I’m happy for them. I might not ever be on speaking terms with Agnes again, and I still low-key hate her guts, but … I guess we came to some kind of a truce. When Wes kicked them out of my house after the riot, Jimbo forced Agnes to apologize for having Wes arrested and for tying me up, and I apologized for knocking her out and stealing their truck. But I did not apologize for running over Carter’s foot. He deserved that shit.
Carter ended up getting a job as a police officer, and get this, his first assignment as a rookie is to patrol the area around the Pritchard Park Mall and make sure there’s no resurgence of Bony activity. He’s a real mall cop now! Q would die! Actually, I’m sure she already knows. Her mattress is probably a regular stop on his route. Gross. They deserve each other.
My phone dings from somewhere inside my diaper bag.
“Hold on, little lady,” I say, pinching my munchkin’s toes. “I just gotta … err …” I dig around in the bottomless bag as Lily watches me in amusement. “Got it!”
I yank my phone out and illuminate the screen, giggling at Michelle’s all-caps text.
THREE MONTHS OF MATERNITY LEAVE IS BULLSHIT. IS IT NEXT WEEK YET?
I smirk and drop the phone back in my bag. I always thought I would go to school to become a nurse like my mama, but I think I’ve seen enough bloodshed for one lifetime. After the Green Mile riot, Michelle insisted that I keep working as her co-reporter and personal assistant. I couldn’t tell her no after everything she’d done for me, but I also realized that I didn’t want to. Nobody had ever listened to me until Michelle handed me a tube of red lipstick and a microphone. She showed me that I don’t have to roll over and let bad things happen to me anymore. To the people I love. I can fight for them with nothing more than a camera and a press pass.
Only now, I do it under my new name, Rain Parker, instead of Stella McCartney.
My mama’s wedding rings gleam on my left hand as I walk my short nails up baby Lily’s chubby thigh. I blow a raspberry on her squishy cheek and feel my insides turn to mush when she lets out a tiny, breathy giggle.
I had no idea that Wes had saved Mama’s rings for me until he surprised me on Mother’s Day, a few days after the assassination. He took me to the Fulton County Courthouse, and in the exact same spot where Governor Steele had sentenced him to death, Officer Marcel Elliott pronounced us husband and wife. When I asked Wes why he wanted to do it there, he said it felt like “a nice fuck you.”
And it did. It felt perfect actually. Lamar walked me down the aisle. Officer Hoyt and Officer MacArthur were our maid of honor and best man. Michelle and Flip were in the audience, taking pictures and videos, and Wes even invited his mama, who cried like a baby the whole time.
After Lily was born, Wes had a tattoo artist transform the wilted pink flower on his ribs into a vibrant orange tiger lily. He said he didn’t want to be marked by what had happened to his sister anymore. He wanted to move on. And a big part of that was letting his mama back into his life. Rhonda has stepped up and become the mother he and I both needed. She’s clean and sober, she has a job and an apartment, and she comes over for dinner every Sunday. We don’t let her babysit though. Wes’s trust only goes so far. Besides, we have Lamar for that. At least, until he goes off to college.
I turn my head and smile as Wes saunters over. He’s wearing his blue Hawaiian shirt—my favorite—and carrying a tray full of the world’s most mediocre barbeque. We don’t normally eat at the Renshaws’ place—things are still pretty tense between us—but today is special. This is the anniversary of the day we met, right here in this very restaurant—or as Wes likes to call it, the day he kidnapped me at gunpoint from Burger Palace. But he knows he saved me that day. I was as lost as a person could possibly be. My house was a crime scene. My parents, the victims. My friends were gone. My boyfriend had abandoned me. I was being jumped by half the town while high as a kite on my daddy’s pain pills. And the world was supposed to end in a matter of days. All I wanted to do was stay numb and die.
All Wes wanted was someone to help him survive.
But somehow, together, we figured out how to live.
Wes’s full lips curl into a smug grin the second he catches me staring, and my heart does a little backflip. I can’t believe I get to keep him. I can’t believe we actually got our happily ever af—
Without warning, the lights go out, and the doors on either side of the restaurant burst wide open. Police sirens blare, and blue lights splash across the darkened walls as hundreds of shoving, screaming bodies run full speed into the restaurant. The customers all around us stand up on their chairs and benches, and they’re all wearing riot cop gear—gas masks and shields and billy clubs and guns. When I look back at Wes, he’s gone, swallowed by the chanting, fist-thrusting mob.
Chairs and punches are thrown at cops. Tear gas and bullets fly into the crowd. Noxious smoke fills the room as Lily begins to cough and cry behind me.
I pull her blanket over her face and stand up on my seat, hugging the car seat to my chest as I try to find Wes in the crowd. I scream his name, but I can’t see or hear anything through my own stinging, watering eyes and the painful wails of my baby girl. I get closer to the edge of the crowd, searching through the blinding, burning smoke when someone reaches out and grabs me, pulling me in.
The crush of fighting, clawing, panicking bodies is so forceful that I can’t breathe. I can’t even move, except when they shove me in one direction or another. Someone climbs onto my back, trying to get above the crowd, and my knees buckle under the weight. I curl my body around Lily’s car seat, trying to protect her as feet and fists and billy clubs rain down on my head and back.
“Help!” I scream as loud as I can. “Help! I have a baby!”
Then, two hands reach out from the smoky darkness and grip me by the shoulders.
“Baby,” Wes whispers, gently shaking me. “You fell asleep nursing again.”
I open my eyes with a gasp to find a shirtless green-eyed man smiling down at me and a sleeping infant in my arms.
“Oh my God,” I cry, clutching Lily to my chest. “Oh, thank God.” My heart is pounding as my brain sluggishly tries to grasp the fact that we’re not going to be trampled to death.
“Another nightmare?” Wes asks, his dark eyebrows pulling together as he crouches down next to me.
I’m sitting in a rocking chair in my old bedroom—Lily’s room now—in the dark. My white nursing gown seems to glow in the moonlight, and my breast is still exposed from her midnight feeding.
I nod and reach a hand out to cup Wes’s concerned face. I thought the nightmares would go away after April 23, but they’re just different now. Instead of demonic horsemen, it’s real monsters. Ones we’ve already defeated whose ghosts now haunt us while we sleep.
But that’s okay. As long as I get to wake up in this beautiful dream, I don’t mind a few nightmares now and then.
“You okay?”
I smile and nod again. “Better than I was a few minutes ago,” I whisper, echoing the flirty response he gave me from inside his jail cell.
Wes smiles and kisses me on the forehead. “Here, I’ll put her down.”
He scoops the sleeping bundle out of my arms, and I watch, awestruck, as he lazily carries her across the room. She’s barely the size of one of his biceps, but he’s so gentle and loving with her. He kisses her fuzzy head before laying her down in the middle of her crib, his back muscles rippling as he leans over. Wes is wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants, and when he turns to face me, his lips curl into a sinister smirk. I follow his gaze down to my chest and laugh silently as I go to pull my nursing gown back up.