those pieces together. And he looks different than he did in high school, but—” She shakes her head. “I haven’t seen himin years. Since my senior year.”
“How did that happen?” I say, my mind working through possibilities.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll write him and ask. Later, maybe.” Then she pats my leg. “Want to help me research something for my book?”
“Don’t you want to know?” I say with surprise.
“I do, yeah,” she says. She swallows. “But not right this second. I can’t process anything else at the moment. I’ll write him a letter tonight.”
That’s fair. So I raise my eyebrows at her. “What’s the book research this time?”
“Zip ties,” she says with a little grin. “Escaping zip ties.”
I laugh. “Tempting.” I pause, then go on, “Is there romance in this book?”
“Of course,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I don’t write books without romance in them.”
“Silly me,” I say. “Then let’s research that instead.”
“What, romance?” she says, and her smile widens.
“Romance,” I say, leaning in for a kiss. I press my lips to hers, threading my fingers into her pink hair.
She laughs before kissing me back.
I don’t know what the coming days will hold. I don’t know how Juniper is going to make peace with all the things that have happened over the last month. But I’ll be by her side through it all.
My fate.
* I wrote this dialogue exactly the way it would play out if I were the one being threatened.
* I may or may not have stolen this quote directly from my four-year-old shouting at my six-year-old when the six-year-old burst in the bathroom without knocking first.
* I definitely giggled writing this.
* My dog’s name!
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
“Just tell me where we’re going.”
“Mmm,” Aiden hums from the driver’s seat. “No. I don’t think I will yet.” I can hear the amusement in his voice, but thanks to the blindfold around my eyes, all I can see is a faint strip of gray at the top and bottom of my vision.
“Did you ever stop to consider that this is ruining my eye makeup?” I say. “My makeup looked amazing.”
“It did,” he says, still sounding amused. “So does the dress.”
I smooth my hands down the front of my prom dress, smiling a little.
The prom-turned-Hunger-Banquet was a surprising success. Aiden worked his butt off to put everything together, but I was worried the kids would give him a hard time. And they did at first, but the statistics he rolled out and the bowls of rice and beans and whatnot had their faces turning from disgruntled to solemn. They perked up in time for the dance, though, and we were bombarded by the usual stench of teenage body odor and raging hormones. The Betties chaperonedproperly this time, too—as it turns out, during the Homecoming dance, they snuck down to the woods to vape.
Tovape.
They saw Sandy briefly by the Solomon statue, still alive, when they first went down, but not when they returned. I felt kind of bad for them; they looked sheepish and drawn all throughout thein memoriamslideshow honoring Sandy. They clearly felt horrible.
Rocco Astor did not get a slideshow.
