Epilogue
Epilogue
Years later, Lila asked me why I kept a tiny silver tuning peg inside my jewelry box.
I placed it in her hand.
"Do you remember your first guitar?"
"A little."
"I remember Grandpa breaking it."
She looked at the worn piece of metal.
"I used to think this was the saddest thing I owned."
"What changed?"
I smiled.
"I realized it wasn't a reminder of what we lost."
"It wasn't?"
"No."
"It was proof of the day we stopped being afraid."
Lila turned the little tuning peg over in her fingers before slipping it back into my palm.
"I'm glad he broke the guitar."
I looked at her in surprise.
"You are?"
She nodded.
"Because if he hadn't..."
She glanced toward the music room, where children's guitars lined the walls of the nonprofit academy Colin and I had opened in Jonathan's memory.
"...a lot of kids might never have learned to play."
I wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
Outside, the sound of dozens of young voices drifted through the open windows, each one carrying a melody no one could own, silence, or destroy.
Some empires are built on fear.
Those eventually fall.
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But a song shared with love has a way of outliving every tyrant who ever tried to stop it.
THE END.
