If we ever find her.

Not that it even matters.

“This looks so goddamn fucking amazing,” I say, standing in the middle of the nearly finished kitchen. There are cabinets and countertops, and holes where all of the appliances are supposed to fit. It looks … grown-up and strange and not like anything I’ve ever been a part of. “Who’s going to cook in here? Hael? Aaron?”

“Well, it definitely won’t be me,” Vic says, and I snort in agreement. We’re both shitty cooks. Nothing has changed since high school. Not a single goddamn thing. Alright, nothing in regard to cooking. Plenty of other things have changed.

First off, the fingers of Havoc’s influence have crawled into every single corner of this city, every dark space or shadow that seemed off-limits before. With our money, with our experiences, we hold this place in thrall. Fortunately, since dealing with the GMP, things have been much quieter.

I almost miss being chased around by Sara Young. Almost.

“I’m happy to cook in here,” Aaron says, lifting up a bit of tarp and revealing the cooktop, embedded in the counter and ready to go. The double ovens are still missing though, and the fridge, and the dishwasher. “Shit, this is fancy.”

“We’ll cook together,” Hael informs him, making a picture frame with his fingers and squinting. “I can see it now: me in an apron, naked. My beautiful blond husband, Callum, standing by to massage my feet after I’ve cooked a hot meal.”

Callum snorts and flicks Hael in the back of his ear, making him wince and swat at him as he climbs up onto the counter, just to test out the crouching abilities of this new kitchen. Looks very crouch-worthy to me.

“I’ll eat the hot meal, and I’m cool with you cooking naked in an apron, but a foot massage? I don’t know about that. You’d have to really earn it.”

Hael throws a loose screw in Cal’s direction as Oscar pauses at the back windows, peering out into the yard and the gray mist drifting across the grounds. I move up to stand beside him, and he takes me in one arm, dragging me close and pressing his lips against the side of my head.

He’s gotten so much better about touch lately. So, so, so much better. One night, he even got drunk with Aaron and me and told us how he used to crave the pain of a tattoo, the pain of a piercing, because it was the only way he could fight back the nightmares of his mother’s cool arms around his neck or the feel of his father’s hands at his throat.

Things are different now. For all of us. When we’re all in bed together, I don’t see him shying away from touch anymore. He even lets the girls hug him now which is something I never thought I’d live to see.

Once we’ve spent an ample amount of time tramping around inside the house, we head back outside to where the girls are playing in the sun. I’m pleased to see them exploring the yard and ignoring their phones for once.

Shit, you sound like a fucking boomer already, Bernie. “Back in my day …”

But I don’t say anything, just try as hard as I can to keep the smile that’s slowly sliding from my face. Heather asks me to take her to Pen’s grave a lot, and that’s okay, I’ll go. I don’t mind. Even if I believe that my older sister has been reincarnated in some far-away place, and that she can’t hear us, it feels good to talk to her.

After all those visits however, I started to dislike the austerity of her grave, the prepaid plot with a family stone. Penelope’s epitaph was etched on one side of an obelisk, just a simple scrawl of her full name and the two most significant dates of her brief existence—dates that Pamela Pence formerly Pamela Blackbird was responsible for.

So I did something about that.

I stayed up every night for a week, curled up in a chair, poring over a poem that I scrawled in the notebook Aaron gave me. Even after all that work, I’m still not sure that I’m happy with it, but that’s the true curse of an artist, right? A constant running critique and questioning of your own work.

Anyway, I wrote a poem.

I never knew that missing hurt this much

Until you.

I never knew that love was a double-edged sword.

It cuts.

But the best parts of me are my memories of us.

Forever your sister, forever your heart.

It isn’t long, but I was limited by the size of the gravestone I was able to add to Penelope’s plot. Obviously, money wasn’t an issue, but nobody wants to read some gigantic, hulking piece of literature etched into the side of somebody’s grave. It just needed to be short and sweet and honest, and so that’s what I tried to do.

“Alright, let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say, gesturing at the girls to climb into the Eldorado.

We drive to Our Lady of Mercy, the cemetery where Penelope is buried, and I try really, really hard not to think of the Thing chasing me through these very gravestones.

The nine of us end up at her grave together, studying her new headstone which suits the space so much more than the plain and austere shimmer of the obelisk. After we’ve laid our flowers down and said some frilly, fancy words that are more for us than for her, the boys excuse themselves and I sit down with Heather.

I pull her close and I tell her about Pam. Not all the worst parts because she isn’t quite ready for that. But I explain to her that Pam and Neil hurt Penelope, and that they’re both gone now. Both of her parents are gone.

She sits in silence for a long, long time.

“Are you mad that I waited so long to tell you?” I ask, and I wonder if she hadn’t already Googled their names and found out. We try to keep tabs on the girls’ internet activity, but like, fuck, it’s so easy for kids to find ways around that shit. She could’ve seen news stories or headlines from anywhere.

Those first few weeks after the raid, the boys kept her offline completely, until some of the buzz died down. But still … I wonder how much she really knows.

“I’m not mad,” she admits after a moment, sniffling as I hug her close and we look at Penelope’s final resting place together. “Because you were trying to keep me safe.” She looks over at me and I wonder if she knows how much I truly love her. I tell her all the time, but you can never say that sort of thing too much. I only wish I’d savored it each time Penelope said those three little words to me. I love you. “I still miss them,” she hazards after a moment. “Mom and Dad.”

“You can miss them if you want,” I tell her, giving her another squeeze. “There’s no rulebook for grief.”

So we sit there together, and she tells me all her best and favorite memories of Pam and Neil, and then she starts to cry again and I let her. I let her and I hold her, and then we say goodbye to Penelope and head home for movies and popcorn and hair-braiding that Aaron is getting better at but that Victor sucks at.

The girls attend Oak River Elementary; the boys and I build an empire; our love blossoms and amplifies and turns the entire world into a dream that I never, ever want to wake up from.

Five years later …

Vera and I stop by the same rachet ass coffee place that has no name, just a sign in the window that reads Coffee, and we take our drinks across the street to the newly created park funded by some of the inheritance money.