Outside they found Andrew, who was standing watch. Alina had expected to see him fighting off a pack of wolf shifters but he was all alone, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the building. It was like he was just waiting for a drink or a phone call, not breaking a friend out of her unfortunate imprisonment.

“Hey, look at you! You’re alive and you made a friend. Now how’s about we get the fu*k out of here before those boys come back? I’m not crazy about the idea of dealing with them twice.”

Alina and Joshua never looked back after that moment, not even once. There was no reason to. Alina had nothing to look back on except for a life of sorrow and fear. Her life had not really begun until she made the rash decision to move all the way across the world and to a small town nobody had ever heard of. In a way, Joshua’s life had never really begun, either. He hadn’t understood that he was missing anything and he hadn’t wanted to introduce anything new into his world. Andrew had forced the change upon them both and everything had changed.

True, it had almost pulled them all apart, but in the end it hadn’t at all. It had only taken another month before he had gotten down on one knee in front of his whole family, in the same kitchen where he had informed his father that she was gone for good. He had asked her if she would spend the rest of her life with him and she had said yes without thinking twice.

Finally, after all of this time, she was going to form her own little family. It wasn’t that everything was going to be perfect because it wasn’t. Andrew left, only a few weeks after the proposal. He said it wasn’t because of the fact that they were going to get married and most of the time both Joshua and Alina believed it.

He left to see the world, to travel like a bohemian with nothing but a pack on his back and a desire to find something new. He would come back. They knew he would, at least from time to time. After they had their first child, the boy they named after the brother Joshua had never had, he came back to see his little namesake.

He would come back after they had their daughter, too. The family stayed together in a different way. It was a way where all of them found their own little piece of happiness. And that was just the sort of family that Alina had been hoping to find.

The end.

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