Not guilt.
Not fear.
Peace.
Epilogue
Dani
Six Months Later
Logan likes to say I brought light into his world.
He says it as if it’s simple, like the light was simply there, something I carried in without effort. Like I just opened a door, and everything shifted in an instant.
But the truth is—
He’s the one who taught me what it means to live.
In the consistent ways he shows up. In the way he looks at me, like I don’t have to earn my place beside him. In the way he never asks me to be less, never asks me to be more—just… exactly who I am.
For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with that.
Being seen like that felt unfamiliar. Almost uncomfortable at first. Like I was waiting for the moment it would change, for the point where I’d have to adjust myself to keep it.
That moment never came. Instead, something else did; I softened.
The last six months haven’t been easy.
There were still long days at the public defender’s office. Cases still sat heavy in my chest long after I left the courtroom. In those moments, the weight of it all pressed in—the responsibility, the outcomes I couldn’t control, the lives that didn’t always bend toward fairness, just like before Logan.
That part of me didn’t disappear when things changed, but it shifted over time.
I stopped carrying it like it was mine alone. I stopped measuring my worth by how much I could bear, how far I could push before something gave out. But even as I continued to show up and fight, I no longer lost myself in it, because at the end of the day, I had something to come home to.
Not just a place.
A life.
Logan, standing at the stove with that same quiet focus, like making dinner is something that deserves his full attention. Harper, spinning through the living room, music playing too loud, laughter filling every corner of the house.
And me—
Right in the middle of it.
Not on the outside looking in.
Not waiting for permission.
Just… there.
My parents came around, slowly, but they saw the change before they understood it. Saw the way I stopped rushing through conversations, the way I didn’t answer every call with tension in my voice, the way I showed up to dinner without that constant edge of needing to prove something.
Then they met Logan, the man who listened when my father spoke, who asked questions instead of making assumptions. The man who stood beside me—not in front, not behind—like we were equals in something we’d built together.
They saw happiness I wasn’t trying to hide. The life that didn’t take anything away from who I was and what I could achieve, it added to it.
And slowly, they let themselves believe it too.
