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When Joe returns from the diner restroom Nina is hugging Joon-gi.

He watches them for a moment, almost outside it all. It’s strange that the worst moments of his life are now so fused with the best.

They were offered the chance to relocate together. To give it a shot and if being stabbed by your witness protection spouse and still wanting to be with her wasn’t grounds enough for commitment then Joe isn’t sure what could be.

Nina didn’t want to be alone, and he didn’t want to be without Nina. It was a simple choice. After all he’d already followed her into hell and back—what was moving to Charlotte?

Joon-gi catches Joe’s eye and breaks away from Nina’s embrace. He offers an outstretched hand to Joe, emotion thick in his eyes. The men shake hands and then Joe pulls him into a hug of his own. Nina tumbles in too, and then all three of the survivors are hugging, laughter coming in body-shuddering jolts among them.

They have made it, and they feel it to their very cores.

When the embrace subsides, they sit and talk, the waitress bringing a third fork and the hours rolling by.

—

It’s only on the drive back to Charlotte that it hits Nina. As they roar down the highway, their smiles slip slowly from their quiet faces and Joe clasps his hand into hers almost subconsciously.

The game is over, the music has finally stopped, and this is where she landed.

The meaning of everything seemed so clear in the house: stay alive, don’t die. It was easy in a sense.

Because now what is she supposed to do?

Outside the house the structure of things loosened, the rules were less obvious, life was opaque and uncharted territory. The clarity and importance of her every move seemed lessened, the point of it all ultimately unknowable.

Nina felt real life flooding back in, the everyday weight of it, the normality of it. And it scared her.

She watches the pavement blur past, and for the first time in her life she truly understands her father, the reason he worked so hard, kept so busy, built a house of escape rooms—because he understood how important distractions, complexity, challenge, and games were. To know the rules, to follow them and triumph. Life isn’t like that.

He was left alone with a child, this brilliant man, his wife gone, and he could have sunk under the heft of that but he didn’t; he swam, and he created, and he built a house that made life the ultimate prize. And though the original idea was warped by others, twisted into something else, Nina couldn’t argue with the fact that she had never prized her own existence as highly as in that house. That house had made her fight for her life and every problem she had ever had before then or after would be nothing against that.

Nina turns to look at Joe, his handsome, kind face in profile, unknown thoughts at work behind his eyes.

Now the game is over and it’s just them; them and their hard-won lives, their fledgling love, and a cozy two-bed in Charlotte.

And just as the terrifying fear of that floods into Nina a spike of adrenaline kicks it back and away.

Because—maybe normality is okay. Maybe it is enough.

Nina feels a bright twinkle of hope.

They are survivors, she knows that now, and if life isn’t enough, they can always make it a game.