Page 153 of The Ashes of Summer

Ash. That's all any of it's going to be.

He spent years trying to build something permanent. He tried to build it out of me.

He doesn't get permanent.

He gets ash.

I lean back into his chest and he holds me again, and we stand there in the middle of the kitchen in the thin afternoon light with the stain still on the floor and the dried-up coffee on the counter and all the ordinary evidence of a life interrupted.

And slowly, very slowly, something in me begins to let go.

Not heal. Not yet. That's a longer road and I know it.

But let go.

Like a breath I've been holding since the night that helicopter disappeared into the fog, finally finding its way out of me.

"I'm glad we're home," I say quietly.

Jacob presses his lips to the top of my head.

"Me too, baby," he says. "Me too."

Epilogue One - The World Didn’t End

Summer

The good thing about the milkshake stand in the mall is that it never changes.

Same neon menu. Same sticky laminated tables. Same smell of strawberries and sugar and fries drifting through the air.

For the first time in months, something feels normal.

I walk toward the booth with Constance and Adelaide beside me and silently thank every God in existence that our corner is empty. Not that it's surprising at ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning. Most people are at work.

Meanwhile we're here, pretending our lives didn't completely implode and rebuild themselves in the space of a few days.

Oliver—the guy who's worked the milkshake counter since we were teenagers—grins the second he sees us.

"Well, if it isn't trouble times three."

"Well, you somehow managed to get even more handsome, Oliver," Constance says smoothly, leaning against the counter.

He laughs nervously.

Still terrified of her after all these years.

I order my usual strawberry and cream while Constance gets the horrifying combination of banana and cookie dough she's currently obsessed with, and Adelaide sticks with vanilla because, according to Constance, she's ‘emotionally incapable of making chaotic choices.’

Once we slide into the booth, something strange settles over me.

For a few minutes I almost feel eighteen again. Like my life isn't split into before and after. Like I'm just another girl sitting in a mall with her friends talking absolute rubbish over milkshakes.

Adelaide stirs hers slowly with her straw. "So…"

Then nothing.

Constance groans. "Ugh. This is weird."