You can raise three little girls even when you’re just barely past the little girl stage yourself. You can fall in love with five beautifully broken boys. You can wreak havoc and make chaos, chase mayhem and incite anarchy, and in the end, you can find your own sort of victory. Whether that means putting up wallpaper or running an underground that functions in the dark without being consumed by it.

There are still drugs in Springfield; there are still prostitutes; there are still murders.

But Havoc is always there, always watching. The hammer of justice is in our hands, and we’re not afraid to use it. There are no children being sold and no girls disappearing down the I-5 corridor. There are no cops whose hands are not tied to justice or Havoc or both.

Prescott High has been renovated, and it’s full of laptops and iPads and teachers with degrees who don’t beckon girls into selling their bodies on webcams. There’s a dance studio where Callum teaches little kids who can’t afford to pay for expensive classes in any of the Oak neighborhoods but whose hearts are so full and so ready to learn that they find themselves with scholarships to places far and wide.

“Bernadette?” Heather says, waving a hand in front of my face. Both she and Aaron are staring at me, waiting for me to come out of my reverie and remember that my little sister, the one I worked so hard to save, is graduating high school next week. Going to prom this week. She’s going to college in New York and I’m both sad and excited all at the same time. “You’re not writing poems in your head again, are you?” she asks, but I just give her a wry smile.

“Where’s Kara?” I ask instead, because I’m not ready to explain the full feeling in my heart just now. It’s bursting and overflowing and the only reason I’m not frightened by the intensity of it is because I’ve gotten used to feeling this way over the last ten years. Shit, the Havoc Boys—who now, really, can only truly be called Havoc Men—make me feel this way every goddamn day.

“Right here!” Kara says, coming down the stairs in a dress that’s black and sultry and much more like something I would’ve worn in high school than what Heather’s got on. She’s dressed in pink and sparkles, and I can’t help but wonder if, like her body spray, the dress is an ode to a sister that she doesn’t remember nearly as well as I do but misses all the same.

I smoke my cigarette as Kara bounces over and presses a kiss on my cheek, her floppy, curly chestnut hair piled into a bun but with tendrils that escape and spring against her cheeks and forehead in a way that reminds me of Aaron.

My eyes turn his direction as Kara offers him a kiss as well, clearly also attempting to make the great escape before the other boys find us. Only … it’s too late.

“I told them you two were trying to get out of here before they could grill your dates,” Ashley says in that smug fifteen-year-old way of hers, like she knows fucking everywhere. Heather and Kara both give her death glares, but Ashley doesn’t care. She’s so enamored with my boys that she slips up sometimes and calls them her dads in conversations with other people. She’s a bit of a snitch, too, when it comes to tattling on Kara and Heather, but we’re working on that.

“Not a chance in fucking hell,” Vic says, cigarette dangling from his lips. Ever year, I’m certain that he can’t possibly get more beautiful, that I’ll never be able to find him more handsome than I did the year before. And yet, year after fucking year, he proves me so wrong I could cry when I look at him. My husband. My boss. My protector. My emotional clone.

A knock sounds at the door, but I’m not surprised. In order for their dates to get up to the front door at all, they had to pass through the gate, past security. I’ve known for the last several minutes that they were on their way.

“I’ll get it,” Hael says with a Cheshire cat grin, chuckling as Heather groans and Callum perches on the staircase, a cruel smile painting his fairy-tale mouth. Oscar waits nearby, a brand-new iPad in hand, watching the door open with eyes the color of the full moon and twice as mysterious. “Well, hello there,” Hael drawls, dragging both Kara’s date and Heather’s date into the room by their wrists. “You must be Brody and Bailey. Nice alliteration by the way, any relation?”

The poor teenagers look half-ready to shit themselves already, so I step forward and give Hael a friendly slap on the shoulder.

“You’re scaring the fuck out of them,” I say, gesturing with the cigarette and wishing I’d dressed up in something even remotely resembling like, what a mom might wear. Then again, that’s sort of fucked-up, right? To assume that having a kid requires a change of style. I imagine that when the boys and I do start breeding like rabbits the way they’ve all been dreaming about for the last ten years, I’m still going to want to wear sweats with pink bats on them or cigarette pants covered in jack-o-lanterns. Anyway, when you’re the queen of Havoc, you can’t dress in mom jeans and chunky sweaters with cowl necks, now can you? “Hi there, I’m Bernadette; this is Havoc. And you’ve got nothing to fear as long as you don’t mess with our girls.”

Heather groans again and Kara buries her face in her hands for a moment, but hey, it’s better than if the boys do the talking. Callum is casually playing with a knife while Oscar makes notes on his iPad in just such a way that making notes is just as menacing as playing with said knife.

Aaron and I take a few pictures and then let the kids get on their way. What we don’t tell them is that they’ve got Havoc Crew members on their asses all night, wearing skeleton masks and waiting in the shadows. But hey, anything to keep them safe. That’s been the point of everything I’ve done up until this point.

When I flop onto the black jacquard couch later, it’s with a sigh of such intense relief that I couldn’t even begin to explain it. It’s like … I’ve been on a very specific journey for an entire decade, and that decade is now coming to an end. Heather is graduating, and she’s moving to New York for school while Kara starts college life in the dorms at the local U.

It’s almost like … I’ve hit a finish line somehow.

Heather made it; she’s safe; she survived.

You’d be so fucking proud of me, Pen, I think as I spot her ghost standing in the corner, smiling at me and wearing the prettiest pink skirt and the brightest pink lipstick and beaming like the whole world is on fire and burning just for us. There is no end to the things that I can do, that I can accomplish.

“I’ve always been proud, Bernadette,” she tells me as I choke on tears and try to hide my reaction from the boys.

Of course, that’s never a thing, hiding from them. Because they always know. Not once in the last ten years have I not felt seen by them. I rub absently at one of the scars on my shoulder where Martin’s bullet tore through, and I smile sadly at Pen’s ghost until she fades away with a wave, leaving empty space in my heart that I have no choice but to fill with love.

“You okay, wife?” Victor asks me, offering up a scotch that I accept between grateful hands. The booze burns on its way down, tasting like fresh fruit, butterscotch, and oak. It’s far nicer than the crap we drank in high school. That is, except for the one exception of the fancy stuff we stole from Coraleigh’s beach house. Fuck, that feels like it happened a million years ago.