In years hence, Severus will wonder how exactly he came to Spinner's End. He had merely thought home and to home he had gone: not the mansion he had shared with the corpse he has left behind in the crypt, but the childhood home they both had known.

It is intact, unlike much of Cokeworth. Lily's Fiendfyre took its toll, and the smell of smoke still lingers in the air. But that burned mansion was in the finer part of town. The slums are untouched.

Time moves strangely. He may have just sat down, but the vial is gone, and with effort he can recollect locking it in a drawer and vanishing the key to remove any temptation toward weakness. He sleeps, at some point, or perhaps dozes, or perhaps merely stares at the nicotine-stained walls, willing himself to stop thinking and very nearly succeeding. He wonders vaguely if he has wept, or will weep. He suspects he hasn't, won't. But there is no knowing for sure. There is no knowing anything for sure.

Regulus appears bearing food sometime after the light moves across the closed curtains once. Severus could not say how they tracked him down, and does not care to speculate. Regulus' scowling brother and the werewolf are in tow. The werewolf looks pitying; the younger Black brother looks fretful with heavy dark circles beneath his eyes; the elder looks stiff and tired. They've clearly had some kind of conversation about him and all of them wear the nature of it on their faces: that he is badly damaged in some obvious way, and they all know it. Regulus says hello and Sirius is chewing his cheek like he's angry and Lupin says something that contains the name of that damage, a name he'd rather forget, and Severus attempts to remove Lupin's skin with a particularly nasty spell.

Three on one are bad odds, nearly as bad as four on one, and Severus has not slept or eaten since-he can't remember, something has happened to his mind, but not since-and it makes him slow and stupid. Lupin tries to be gentle in subduing him, Sirius Black does not, and Regulus looks on aghast, but the result is the same: Severus ends up disarmed and scowling in an armchair.

"We are here to help you," Lupin says, his voice conciliatory, kind, gentle.

"You are unwanted," Severus snarls. "And unwelcome."

"I told you," the elder Black says, rolling his eyes back to his brother and stuffing Severus' wand in his pocket. "He's going to be difficult."

Regulus is wringing his hands again, plucking at a ragged fingernail frantically as it begins to bleed. "Severus, please listen, we understand what you must be feeling-"

"Spare me your sympathy," Severus says.

"Do you think you're the only one who cared about Lily?" Sirius shouts, a new kind of pain visible on his face.

Lily is the crux of the problem going on inside of his mind, but there are facts there, facts he can grasp and use as weapons. "It does not matter. She is dead, and beyond even your caring."

It fails utterly to have the desired effect, even with his voice flattened by Occlusion. Instead of fury or disgust or denial, they look on him with pity; even Sirius' features are contorted by it. Lupin appears nearly on the verge of tears.

It does not matter. Severus extends his hand, and puts all the hatred he can muster into his voice, which does not tremble in the slightest. "My wand."

They look at each other, and there is some communique that Severus cannot perceive-they are pathetic, concerned, useless, useless, useless.

Sirius comes to the fore. "Afraid I can't. Former Death Eaters who still have their magic aren't being allowed wands."

"As if it would do so much," Severus sneers, even though he feels his heart accelerate. "Children can do wandless magic."

"This doesn't have to be difficult," Lupin says, an edge of annoyance threading through his voice as he stuffs his hands into his pockets. "We don't have to treat you like a prisoner."

"But you will if you must, I take it?" Severus comes to his feet again, takes a step forward into the semicircle of his jailers.

"They want you in Azkaban. They want every Death Eater in Azkaban," Regulus says.

"Then why are you free?" Severus drawls, pressing his attack.

Regulus shrinks. "Because I-"

"Because Regulus was part of the war," Lupin says, sounding tired. "As were you, Severus-perhaps even more than Regulus, due to Lily's involvement, which is-"

Severus does not care to hear the end of the sentence, and he does not care to hear her name spoken by a beast like Lupin. The wan electric light flickers with the power as he draws it up. He makes a slashing motion with his hand and speaks the spell. Magic obeys: a bright welling of sudden blood, not across Lupins throat as he intended, but rather along the shoulder and chest, catching more on the fabric than flesh.

Performing magic without a wand is like trying to write cursive wearing a mitten, but it does still function-clumsy, insufficient, but it still functions.

Severus thought the hissing sound of pain Lupin makes would satisfy him. It does not. He reaches for his wand, reaches for accio, but Sirius is on him and Severus is weak, underfed, underslept, a very visible wreck, and he might still possess all of his magical abilities but that kind of wandless violence takes much from even a healthy man. It doesn't take much to muscle him back into the chair once more.

"This is why they want you in Azkaban! You're not acting like an innocent man! Have you gone absolutely feral?" Sirius pants, exasperated,

"You have tried to kill me with that beast before," Severus says, jutting his chin toward Lupin.

Sirius searches his memory visibly until it clicks into place. "You're still holding onto that? A grudge from when we were in school? We just fought a war together and won and you're holding on to that?"

If Lily Potter were alive, she would think the set of Severus' jaw says yes I am. But she is dead, and Severus is holding onto anything that he knows to be true in a sea of falsehood, like a drowning man.

"Snape." Lupin's wand finishes moving over the scrape-it is not so deep as to not be healed quickly. When he meets Severus' eyes, he is forcing himself to appear kind. "We won."

"What exactly did we win, werewolf? The war? The world?"

"The Ministry," Regulus says. "Azkaban, Hogwarts. All of it, your whole plan came off beautifully. We won all of it."

"I lost," Severus spits, his voice violent with a sorrow. "I lost everything."

The intimacy of the confession leaves the room echoing and frozen until Sirius finally sits across from Severus, rubbing his fingers through his whiskers. Lupin lays a hand on Sirius' shoulder.

"Not everything," Regulus says, spreading his hands.

The way he looks-so earnest, so believing, as if they were any kind of consolation-he has to laugh. The sound is broken, jagged, cruel, but he doesn't stop it and no one else does either. It spirals into an uncomfortable silence.

"I'll take first," says Sirius gruffly, looking up from Severus as if he isn't there. "Remus, you've got to manage the werewolves, and Reg, you're still working on tracking down the Carrows. I'll do it."

Regulus looks back and forth, chewing the ragged and bleeding thumbnail, then nods. "In 24 hours," he says, and then he retreats to the door. "I'll take second. The werewolves are still volatile and may require you for the longest, Remus."

"With Fenrir dead, I doubt it. Send if you need anything," Lupin says. "And if it is a longer affair, there are others. I'll come." The affectionate touch on Sirius' arm could almost go unnoticed if it wasn't a twisting knife.

When they are gone, Severus pins Sirius with a glare. "First," he asks. "First what."

"First watch." Sirius breaks open the bag. It's dishes, hot, on china etched with a porcelain P and rounded with vines that grew and retreated. "Making sure you don't do anything stupid, which you seem liable to do. Part of the agreement keeping you out of Azkaban. The other part is that you aren't worth the trouble, not with other Death Eaters taking hostages and trying to flee the country."

One against one is better odds, at least. "What is to stop me from fighting you off and fleeing as well," Severus says.

"The fact that you're no more a Death Eater than Regulus is anymore. Maybe less, by the looks of your Mark. That's how we measure it. You're a special case." Sirius heaps a plate with stew thick with potatoes and then pushes it toward Severus. "Remus' stew is no good cold," he says. "But if you want to let it, be my guest."

"Return my wand," he says. "And leave my home. I do not require a minder."

Sirius heaps his own plate and tucks in with a spoon better suited to serving. "I don't think you're the best judge of that," he says between mouthfuls.

"Why. Why you and the werewolf, of all people."

"Certainly not for my own health, Snape," Sirius says. He means it to sound like a joke but it comes out acid. "If I had my way, Regulus would be here to look after you full time and Remus and I'd be rid of you. But there's too much Death Eater nonsense to undo-something you could help with if you were so inclined, but you seem more interested in being useless. Frank and the rest need Reg more than you do, and no one but the three of us trust you to-" he searches, visibly, for something less crude than what he's clearly thinking: to kill himself, to kill everyone else, to flee the country. "They don't trust you."

Sirius eats in silence for a few long minutes while Severus stares stonily at a wall, arms crossed. When the plate is clean and Severus' is still filled and grown cold, Sirius sighs and reclines in the chair as well.

"Not the slightest bit curious what's been going on, are you?" Sirius asks. "It's chaos out there, but they're really scrubbing the Ministry, end to end. Some real change, for once, Lily would-well. You know how she felt about it."

Severus stands. "Give me my wand and get out of my home."

Sirius rises, rolling his eyes and moving to the kitchen to rinse his plate. "They're talking about Order of Merlin for you, you know," he says over the running water. "If they don't send you to Azkaban, that is. Depending on if they listen to Regulus. He's in the same spot too but he's still-doing what Regulus does, which is helping his situation, even though he's a squib now. Lots of Death Eaters are squibs now. Lot of others died when their magic went." Sirius gives Severus a curious look. "But you've still got your magic, for all the good you use it for. Probably Lily's doing."

"Do not," he spits. It feels like there could be more but the rest is a yawning void, so it remains: a blanket edict.

He ignores it. "Or maybe it was dumb luck. You could stand to act like an innocent man, you know. You could try to help the New Ministry, or catch your old friends. If not for them, then for her. It's what she wanted."

Severus comes to his feet, moves to the door. Even without a wand, Severus is confident he could be dangerous, and if Black will not leave-

The handle doesn't budge beneath his hand.

"House arrest," Sirius says, drying the plate in his hands. "Which you can thank Regulus for, because as I've said, the other option is Azkaban. You're stuck."

He makes the slashing motion once more, speaking the spell, but Sirius is ready; it is blocked easily with a wand. And Sirius-in a moment of insight-vanishes all the sharp knives from the kitchen for good measure, though for whose protection it might be is anyone's guess.

The next day it is Regulus, who chatters nervously about nothing and does not ask for thanks that he well knows Severus will not give. It is the only thing that renders him tolerable. Then Lupin, who is so gentle and patient as to make Severus understand why Sirius may have taken away all the knives. On the fourth day they ask for a list detailing every Death Eater, every crime he can recount from the inner circle-things Regulus would not be privy to, especially. Lupin asks with cajoling, Regulus with his nerves, and Sirius is blunt: if he ever wants to be free again, free of house arrest or Azkaban, he will answer the questions.

It is, on the whole, is better than this pointless, fruitless combat he has been waging against them. So he agrees.

The account takes days to fully assemble, but when a page is complete, it is whisked away. He does not ask where it goes. There are more questions, on parchment, that come in reply-an action that brings up memories he buries with brutal efficiency. He answers the questions and tries to remember nothing more. There is work, and then there is the space around the work. When the work runs out, the days continue to pass and Severus sinks into himself.

He eats, eventually, when food is placed before him. He drinks water from the tap. He reads when he can. He sleeps when he cannot. When he can do neither he presses at his eyes and temples with his fingers and tries to forget.

He finds half a bottle of liquor squirreled away in the back of a cabinet, where even his mother didn't find it-bad gin, barely better than scouring fluid, but it does the job for a night.

Obliteration does not last long enough.

He convinces himself, in the hangover, that the previous months have been half-hallucination. That he has gone mad. No one has said her name to him in weeks, so: Lily never existed. Or if she did, she had never cared for him; he had captured her, kidnapped her, their relationship was entirely servile. And if she did care for him, it was a twisted, needy thing, borne of her dependency, vile and manipulative, and he a monster taking advantage.

It is a better thing to believe than the alternative, so he tries with all his might to believe it.

Narcissa visits once, on a day when Lupin is there. She says something about a moth she had expected to see, suspicions she had possessed. Says Lucius is dead, that he died when his magic was taken, in front of their child, as if that could drum some kind of sympathy out of him. When the ploy fails, she wants to know the fate of the pretty redheaded girl- "Lily, was it? What a lovely name. I have heard she died defeating your Lord. Did you help her die, I wonder?"

Without a wand and without a sincere desire to hurt her, the only technique left is that of a petulant child. He slams a bedroom door in her face.

Minerva comes on a day that Sirius is there, bearing a bouquet of apologies. She tries to forgive him, which is vile. She tries to tell stories of Lily in the Order to him, which is worse.

He slams a door in her face too.

The only peace is Regulus' silence and books. The only texts that are here are storage, old editions, schoolbooks. He reads them idly so many times he memorizes them, marks them, making improvements; his wand may be gone but there is still theory. Some of the marks in the margins are labeled SS and some are labelled LE and the script makes him think of a vial in a drawer with a vanished key but, most times, he chooses to remain ignorant of the hand that wrote them. When he cannot, he accounts it to the madness that has been plaguing him for months, the laughable notion that a woman like Lily Potter could have ever been his.

In the darkest moments, lying in bed at night, there is a blind and paralyzing fury; that she may have cared for him truly and still left him to this suffering that she, more than anyone, has been so intimate with. The rage of it chokes him.

Weeks pass like this. Minerva makes a second attempt and does not say the name once. He rebuffs her every salvo with stony silence, his most frequent companion. She does not come again.

It is two months on, very late into the evening-though Severus stopped keeping track of time weeks ago-when a woman Regulus named Perenelle arrives. She sends Regulus ahead to the Ministry-he promises to return the following morning as he leaves, but no one else steps to take his place, leaving them alone.

Perenelle Flamel offers back his wand.

"You are exonerated, Mister Snape," she says. "Congratulations, and my apologies on the delay. Rebuilding a government is time-consuming and you seemed safe enough here. There is a ceremony for the Order of Merlin you are to receive, if you would like it, but I was given to understand you were not a terribly social man."

He takes his wand and doesn't thank her. He isn't even sure why he's missed it. There is nothing he wants to do with it, no magic, no spells. No work left to be done.

Perhaps now they will leave him in peace.

She goes on, unperturbed at his silence. "We have pieced together the events of that day, you know," she adds. "Your girl was very clever. It would have been easier to square with your help, but your friends-"

"They are not." His voice is thick with disuse.

"Your co-conspirators, then, informed us you were not terribly cooperative. It would seem they did not overstate the matter." She measures him, lifting a brow. "A place has been prepared for you in the New Ministry all the same."

He sneers, "I am not suited to government work."

"You were suited well enough to it under the Dark Lord, if your notes are to be believed," she says sharply. "Regardless, the bulk of talented wizards capable of handling Dark artifacts and curses now find themselves imprisoned, squibs, or deceased. You are valuable to the New Ministry. Your talents may save lives."

"I have no interest in such work."

"Indeed. What do you have an interest in, then, Mister Snape? Your friends seemed certain this sort of thing would be best for you, to provide purpose to see you through your grief."

"They are not," he says, "my friends."

She measures him once more, as if trying to translate his face into something she can understand. "You wish to leave the country, yes? Many of your colleagues under Voldemort have tried. Tell me, where will you go?"

Severus looks to the door. He had thought of it and all it represented when his thoughts became too loud, but a destination has never even entered the equation. He had thought of the door as an abyss he could fall into and disappear, not a passage with anything at the end of it.

"Perhaps you have nowhere to go," Perenelle says idly as she moves to the door and opens it. "I will leave you to your sorrows, then, and the rest of your lonely life."

The way the sunlight of dusk slants on the street outside, it is a beautiful late spring day-unseasonably warm and, even here, blooming green. And seeing it, she pauses, glances back.

"If I may, Mister Snape. Lily Evans-"

"Her name," he enunciates carefully, "was Potter."

"Very well." Perenelle takes a breath, draws herself up. "Lily Potter may have died alone, but she did not die scared, and she did not die for nothing. And if what her friends say is true, she cared for you-very deeply. She would not like this thing you have become, I think. No true friend would." She steps over the threshold. "I think she may yet surprise you. I think you may yet surprise yourself, in fact, if you only let her."

"Shut the door on your way out," he snarls.

"Must I make it plain to you? Your friends have not told the New Ministry of the vial of memories," she says, voice sharp, that of a teacher. "It could be called treason-they could contain vial information-but they have told no one. I had to pluck it from Regulus' mind myself. They believe it to be too personal to share."

"Wasted effort," he says through gritted teeth. "I have not looked into the vial since I was imprisoned here."

She makes a sharp, angry motion. "They have protected you in her memory, for the love she bore you and for the love you still bear. You are not so good an Occlumens to hide that-it is in everything you have done, every action you have described by omission in your notes, every element of tactical movement corroborated by others. It is the reason you have been exonerated-your efforts in her defense are all that stand between yourself and a cell in Azkaban. And yet you refuse to hear the last words she has left for you? You believe you do not owe her that in exchange for your freedom?" Her eyes go flinty. "She thought you brave. Your friends call this grief. I call it cowardice."

He raises his wand, the blind fury overtaking him, but she vanishes from the top step. All the violent motion serves only to slam the door shut behind her so violently it shudders the walls and must echo up the street.

There is too much violence still left to expend. He is a spring, wound tight-he has the solitude he has wanted for months now but it is not enough. There is still no silence, no peace.

The bureau he locked the vial in smashes to pieces and there-still shining, still silver, still lettered an antidote in her hand. He moves to the sink, teeth gritted, fumbling with the cork, ready to dispose of it, to drain it all away and then, perhaps, he may have some peace-

He notices that the hand holding the vial, ready to tip its contents down the drain, is trembling as if there was anything left to fear between heaven and the bottom of the river that runs through this cursed town.

No, this is not about his fear or his bravery. This is about what he owes.

If she never existed, there is nothing to fear. If she was a prisoner, then this is an accusation-deserved. And if there was, perhaps, more between them, if the memories he tries to hide even from himself of her smile, her mouth, her hand reaching for his body-

If those are true, there is a debt to be repaid.

The pensieve is here; she made sure of it. It may be set upon the rickety table in the kitchen; the memories flow into it instead of down the drain. There is only one path out, and it runs through.

He touches the surface.

-Lily is laying in the grass by the river and his voice telling her everything, spinning a castle out of thin air. He told her everything: that she wasn't alone or a freak but that he was like her, and there were others, so many others they filled up a school, a world-and they would be taught, would be powerful, would do magic. The feeling of the cool earth beneath her fingertips while he talked and how her heart filled to bursting with the knowledge.

How later, sprawled under the same tree, going through the next term's books-and the next-and the next-how that joy never seemed to slacken but how her heart seemed to expand to contain it. How many late nights she had written his name out on a duplicated parchment and how good it felt to see his script reply. How beautiful the things he made were; the potion that gave off an entire flock of doves drawn in smoke, or the one that caught starlight in a vial, or even the inky velvet darkness he could pull around his wand and fist-the prelude, he promised with a brilliance in his eyes and a smile on his face, to real invisibility.

She had never got to see the result, of course. There is no version of their history that does not contain the day of their OWLs, down by the lake. There is only one drop of it she let through; how, when she portrait-hole had shut behind her, sealing him away from her, how she had pressed her back to it. How she had run up the stairs and shut the curtains and cried herself to sleep. How awful losing him had been.

There is a moment of darkened silence in the path of her life for the intervening years. For Potter. For a life and a love she would spare him, for all that he has lived in the wreckage of it. It's not for or against him, and it never has been-it is separate from him entirely. But it ends in the same place their life together begins, on Halloween, in Godric's Hollow.

Severus knows what is coming, wants to draw her back into the warmth of her home where-he knows, surrounded by the last of her-she is so loved, but she had answered the door. She had known it must be a friend, only the friends could knock-and then found him there, looking half-wild and pale as death.

"Severus?" she said, half quavering with fear, half with hope that he was a friend truly again, the private hope that the Death Eater spy they had was him-

But he didn't answer. Merely panted there, one hand on the doorframe and staring into her face. Then, a violent motion of his wand.

Lily had come to in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar place, with a dark-robed man who was both familiar and not. When he explained what had happened, she had struck him, screamed, and nothing had changed. The world was a dark sky hung from pushpins of bright pain. A fist through a window, a palm through a mirror, a wrist broken and mended too late, down and down and down-

Then, the charm. Then, three years of something like peace, her slow recovery. It is like watching a portrait painted of himself by a stranger, like listening to his own voice over the telephone, relating the long and drifting days with his careful distance between them.

Then Sirius brought her a foothold in the war.

And in pressing him to believe in her war, she had found him more worthy-more than he had been. It brought them closer, pushed them together, even as they fought. It had made her see the shape of the world. There has been good there, beauty even buried in all this darkness. His fingertips playing at the end of her braid. The constructed version of him, and how it gave a glimpse of the man he might have been, the kind of man she hopes he might be able to become still. And more: her fingernails scoring his back, his mouth pressed to her throat. Even that horrible morning in his bed after the charm broke, how she saw his face illuminated by dawn and wanted to touch it with tenderness, even then. That fierce and burning thing that flashes at her only when he is too riled to shade or shield it.

Love. Love. A thousand times, a poisoned and doomed love, returned. And this, the supposed antidote.

And the last moment, after the litany, clearest of all. They sit in the study, across the table from one another. "I need a break," she lies, rising.

She prepares the other three vials in silence, puts them into her pockets, showing him her hand, showing the nature of the trick, and then moves to the bathroom-to the mirror, where her eyes focus above her shoulder, behind herself.

And then her eyes focus exactly on Severus' own.

"Hi," she says softly.

Her name comes to his lips unbidden but dies there, too. She can't hear, can't respond. Severus is absolutely anchored by the fact of it, even when he uses the knowledge to bury itself. If the rest of him were burned away he would still know it in his bones.

She knows it too. "I hope you're here," she begins. "I hope it worked. I hope you know how much-" She looks up, blinks. The wan light of the bulb above the mirror catches something liquid in her green eyes, but it disappears before it falls. "This is so hard."

Another man, a man who is not Severus Snape, who has not lived this life and taken these lessons from it, might have still tried to reach to comfort the image of the woman before him-this memory, this gift.

He does not. He knows better. It is the only good thing left inside him, this fact that he knows better.

She takes a deep breath, puts both hands on the curved porcelain of the sink. "No one knows how much this hurts more than me. No one. I've suffered it." Her eyes flick up to the mirror again, meeting his. "I know what I'm doing to you, and I'm sorry. It has to be this way."

Another kind of man might respond. Might say it didn't. Might try to speak to her only to lie.

He does not.

"But I know you. I know how you are. You'll get everything all twisted up, so I had to leave you proof. Proof that I was here. That I loved you."

She says it so easily, as if it's understood, the most natural thing in the world. It is a fist in Severus' throat.

"I know you don't think you deserve it, but it's got nothing to do with what anyone deserves. It just is. I want-" she pushes a hand through her hair. "I know you won't see it as freedom, but you can't shut yourself away forever. You can forget me if you have to-you won't, but you could if you wanted-but you can't just shut yourself up away until you die. If I succeed, if you survive this, I want you to do more than go on surviving."

Then she turns and faces him directly, still leaning against the sink. He can almost feel the warmth of her body, the breath in her lungs. It's almost as if she's real, and here-still alive, still able to be touched.

Her green eyes are fixed on him, alive, full of something powerful, something he can only barely comprehend. "Severus, you have to live after I'm gone. I want you to live."

And then she vanishes, and he is alone once more, in the dingy kitchen of his childhood home. It has taken some time, this accounting of her life. It is the middle of the night, and there is rain against the window where there was none before. He doesn't know how long he sits there, turning the vial over in his hands. He has lost all track of time these weeks, and has no sense of it until the faint light of dawn begins to brush its fingers down the shut curtains.

Severus rises, moves to the window, and lifts the heavy fabric to watch.

The sun may be pulling itself over the horizon, but here, in Cokeworth, there is a soft spring rain still falling. Droplets cling to the window, collecting in streams, in rivulets, in rivers cascading to the earth.

Lily always loved strange weather.

It is the first thought he has had of her that he has not tried to swallow up with magic or shut away from himself. Lily would sprint through it when the sun slanted through raindrops, when it thundered when it was snowing, when the sky went odd colors at dawn and dusk. She had loved all of it.

And the skinny, strange boy from across the river. Yes, and him.

Severus moves to the front door and opens it, extending one hand out into the rain. The sun is faraway and pale, but it still feels warm on his face. He realizes he hasn't left the house since he returned to it, hasn't felt the rain on his skin in-he doesn't know how long.

Rain with dawn sunshine running through it has no magical properties, is included in no potion, is no kind of antidote to any of the poisons he has known, and yet-

And yet, he steps out into it anyway, into the water and light.

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I have to thank my betas, ap_trash_compactor and x_medea (both on AO3), for their tireless efforts in knocking this thing into shape. I am honored to have them both be so excited and so relentless on this work, and it would not exist without them.

When I started this in 2011, I thought this was Severus' love story. As the story grew when I picked it back up in 2017, I realized it isn't his at all. It's Lily's. I don't intend to write a sequel, or go any further with this story for that reason: it can't continue without her.

By necessity, this leaves Severus to live the rest of his life with his choices-without a war to fight, without a child to loathe and help by turn, without a convenient and poetic death to exit on. But there is hope in that freedom, and the rest of his life is exactly that: his own. Which I think is exactly what Lily would have wanted.

Thank you for coming with me for this story. There is no greater validation to a writer than to know that someone is reading your work and that it is making them feel something. I hope it has brought you as much enjoyment as it has brought me. I read every single comment, and I have other projects in the works, and my askbox is always open.