I reached for her and stopped myself because I wasn’t sure I had that right.
“I am not walking away from you again,” I said, and for the first time there was no shake in it. “You are it for me. You always have been.”
She crossed the space between us. Her hands grabbed my face like she was afraid I’d disappear. The kiss wasn’t gentle. It was furious and terrified and desperate. When she pulled back, her forehead pressed to mine.
“Go,” she whispered. “Go fight for us.”
I nodded, not trusting words. She kissed me again, and then I drove to the meeting with my hands steadier than they had been in a long time. I sat in a circle of ugly chairs and worse coffee and said my name and my voice didn’t break. I listened to men and one woman talk about who they were when the bottle held the leash and who they were learning to be now that their handswere empty. I didn’t feel fixed. But I was going to try. For her. For them. For me.
Outside, the air was cold and honest. I texted her to let her know I was headed back to Atlanta. Driving to the clubhouse, my leg ached with the vibration of the bike under me. The lot lights threw long cones on the gravel. Through the front window I saw Hannah closing up, moving like the personification of a heart that refused to quit. In the garage, Dalton and Mac argued about a shim that didn’t exist and would have to be made. Somewhere, Maria and Diego were probably at home tucking Jewel into bed.
I stood by my bike and breathed until the shake in my hands dropped to a hum. I thought about whiskey. How it lied like a good salesman. How it told me I could hold fire and not smell like it. How many times I’d let it make me smaller, just so the voices in my head weren’t quite as loud. I thought about Holly’s eyes tonight. Not pleading. Not even hopeful. Just watching to see if I was a man who could hold eye contact with the truth.
She was better than any whiskey. A math problem with only one right answer.
I went inside. Hannah didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She slid a Tupperware at me and then headed home to August.
In my room, I sat on the edge of the bed and set my phone on the nightstand face-up like a man waiting for orders. I typed, erased, typed again. Settled on the only thing that didn’t taste like a commercial.
Me: I love you, Malibu. Always have. Always will.
The dots came and went.
Malibu: You better. Goodnight, handsome.
I lay back. My phone pinged again.
Malibu: And for the record… I love you too.
I smiled when I set the phone back down. The ceiling didn’t spin. The ghosts in the corners kept their voices to themselvesfor once. I closed my eyes on the image of a door half-open, a chain that would come off when it was supposed to, and a woman with a pen in her hair who had already done the hardest thing and might let me try.
I slept without dreaming.
Epilogue - One Year Later
? Holly ?
The wind carried the smell of cut grass and rain, the kind that clung to headstones long after the storm was gone. I knelt in front of the grave, tracing my thumb over the carved name, though I didn’t read it aloud. My lips moved anyway—habit, not prayer. There were flowers from half the city tucked into the brass vase: grocery-store lilies, roses from somebody’s yard, one plastic sunflower a kid must’ve insisted on. The wind moved through the cemetery trees with a long, low hush, like the world trying to quiet a crying child.
Behind me, footsteps crunched in the gravel. I didn’t have to look. Jackson’s boots had a rhythm I could pick out of a thousand others. Slow. Heavy. Present. My eyes never left the headstone. “I don’t know how to keep going without her.”
He exhaled—that long, quiet sigh that meant he was steadying himself before he spoke. “I think that’s the trick of it,” he said softly. “You don’t keep goingwithouther. You keep goingbecauseof her. She didn’t teach us how to quit, Malibu. She taught us how to live messy and love loud.”
He took my hand and pulled me up until I leaned against him. My head found that spot beneath his jaw where the world had always made sense.
I pressed my forehead against his shoulder. “I miss her laugh.”
He smiled faintly, brushing his thumb along my jaw. “Yeah but she’s probably up there giving God pointers by now. Poor bastard.”
That earned a wet laugh from me. He always knew when to break the heaviness before it drowned me. I let myself breathe him in. He had become my safe place, one that smelled like soap and leather and the man who had chosen me in a thousand small ways over the last year.
He’d stopped drinking one day at a time until those days stacked into something solid. Meetings. Calls. The ugly chairs and bad coffee, the texts with pictures of coin-colored tokens in his palm when he felt brave, and pictures of empty chairs when he didn’t. He still shook sometimes. He told me when the dark got loud. He put his hands where I could see them. We had learned how to be not-ok together and still get up in the morning.
It had been two months without her, and every morning I still expected to hear her at the clubhouse door, hollering about somebody’s muddy boots or the price of eggs. Instead we had casseroles from women who couldn’t think what else to do, and a chair at the big table no one would sit in, and the memory that the city had swallowed her in the middle of an ordinary day.
A drive-by, they said. Random, they implied. No, we all thought, even if we didn’t say it. Not random. Nothing about Hannah was ever random. The story of it still lived in my muscles: the phone vibrating on the counter, Dalton’s voice stripped to bone, the way the clubhouse turned into a church and a hospital and a town hall without anyone calling for it. The grieving that never seemed to stop. The after. God, the after.
The sky had that swollen look it got before it opened. He slid his fingers through mine. The ring he’d put there in front of the whole damn club flashed when a weak strip of sun broke free. It was simple and solid and heavier than it looked. Like us.
