Page 62

Epilogue

Six Months Later, Sonoma

The sky is awash in shades of pink and gold, the evening so clear I can make out the bridge across the bay miles away where the Sonoma Mountains slope into the sea.

A breeze whips over the mountaintop, dissipating the heavy herbal smoke that unfurls from the stick of sage the Unitarian minister waves overhead.

I pull my trench coat tighter against the sunset chill as he chants in an unfamiliar language, his white robes rippling in the wind. Laurent circles his arms around me from behind, and I lean my head against his solid chest.

The group Samira and Gisèle have gathered to bid farewell to Tyson isn’t large, consisting of his parents and a few other business associates and friends, his ex-wife, the woman he had a child with out of wedlock, Allison, Laurent, and me.

Benji and Alex are with the rest of the children in the sprawling farmhouse at the bottom of the hill, having pizza and getting to know one another.

My boys took the death of the father they’d never known harder than I’d expected, but they were buoyed by the news of three half-siblings, and their mothers and I plan to get the kids together again to give them the opportunity to have a relationship with one another.

Notably missing from this gathering are Cody, who is at the beginning of his prison sentence, and Jennifer. They are no longer together, and Samira didn’t feel it was appropriate to invite Jennifer after all the damage she caused.

But Jennifer wasn’t completely abandoned.

Ian’s notebooks were recovered from Tyson’s safe, and it turned out that the solution for the pollution problem Tyson had been falsifying environmental reports to cover up was in the notebooks all along.

Allison came up with a plan to pay Jennifer—or rather, her son, Ian’s beneficiary—a hefty sum for the use of the technology that included shares in the company.

This lessened the guilt I felt about the money my children and I inherited from Tyson, though I’ve yet to spend any of the half million dollars that landed in my account once his affairs were settled last month.

The boys still don’t know they’re multimillionaires. I’ve told them they’ll be able to go to college anywhere they want, but I plan to keep the weight of the privilege they’ll now have access to off their shoulders until they’re strong enough to bear it with grace.

Otherwise, their lives are not terribly different, except for the additional time I have with them since I’ve added three more agents and two assistants to my company, and the man who is often in our house.

If things continue as they are, Laurent and I will likely buy a home of a more comfortable size for the four of us sometime in the future, closer to the beach where we surf. But there’s no rush.

“I ask you to bow your heads for a moment of silent reflection as we remember Tyson Dale,” the minister says, handing the urn to Samira.

I think of Tyson, the boy with big dreams who I’d been so smitten with in high school, the young man desperate to prove himself who’d broken my heart, and the billionaire who’d changed the world for the better but carried such darkness in his soul.

It’s poetic justice, really, the corrosive nature of the knowledge that he didn’t do the one thing that brought him notoriety and success.

His deception became a cancerous tumor, crowding out all the light in him, withering his self-confidence and fueling the fire of his insecurity, which raged until his heart was charred.

Samira’s black maxidress billows around her as she walks to the edge of the bluff, where she reaches into the urn and casts a handful of ashes into the fading evening sky.

Some have called Tyson’s death at Cody’s hand fate, some karma; but if that’s true, it was a fate they authored by their actions, a karma of their own design. Both brothers made the choices that defined them, as did I, as do all of us.

The ashes scatter on the breeze, whisked over the canyon by the wind. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the minister says.

The days between? Well, I suppose we are condemned to be free.