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Read on for a special second epilogue…

SECOND EPILOGUE

FORDE

Three years later

I’d arrived at work only five minutes ago and had stopped to open my business mail. In among it was a postcard from Cornwall addressed to the garage. I smiled in recognition, flipping it over to find a quick, scrawled note from Genny. When she wrote to me again, not long after Cameron’s attack, I’d decided to write back. We didn’t write constantly, but we’d stayed in touch over the years. She’d decided she wanted to go into social care and because she was obsessed with the TV show Poldark, she’d moved to Cornwall to do it. Genny now lived, studied, and worked in Newquay of all places. She was doing well and that’s all I needed to know. Barry hadn’t won.

Tucking the postcard into my pocket, I felt the vibration of a notification from my phone. Expecting it to be Cameron, reminding me of some obligation we had to friends or family (because it seemed like there was a birthday or anniversary or some celebration we needed to attend every other week), I jolted when I saw who the text was actually from.

I stumbled to a stop outside the already open doors of the garage as my pulse raced.

“Forde, you all right?” Pete called.

Pete had answered my ad for the live-in mechanic almost three years ago and the forty-nine-year-old had made my life easier ever since. We were training Allie, an eighteen-year-old islander, and it was a good working environment. Pete hadn’t told me much about his previous life and frankly I didn’t need to know. He was an excellent mechanic, a trained diagnostic technician, and all he’d told me when I hired him was that he was looking for a fresh start.

“Eh …” I reread the text message from the social worker. “I, uh, I have to go.”

“You sure everything is okay?”

I waved him off as I turned on my heel and ran.

Three years ago, while Cameron was still recovering from her knife wound, I’d proposed. I’d always imagined it would be kind of over the top. That maybe I’d wait until we returned to Torin’s resort, there would be candles and music and a stunning view … but after I nearly lost her, none of that mattered. I’d bought a ring and I’d proposed to her in her living room that night. Cameron had said yes before I’d even finished popping the question.

We married in a civil ceremony four weeks later because we couldn’t wait to start our lives together. Torin gave us the Montrose Suite again at the hotel for our honeymoon and we’d begun that night on a quest to get pregnant. Cameron and I had both agreed we just didn’t want to wait. We’d waited long enough.

For whatever reason, only a week after we tried, Cameron got it into her head that we needed fertility testing. I’d tried to talk her into waiting, to give it time to get pregnant, but she was adamant.

Our GP wouldn’t entertain it because we hadn’t been trying long enough to be concerned, but Cameron wouldn’t let it go, so I used my savings to get us into a private fertility clinic.

And thank fuck we did.

Cameron was experiencing declining fertility due to her age, which didn’t make it impossible to conceive but more difficult. But because I also had low motility, the two together did not bolster our chances.

After a lot of discussion, we both agreed that we would keep trying, but we would also start looking into adoption.

As a child who had been raised by someone other than my parents, I liked the idea of giving a child a home, one a million times better and more loving than what I had.

Cameron had a big heart, so it was an easy decision for her.

We’d been in the process for two and a half years, waiting for a child of our own. We hadn’t fallen pregnant in that time, so we knew this might be our only chance to be parents.

As I jumped into my truck toward the house Quinn had built for us, just five minutes down the road from his own, the last few years flew through my mind. It had been a whirlwind. Eighteen months after Cameron first walked with me into that police station to give DI Katherine Mulvaney her evidence against Greig Wallace, his case went to trial. It was a media furor. The paps returned to the island to dog Cameron and me, attempting to follow us when we traveled over to the Glasgow high courts to stand witness.

We met Rina and Caoimhe there because Caoimhe was also a witness to Kenan Reese’s confession. They seemed to be doing well, and it was startling how much maturing Caoimhe had done in such a short span.

Seeing Greig Wallace in that court for the first time in years made my skin crawl. He watched Cameron with undisguised malice that terrified and enraged me. Then when he got up to defend himself, he was all lies and cheeky charm, trying to convince the jurors that he couldn’t possibly be the type of man who would do that to women.

And his public defender tried to tarnish Cameron. Tried to make it out like she was some jealous, petty older woman who had been dumped and rejected, and this was her idea of revenge. Why had she broken into his flat with her now husband? Cameron stayed cool and calm, impressively so considering how much I knew their questioning must be pissing her off.

When I got to the stand, I relayed everything we’d found in his flat.

They tried to make it out that I was just jealous because he’d been with Cameron and I’d wanted her for myself. That maybe we planted the evidence.

But their twisting of the facts was blown to shreds in the face of overwhelming physical evidence. His DNA was found on the victims and there was no getting away from that fact. While the discovery of the branding iron, hair, and knife in his attic were suggested to the jury to have been planted by us, that evidence still carried weight. The man who had specially made the branding iron had come forward as a witness to attest that Greig Wallace custom ordered it from him. Not so smart after all, eh? His arrogance was his fucking downfall.