She narrows her eyes. “I’m dramatic?”
“Yeah. You could’ve started with, congratulations, your life is over.”
She laughs, and this time, I laugh with her.
And as I look at her, with all that light in her eyes and every future I never once let myself want standing right in front of me, I know one thing for sure.
“I’m the happiest man, and the luckiest man on this planet,” I say, pulling her closer.
And I mean it with every part of me, because I’ve never been a better man than I am when I’m with her. She stepped into all the broken places inside me and made them feel whole again. She touched every dark thing I carried and taught it how to breathe in the light. I’ve done terrible things. Things I can’t take back. But for the first time in my life, they don’t feel like the end of me.
Because of her, I know whatever comes next can be better.
I know I can give her the life she should’ve always had. A life where love doesn’t come with bruises. Where peace isn’t something that disappears overnight. Where she doesn’t have to go to sleep wondering what tomorrow might take from her. Where safe actually means safe.
This ends here, with the two of us.
I will never be my father. I will never be my grandfather. And I will never be Daniel.
Maybe cruelty does get passed down. Maybe it does come generation after generation, until no one remembers where it started, only that it hurts. But pain isn’t the only thing that stays. So does love. So does mercy. So does the choice to be different.
She was thatchoiceforme.
She touched the wound in me and turned it into a scar instead. She healed it.
And I know, with a certainty so deep it feels written into my soul, that our child will never have to run from home just to feel safe somewhere else. Our child will never learn fear before love. Our child will never look at us and think pain is normal. Our child will never carry what we carried.
Because whatever was broken before us, whatever poisoned the blood before it reached us, whatever turned love into something cruel, it doesn’t get to live past this.
This line ends here.
And if a call from our past ever comes, I know now those are the callsyou shouldn’t have answered.
Epilogue
AURELIA
6 months after
Every house holds a memory, and Rosewood Residence holds nightmares. Isn’t that how the story is supposed to go? But not every nightmare is bad. Some carry something inside them. A sliver of hope that after a bad dream, a good one still comes.
Nathaniel and I decide to part with this place now that we’ve left everything behind us.
I lower my hand to my stomach.
Now that our daughter is on the way.
We come back to pack everything and load the truck that will take all our things to Salem, Massachusetts. We bought a new house with a touchsimilar tothis one, only far from the worst of the memories.
Wedidn’tsell this one. We decided to keep it, just in case we change our minds, butI’mpretty sureonce our little one arrives,we’llhave to make something permanent.
If you had asked me before where I saw myself in ten years, I would’ve told you I’d be traveling the world, maybe visiting Paris, playing piano near the Eiffel Tower in some fancy restaurant. But now I see myself in a new house, with my future husband and my daughter, and I will make sure her life is never anything like mine.
I move to the bed, exhaling deeply as my palm slides to my lower back, holding myself together. Sometimes I wonder howI’mstill able to walk.
Littleone is heavier than I ever expected her to be.
I take a notebook from the plastic bag I left on the bed, then reach for the pen in the drawer where I left it exactly eight months ago, and open to a fresh page.
