And for the first time in my life, I am not looking for the exit. I am not waiting for the floor to give way. I am not counting the ways this will end.
I am just here, on this roof, with this woman I love, her hand in mine, and whatever comes next stretched out in front of us. For once, for the first time, I am not afraid of it.
Epilogue
Zane
Five years later
The creek behind the house moves slowly tonight. Not lazy. Just steady. The way things move when they have found their rhythm and stopped fighting it.
It runs behind the back fence, half-hidden by reeds and old trees, water slipping over stones with a sound I never would have noticed when I was younger. Back then, quiet made me twitch. Quiet meant something was coming. A door. A fist. A voice from the hallway deciding the room needed pain in it and me choosing it as the most convenient place to put it.
Now it sits quietly beside me and no longer asks for blood anymore.
That still gets to me some nights.
Not in a bad way, but simply as something you never expected to have, sitting so ordinarily in your hands that you have to look at it twice to make sure it is real.
It still feels strange that an old man once looked at a kid digging through his skip and saw something worth keeping.
On nights when I can’t make sense of it, I sit out here, listen to the creek, and remind myself that Rainer never once needed a reason I could understand. He just decided.
I sit in the old wooden chair under the back porch, one boot braced on the step, the other planted in the dirt. The evening air smells of cut grass, damp earth, and the faint smoke from the fire pit I forgot to clean out yesterday because my three-year-old daughter decided the entire afternoon needed to be dedicated to the serious and urgent business of finding ladybugs.
We found two.
One was dead.
She named it Kevin anyway and cried for ten solid minutes when I told her Kevin had gone to bug heaven.
Then Skylar told me I was shit at managing emotional crises and took over.
I lift my head. The sky is bruised purple above, the last thin strip of orange vanishing behind the hill. Lights glow through the kitchen window behind me. Warm and soft.
Home.
I still notice it sometimes.
The word itself. The way it sits in my mouth now, without any weight attached to it, without the old flinch that used to come with anything too good to trust.
Home.
Not a room I am borrowing.
Not a mattress I am one bad decision away from losing.
Not a space I expect to be told to leave the moment I breathe wrong, want too much, or need too loudly.
Home. Mine. Ours.
Rainer gave us this house. He also gave me the workshop. He gave me more than any man should ever give a half-feral little bastard he once found half-starved and angry enough to bite the hand offering help. And I still do not know what to do with the size of it all.
It has been two years since we buried him and I still pick up the phone some mornings to tell him something stupid. A customer tried to argue with me last week about a noise in his engine while standing beside a car that sounded like it was filing its own death certificate. The coffee machine in the workshop finally gave up after threatening to do so for half a decade, which Rainer would have called inevitable and I would have called personally offensive. I wanted to tell him both things, but I couldn’t, and it still gets me every time.
I glance down at the paper in my hand. Worn soft at the folds now, the edges thin from being opened and closed more times than I can count. I’m familiar with all the words. Every line. Every place where his handwriting grew thinner near the end, where his hand must have shaken, but his stubborn old-bastard pride would not let him stop until it was finished.
I no longer read it every day.
