“I’m not leaving,” I whisper.
Rhys’s eyes search mine quietly. “No,” he agrees. “You’re not. And neither am I.”
Epilogue
SLOANE
Two weeks later, the Jeep still isn’t completely free.
Rhys says the mountain’s “thinking about it,” which apparently passes for optimism in Hollow Peak.
“Good thing I got the extra rental insurance.”
“Good thing,” he snorts, shaking his head.
I stand beside him near the edge of the washout, arms folded against the early morning cold while fog drifts low between the pines. The Wrangler sits half-buried in mud below us, exactly where it’s been since the storm, one tire finally visible again after three straight days of digging, winching, and Rhys swearing creatively at geology.
“You know,” I say dryly, “most people would call this totaled.”
Rhys tightens the cable another inch. “Most people don’t know Jeeps.”
“That sounds like a cult.”
“Pretty much is.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. The sound hangs strangely in the mountain air. Still unfamiliar enough that Rhys glances at me like he’s surprised to hear it, too.
He looks better. Not healed. I’m not sure men like Rhys Ward ever heal cleanly. But he’s lighter somehow and more present.
He sometimes sleeps now, though not always. And he still wakes at sudden thunder. When helicopters pass overhead or radios crackle unexpectedly, his eyes narrow, jaw tensing. And he still carries on entire conversations in silence.
But he always comes back to me.
The article I’m working on sits open on my laptop. The cursor blinks at the end of the last paragraph, unfinished.
My eyes sweep to the window where fog drifts across Hollow Peak, as if the mountain itself has finally exhaled.
I take a deep breath and then reread the piece. The official reports called the ambush a failed extraction during a rapidly deteriorating operation in hostile territory. One where multiple Marines got killed, and others returned carrying injuries no report could fully document.
That part is true.
I wrote about fractured intelligence. Impossible command decisions. The burden left on survivors forced to choose between orders, instinct, and the men beside them.
That part is true, too.
What I don’t write is Phoenix… not all of him. Not the pieces I still don’t understand, the ones I likely never will.
Not the possibility that my brother stepped willingly into something larger than the rest of the team understood. That he made choices in those final hours that cost lives based on a terrible, impossible calculus I can’t solve because I don’t have all the variables.
And not the look on Rhys’s face when he finally told me. Because some truths don’t belong to the world. Some only belong to the people who survived them.
I stare at the blinking cursor. The families deserve answers. But I’m no longer sure anyone survived with enough truth to give them.
After weeks here—after hearing the cracks in the survivors’ voices, after watching Rhys wake from nightmares he still can’t escape—I no longer know if every truth heals the people left behind. Sometimes survival depends on the story you can bear to live with.
The floor creaks quietly behind me. Pine and leather thread the air. I don’t turn around. I don’t have to.
Rhys pauses in the cabin door. He still carries silence carefully like it bruises easily.
