With them.
With him.
EPILOGUE
One year later
The playground was half built.
Ash looked at it every morning and told himself today was the day he’d finish it.
Six weeks after he and Chase started it, the frame still stood alone in the yard, solid but incomplete, surrounded by the kid toys that had taken over the patio like a brightly colored military occupation no one was resisting.
He didn’t mind. He’d learned, in the last year, that the half-built things weren’t failures. They were just proof that there was always something else pulling at him that mattered more.
He minded it less every time he heard Ellory laugh.
She was out on the patio with the others, and he watched her from the doorway for a moment the way he did when she didn’t know he was looking.
She smiled at something Opal said and moved through this group of people like she’d always belonged here. So did he. He just hadn’t known it yet.
A year ago, he’d been standing just outside the circle.
He wasn’t outside anything anymore.
One of the dogs hit him in the back of the knee, and he reached down without looking and scratched behind an ear. Elin’s fluffy companion was already sprawled in the last of the evening sun, unbothered by anything.
“Toast!” Alyssa announced, appearing with a glass raised and her small daughter on her hip. “Before Sinner burns the pizza.”
“I’m not burning the pizza,” Sinner said without turning from the grill.
“He’s burning the pizza,” Con said.
Ash moved out onto the patio and found Ellory at the edge of it, standing a half step back from the group with her eyes moving over all of it, like she was trying to memorize everything.
He came up behind her and tucked her against his side. She leaned in without hesitation, and he felt the familiar settle of it. A year of that and it still hit him in the chest.
“You’re doing the thing,” he said.
“What thing?”
“The memorizing thing.”
She looked up at him, glowing with happiness. “Maybe I am.”
He pressed his mouth to her temple. He’d never quite believe that she was here and she was his.
“Toast!” Alyssa called out again.
Ash watched his team gather. Chase tucked his wife against him with his daughter between them, as Dante and Kennedy wound together on the bench with their newborn son cradled in Kennedy’s arms. Mason and Elin. Henner and May. Steele and Izzy. And Sinner and Opal. Con stood at the center of it with Sophie pressed to his side, looking over them all.
Con raised his glass.
“To Charlie team.” He paused. “To what we built here. To the ones who didn’t make it back”—the weight of that moved through all of them—“and to every damn thing waiting for us when we do.”
Ash raised his water, staring into Ellory’s eyes as he drank.
Then Con’s phone buzzed. The sequence he knew better than his own heartbeat moved through the patio, and every manon the team straightened at the same moment—because it was what they were.
