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“So are you stronger now since she’s been born?”

“According to Miss Veda, yeah.”

I glanced at our daughter. “So you can find her too? The same way you can find Kaidence?”

“Yeah.” Pride crept into his expression. “Both my babies.”

I smiled through the remaining tears. “You really have a lot of people keeping you tied to this world now.”

“Damn right. I ain’t going nowhere easy.”

A wet laugh escaped me.

He kissed me softly. “I can’t promise you this shit is ever gonna be normal. We both know that.”

“I stopped expecting normal a long time ago.”

“Good, because you picked the wrong nigga for that.”

That made me laugh for real.

There were still moments when I had to remind myself that we had actually gotten a real ending to the part of Caspian’s story that had tortured us for six years.

The morning after the Halloween party, Miss Veda finally made good on what she’d promised. She returned Caspian’s remains, along with those of the two men killed protecting him, to an overgrown wooded area off an old service road on the outskirts of Hallowridge—miles from the mansion, somewhere the police had probably never thought to search.

A crew surveying the land discovered all three the following afternoon. After six years, their families would finally have answers too, even if they would never know how their loved ones had ended up there.

To anybody investigating it, the explanation seemed obvious enough.

Whoever killed Caspian had murdered him, taken his body somewhere isolated, and dumped him where they believed nobody would ever find him.

There had never been anything tying that stretch of land to Caspian, so it made sense that the original search hadn’t gone anywhere near it.

By then, six years had passed, so there wasn’t a body to bring home in the way people usually imagined one. What they recovered were skeletal remains, deteriorated pieces of clothing, and enough evidence around them for investigators to know Caspian’s disappearance had never been voluntary… he had been murdered.

DNA and dental records confirmed what our family already knew.

Caspian Black had finally been found… officially, anyway.

The news hit Hallowridge fast.

Caspian had been missing for years, but once word spread that his remains had been recovered, it was almost as though the city remembered him all at once. People who hadn’t said his name publicly in years started posting old pictures. Men he had grown up with came out of nowhere with stories about shit they had done together. People left flowers, candles, liquor bottles, pictures, and handwritten notes outside the gates until Henrietta finally had somebody move everything to a designated area because the entrance to the property was starting to look like a memorial site.

The streets damn near flooded when his homegoing came.

Some people came because they had loved him. Some came because they had respected him. Some probably came because Caspian Black had been a name in Hallowridge long before he disappeared, and finding out six years later that he had been murdered made the story even bigger.

Henrietta chose to have his remains cremated. She said after everything her son had been through, she wasn’t putting him in the ground again.

I hadn’t argued with her.

Still, she gave everybody the chance to say goodbye.

We ended up having a full homegoing service: Closed casket, flowers everywhere, blown-up photographs of Caspian from different stages of his life, and enough people packed into the funeral home that they eventually had to start directing the overflow outside. His family and men from his past who I knew better than to ask too many questions about came dressed in suits and stood quietly near the back.

His homies, though?

They showed up deep… so deep that at one point I remember looking around and thinking Caspian would’ve had something smart to say about half the room suddenly owning black suits.