Page 388 of Romeo

I looked up at my husband. “You meant it?”

His brows drew together. “That usually requires context, Cher.”

“About teaching me to shoot.”

Understanding spread across his face. Then came the grin. The one that had caused my biological father to name him Romeo long before he ever knew me.

“Oh, I meant it.”

“How soon?”

“First fuckin’ thing.”

“Before coffee?”

He looked genuinely offended. “I said I’d teach you to shoot, not commit a crime against humanity.”

I smiled.

Home.

For most of my life, that word had belonged to places and people I eventually lost.

This time, home wasn’t a place I could lose. It was Jasper. As long as I had him beside me, it didn’t really matter where we ended up.

EPILOGUE

Fiona

A few months later...

The cemetery had gone so quiet that I could hear the wind worrying at the flowers.

Hundreds of people stood beneath a colorless sky, close enough that shoulders nearly touched, yet no one seemed willing to disturb the stillness around the grave. Leather cuts disappeared beneath black coats. Men I had learned could fill a room without raising their voices stood with their heads bowed beside others who carried power in quieter ways. Some had come from across the country. Some from much farther. Looking at them, I wondered how many had ever spoken to the person inside the casket.

Probably fewer than I would have expected.

It didn’t seem to matter.

Jasper’s hand was wrapped around mine, hidden between us, his thumb moving over my knuckles every so often as though he could feel when my thoughts wandered somewhere I wasn’t ready to follow.

Near the grave, a mother cried.

I’d noticed her before the service began and kept finding my way back to her. Someone stood close enough to steady her when her knees threatened to give, but there were certain kinds of grief nobody could hold for you. It showed in the way she looked at the casket, as if everything around it had blurred until there was nothing left in the world except the impossible fact of it being there.

For some reason, I thought of Kyllian sitting across from me weeks earlier.

She hadn’t told me about our mother all at once. The pieces were coming slowly, usually when neither of us was looking directly at the other. A sentence here. A memory there. Enough for me to understand that when Kaitlyn disappeared, Kaylah hadn’t simply lost track of a baby and moved on.

She had grieved me.

I had spent most of my life believing the people I lost were the ones who left holes in me. It had never occurred to me that somewhere, before I was old enough to remember, I had left holes of my own behind too.

Watching the mother by the grave, I found myself wondering what Kaylah had done with hers. There had been no casket for her to stand beside. No marker carrying the name of the daughter she lost. No place to bring flowers or direct all that pain when it became too much to hold.

Only absence.

Jasper’s fingers tightened around mine.