Final Truth

Chapter 83: Epilogue

And it was in that moment she realized she was happy again, truly and completely as she looked around and marveled at the fact that she was alive, that she was present in the world and would fight each day until her happiness was safely permanent.

Smiling to herself, she looked back to the paper and continued to write, continued to burn.

What she wasn't aware of, however, was that she had caught the eye of a young man who briefly passed by.

He looked down at her, so concentrated on what she was writing, and felt wells of guilt spring to life within him. He knew he needed to say something to her, no matter if it had been months.

Noticing the slight shadow that had stopped at her feet, Julia looked up and saw him.

Saw the healthy color in his face, saw the sunlight making his hair shine like copper and his dark eyes seem honeyed. She saw guilt there too, saw everything he wanted to say to her in the roadmap that was his mind.

She found that she wasn't afraid of him, wasn't seeing flashes of the man he was and the atrocities he'd committed. She saw the new person he had become, and she understood the warm feeling that settled in the pit of her stomach for what it was:

She had missed him.

More than the person he used to be, more than the time they once shared together.

She just missed him.

"Hello, Peter."

She could tell he wasn't expecting her kindness, especially after the length of silence between them that spanned months. Months where she had been healing, months where he had been searching.

But he was here now.

"Hey, Julia. Do you...mind if I sit with you for a minute?"

"Not at all," she said, moving her paper out of the way so Peter could join her on the bench.

He settled in, and even though his face stayed trained on the street in front of them, she caught him sneaking looks at her from the corner of his eye, trying to analyze her mood so that he could find the right words to say. She knew it was a side-effect of the power he no longer possessed, but she waited patiently. He'd find the words eventually.

It took him a few minutes of silence to speak again.

"I've been meaning to talk to you for a while," he began. "And I know I'm probably the last person you'd want to speak with, especially with the way I last treated you, but I needed to apologize. I didn't mean to make you feel so bad about not telling me about my past."

"You had every right to be upset," Julia admitted. "I would be frustrated, too."

"I shouldn't have taken it out on you, though. Especially when Cade and Adam started telling me the same things you did, that there's a reason I can't know what happened to me. It's taken me a while to make peace with it, but I wanted to say sorry. You didn't deserve that, especially when I could see that you were struggling, too."

He met her eyes then, saw himself trapped inside the endless swells of green, and he felt that familiar feeling creep back in. It was a feeling that told him he'd looked into these eyes many times before, a feeling that hinted once, maybe they had been something.