Burlap

Epilogue

Here we are, sweetlings. The very last of Burlap. I must stress that this chapter was a RUSH job. Therefore, expect lots of boring telling and yucky awkward wording and some possible repeated phrases I would have caught if I hadn't rushed it. It will be edited, obviously, but probably not on Wattpad. The editing and addition/removal that will polish the thing up will be reserved for the copy I plan to publish in the future. 

I can't thank you guys enough for the awesome support you've given, that I've never had in real life. I'm sure many of you have seen the slight eyeroll of disbelief when you tell someone you want to be an author, and as discouraging as that can be, the overwhelming kindness and support you all have given on Wattpad has made every single keystroke worth so much more. 

Without further ado...

Bacon sizzled on the stove, the hot grease popping and hitting my knuckles in tiny specks. I stirred the scrambled eggs in the skillet on the opposite burner, grinning to myself while I hummed along to the new song on the radio. Heavy boots stepped along the wooden floor behind me. Floors that had taken four months of the two years since Rosenton had burned to the ground to repair and make sturdy. Luckily, the old mining town Robbie had secured for the five of us was several states away and had only been recently abandoned due to emptied mines. According to him, the workers had been so convinced that the mines would produce for decades that they’d built lives for their families by them, only for the shafts to run dry in a few short years, forcing the families to uproot and move where money could be made again. We’d only had to make minor repairs to most of the houses, but electricity and running water and gas had been a tricky affair to orchestrate. They’d required falsified documents that hid us from anything to do with the Rosenton fire.

Those documents were what John and I had used to marry, only a couple months after our escape. I suppose going through something as harrowing as what we’d seen at Rosenton really put how short life was into perspective, and we wasted no time dancing around what we already knew we wanted. We even had our first date the day after the courthouse wedding, and we hadn’t looked back since.

George and Lottie had remained close. Too close for my liking, but Lottie was a stubborn girl who still believed with all her heart that George hung the moon and stars. He preferred it that way, and manipulated her with a scary excellence into all but worshipping him. I suspected he’d twisted her mind and abused it so much that she truly thought she couldn’t live without him, but our position in life was already so precarious that none of us dared to rock the barely floating boat. Instead, Esther, John. and I came to the unspoken agreement that we’d leave them be unless he hurt her or she became unhappy. So far, neither had happened. Lottie seemed content to be his shadow, his pet, and to give all of herself for him. It broke my heart, but I was too chicken to talk to her about it. Something I knew I’d regret in my later years, but just couldn’t seem to make myself act on it. I rationalized it by telling myself he’d helped her beat anorexia, and that she was a young girl still, only sixteen to his eighteen, and she would see him for what he was in time, and then we could support any decision she made from there.

I hadn’t heard a peep from Power, nor felt or seen her presence since that fateful day either. I’d come to a strange, unexplainable understanding, though, that somehow my defiance and willingness to kill her had somehow melted her essence into mine. I’d gone over the logistics in my head too many times to count, laying awake at night, trying to figure out exactly what had happened to her, to me. The Hyde to my Jekyl had disappeared, but had she really? I couldn’t express the sensation to John, though God knew I tried, but the fact was that I could actually feel all the things I hadn’t felt before. Things like confidence, defiance, and fearlessness, which had only manifested through Power or performance before, finally appeared within my own mental capabilities. Even better, the pieces of Old Kate, the timidness, kindness, and cautiousness, seemed to balance our the intensity of those newer emotions, and vice versa. I was made whole, without even knowing I wasn’t whole before.