I’m smiling as I snatch up that phone on the very last ring, click the connect button, and breathlessly answer, “Hello?”
Epilogue: Big Day (Oliver)
Four Years Later
I never thought this day would come.
It’s a risk.
I know it’s a big damn heaping risk.
Then again, so was that note we left with our daughter on a cold, soul-sucking Seattle day when hope seemed like the farthest thing.
I’ve got to say she’s worth it.
And so is my wildcat.
A lot has changed since that one fateful phone call.
It’s been nearly four years of brief coded messages. All sent by anonymous chat rooms over TOR browsers on the dark web, where anything you say disappears in seconds, leaving not a single data packet anyone can trace.
You want to know the best part?
It was Mandolin’s idea.
Even if she was raised in a normal life with good adopted parents, sent to a fine school, allowed to be a blessedly normal girl…
She’s still our daughter.
Wickedly smart, with brains that are just a tad scary.
But it’s not terror I’m feeling today as I watch Fuchsia nervously clatter around our homey little cabin.
It’s love.
Both for her, and for a nineteen-year-old girl I’ve never spoken to directly but that I can’t help but love when it’s hardwired in my genes.
I never thought Fuchsia Delaney would take to the rustic Alaskan life the way she has.
Of course she still wears her designer brands in sleek black around the house, protecting her clothes with kitschy aprons in both front and back when she helps me with dinner.
Of course she keeps her stylish little bob cut razor trim.
Of course she won’t even vacuum the floor without those red-bottomed heels she loves so much or help prep salmon for the frying pan without a piece of that cheap pink candy poised between her teeth.
What can I say? Life’s been cozy with just the two of us.
And right now, the woman I once thought had a heart of ice and a mind of steel is fluttering over arranging throw pillows, trying to make sure the cottage looks picture-perfect for Mandolin’s arrival.
The entire two-bedroom place smells like my baking. Wild blueberry muffins, just in case Mandolin’s hungry.
Fuchsia’s put on coffee, tea, imported cocoa, the works.
Hell, she’d probably whip up a perfect espresso if Mandolin asked.
She’s also laid out quilts in stylish patterns—if anyone could find designer quilts, it’s Fuchsia Delaney—and a bowl of fancier candy in pink wrappers from some shop named Sweeter Things out in Washington.
She’d insisted, in fact, even though we try to avoid online orders and mail-order packages as much as possible. Maybe it’s paranoid, maybe it’s not.
Galentron may be long dead, the real Leland Durham enjoying his forever stint in a Federal Supermax, but there are plenty of people with the same agenda who’d kill to know the things we do.
After everything we’ve suffered, I’ll be damned if we ever have to face down another stone-faced squad of corporate agents or foreign intelligence operatives who’d love to milk us for everything we’ve got and then shove us into the nearest hole with a clean piece of lead in our heads.
Besides, we’re not the only ones who could get hurt.
Which is why we were so careful when Mandolin reached out to us from her college to let us know she wanted to see us.
To know us.
To call us her parents.
And a summer trip after her first year at university was the perfect cover. She’s studying wildlife conservation. Good thing Alaska’s reserves are a common place for students in her program to come and learn the basics in the field. And if she happens to stumble on a cabin outside Fairbanks while she’s out hiking and exploring, well…
It’d be awful rude of Alan and Laura Wellburton not to let a girl in from the wild for a warm drink, now wouldn’t it?
Still, when there’s a light tread on the front step, just right for a lean, wiry nineteen-year-old girl, when there’s a knock on the door in the three-two-four pattern we agreed on as our code—
Fuchsia and I both still go stiff, her hands jutted out from her sides as if about to reach for a weapon, mine clenching into fists.
Old habit.
We exchange tense glances.
Then laugh, both slumping, while Fuchsia presses a hand to her chest, then straightens, smoothing her bare palms over her long-sleeved, sloop-shouldered black sheath dress. I give her a quick squeeze.
“Go, wildcat. I’m right behind you,” I whisper, raking my stubble against her snowy throat.
I smile. That’s one thing Alaska’s changed.
She hardly ever wears those killer black gloves anymore.
I get to touch her skin. Lace our fingers together.
Trace my thumb over the heavy platinum of that ring on her finger. The same ring I hunted down and brought her after so many years through a dozen aliases and half-lives.
I stroke her warmth.
A warmth that never died, no matter how she—or anyone else—tried to kill it.