“Come on, Ellie-May. You can do it.”

I held out my arms to my daughter as she lifted her bottom into the air and then straightened, so she was upright. She grinned widely at me then moved one of her chubby little legs, taking an ungainly step forward, before plopping back to her bottom on the sand.

I laughed and clapped my hands. “Hey, you did great. My clever girl.”

Something cold and wet pressed against the back of my neck, and I squealed before turning to see X pushing a cold bottle of beer into my hands. “Sand isn’t exactly the easiest of surfaces to walk on,” he pointed out.

“Maybe not, but at least it’s soft when she falls.”

Ellie-May had made extraordinary advances during the past year. She was still behind on a few developments, but overall no one would guess she almost hadn’t survived birth. She was saying words now—Mama and Dada, and even animals like bird and cat, which she pointed to excitedly as she formed her mouth around the sounds.

I missed Nicole with every single second that passed. Every cute thing Ellie-May did, I found myself wishing I could tell my sister about it. I’d taken a ton of photographs from my father’s house when we’d left, and I took those occasional quiet moments with my daughter to show her the pictures, pointing at Nickie’s face and telling her, “That’s your Aunt Nickie. She loved you more than anything.”

X and I were living the quiet life now. As his only surviving relative, I’d inherited my father’s estate, which included not only the house, but a number of other investment properties as well. I didn’t want to have anything that would tie me to the life he’d once lived, so, as soon as I was able to, I sold the house and the other properties. The money was enough to pay all the huge hospital bills off from Ellie-May’s birth and care, and the small amount left was enough for us to move to Mexico. Living was cheap here, and we were able to rent a small house and have enough to live on day to day. I’d handed all my father’s business over to Dylan Ferrera. I thought I could trust him to handle things fairly, without there being more bloodshed. Whatever my initial opinion of him had been, he’d proven himself to be a decent human being.

I knew at some point in the future we might have to think about going back to America, to get Ellie-May into school and try to integrate into normal life, but I couldn’t think about that right now. My grief still hit me when I least expected it, leaving me breathless and struggling. I found myself going over the last few minutes of Nickie’s life over and over, trying to think of something we could have done differently. I dreamed of telling her she couldn’t come with us when we’d still been at the house, but I knew if that had happened, I’d only have lost someone else. X, most likely. Or even my own life, together with my daughter’s. I tried not to dwell on the revelation my father had made right before he’d died, that Nicole had been the one to tell him about our mother’s affair and that I’d known, too. She’d had no way of knowing what his reaction would be, and, to her young mind, my mother’s affair probably had felt like a very real betrayal. She hadn’t known him then, had only seen him on the pedestal a daughter would often put a father. If only he’d accepted that love for what it was, instead of destroying everything.

I glanced over to where X was playing with our daughter in the sand. He freaked out if she so much as scraped her knee, and I knew he’d never do a single thing to hurt her. We were a family, the three of us.

“She looks like you,” X said, dropping onto the sand beside me and taking a swig of his beer.

I smiled. “No way, she looks like you.”

It was a favorite game of ours, arguing which of us our daughter looked like the most. In truth, with her jet black hair and bright blue eyes, she was the perfect combination of the both of us.

Ellie-May was a walking, talking show of our love for each other, a little girl who had fought her own battles, even at such a young age, and had survived them all. She gave me a reason to keep going, even after my heart had broken, and both she and X were doing everything they could to help heal that heart. It was working, and day after day, things were getting better.

No more crime. No more killings.

Just us.

 

 

THE END