Page 16 of Born to Run Back

Epilogue

Everything After

Theo

Spring, five years later

The pressure against my chest was different now.

Not that smothering gravity of grief that had once robbed my breath, but the sweet, grounding warmth of Beck—four months old, his tiny body nestled against me like he was a part of my heartbeat.

His fist curled into the dark fabric of my shirt, his breaths syncing with mine as we followed the canyon road that had once changed our lives.

Mile marker eighteen appeared smaller in the daylight, somehow.

The guardrail gleamed, long since repaired, the scars in the earth softened, covered by fresh shrubbery and growth.

Wildflowers dotted the desert in impossible colors.

Orange poppies. Purple lupine. They turned a place that had once been a monument to loss into a quiet hymn of hope .

Aurora dashed ahead, dark curls bouncing, her tiny legs chasing sunbeams and lizards with the unwavering fearlessness of a three-year-old who had never known a world without security or safety.

“Daddy, why are we bringing flowers to the road?” she asked, turning back to us with those enormous brown eyes that were pure Wendy.

“To say goodbye to some important people,” I said, shifting Beck as he stirred against my chest. “People who helped Mommy and Daddy find each other, even though they never meant to.”

Beside me, Wendy carried the bouquet in her hands.

White roses and baby’s breath, just as she had the first time she’d visited the crash site.

Though her face was soft now, serene. The haunted edges had retreated, long gone.

Five years of therapy, of choosing light over some sick ritualized sorrow, had freed her from the need to turn her pain into a shrine.

We had debated whether to bring the children.

Whether to share this place with them. But we had decided that teaching them where we began, where we chose to heal, was more important than hiding the truth.

Beck and Delaney were a part of our story, part of the foundation our family rested on, even if our children wouldn’t truly understand that weight until much later.

“This is where you met?” Aurora asked, peering over the guardrail with that fearless curiosity that made my heart stop at least three times a day.

“This is where we met,” Wendy said, her voice steady. “A very sad thing happened here… but it led to something beautiful.”

I thought of the shrine we’d once built in our shared madness. Painted stones, flowers, a monument to pain, loneliness, and grief that had nearly consumed us. Now, only wildflowers swayed in the breeze; the desert had claimed the place back with quiet grace.

Dr. Probst and Lauren, our therapists, would have been proud.

We’d learned the difference between honoring memory and living trapped horrifically inside of it.

We had learned how to carry Beck and Delaney with us without building alters to our guilt, to our shame.

Healing, we had discovered, was not about decorating in the darkness.

It was about walking right through it, and then stepping into the sunlight.

Beck gurgled softly, content in his own little baby dream world.

He would grow up knowing the story of his name, the courage it honored, but he would not grow up under its shadow.

That was the gift we had promised both our children from the moment they were born: to give them love without the weight of ghosts.

Perhaps that was why we’d named Aurora, well, Aurora. Her name meant dawn. New hope.

“Can we leave the flowers now?” she asked, tugging on my pant leg, already fidgeting.

“Yes, sweetheart,” Wendy said, kneeling to place the bouquet against the guardrail. No shrine this time. Just a quiet thank you to the universe for allowing us to move on from this tragedy and find purpose in our lives.

And to Beck, the one who had died, not the one in my arms. To honor him, and the sacrifice he’d never known he was making. I hoped he was up there somewhere, knowing that he hadn’t had to become a doctor to save someone. Two someones.

As we turned back toward the car, Aurora’s small hand slipped into mine. I thought of an old Springsteen lyric about madness and salvation, the kind that had once felt like prophecy. But the words that rose through me now were different. Wiser. Gentler.

“We learned to live with the sadness,” I said quietly, mostly to myself, “and to love without the madness.”

Wendy heard me anyway. She always did.

“Springsteen?” she asked, grinning wide.

“Modified Springsteen,” I said, and her laughter rose brightly and effortlessly into the desert air.

Wendy

The drive home wound us through the heart of our little desert city, past the coffee shop where we’d somehow survived our second first date, past the bookstore where Theo had first read me poetry, past all the ordinary places where two broken people had slowly remade themselves.

Aurora sang breathily in her car seat, turning the morning into a fairytale of flowers and lizards and “the road where Mommy and Daddy met.” Beck slept on from his infant seat, dreaming in the quiet rhythm of the drive.

I caught their reflections in the rearview mirror.

Our children, born from love instead of pain, named for hope instead of grief…

and felt a deep, unshakable peace with the beginning that had once almost broken me.

Beck Foster and Delaney Lewis had not left us with a shrine; they had left us with a doorway.

A first chapter. A reason to become the people our love needed us to be.

Theo’s hand found mine across the console, his touch calloused, familiar, and warm.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, one hand on the wheel.His wedding ring glinted in the sunlight.

“About all of it,” I said, absently turning my own wedding ring on my finger. “How close we came to losing ourselves trying to find each other. How we had to learn the difference between being saved… and saving ourselves.”

“And?”

“And how grateful I am we were brave enough to start over. To do it right.”

“It led to them,” Theo said, glancing at the rearview mirror. At our children. Our babies. Still small, still so impossibly young. And yet, their existence had given us new purpose in life, a new reason to keep fighting for tomorrow.

“Yes,” I agreed. “It did.”

Our home waited at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, painted sage green, surrounded by the desert garden Theo had been coaxing into bloom: marigolds and brittle bush, palo verdes spilling golden petals into the walkway. A place where life thrived against all odds.

Inside, the walls housed my new paintings.

Landscapes awash in light. The canyons where we had hiked.

The overlook where Theo had finally kissed me again, choosing joy over pain.

The sunrise from our bedroom window, painted in the hush of early feedings with a newborn Beck, when the world felt boundless and new.

Aurora sped off to her playroom, already mentally planning her next story. Theo carried our son to his crib, and together, we watched the small miracle of his breathing in the dappled afternoon light.

“Do you think we’ll ever tell them?” I asked. “The whole story?”

“The parts that matter,” he said, drawing me against his warm, wide chest. My favorite place to be in the world. “That sometimes the worst things lead to the best things. That love is worth fighting for. That healing is possible.”

“Together,” I added.

“Together,” he echoed.

I leaned into him, into this life we had built by choice, by courage, by the hard, quiet work of healing.

This was the gift we had made from our loss: not a shrine to sorrow, but a home filled with laughter and art and history, with small hands reaching for ours, with love that no longer burned us alive.

Theo sometimes quoted that song, the Springsteen one which featured a different Wendy, a Wendy like the one I used to be. But we weren’t the people in that song, not anymore.

Because we had learned to live with the sadness—and in the dazzling light of this life we’d built, love had no need for madness at all.