I’d been the opposite.
I’d only existed, breathed—and just barely. I’d stopped living the day Dani did, and it seemed I was only waiting to be taken down with her. Only when I’d met Wren had I realized that was a disservice to my cousin. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be miserable, to live every day the same, to wake and work and sleep until every year of my life had withered away.
She would have wanted me to live.
Wren had shown me how.
And maybe that was all that mattered.
The night before had been long, sleepless, filled with tossing and turning and thoughts as dark as the night. I’d started off angry—at Wren, at myself—but somewhere in the early hours of the morning I transitioned into sadness, and then into acceptance as the sun rose over the mountains. I wanted to be with Wren, I wanted to build a new life with her, but maybe that wasn’t her purpose at all.
Maybe the reason she came into my life was simply to bring me back from the dead.
Every morning felt like a new possibility instead of a cross I had to bear, and I knew I had her to thank for that. She’d shown me how to remember Dani’s life and still live my own, and I knew I’d never be the same man I was before I knew she existed.
So, as I knelt beside Dani’s grave and placed twelve yellow roses down before her, I took the deepest breath I could imagine, and I did the impossible.
I let her go.
“Hey, loser,” I said to the stone that was meant to represent her. It was all I said for a while, and the longer I stared at the stone, the more I felt her there with me. It was almost as if she’d placed a hand over mine, as if she was leaning in to listen, as if she already knew what I was there to say.
I cleared my throat, though it was tight and raw already. I’d had so much I wanted to say when I got here and yet I knew it didn’t matter if I actually spoke at all. Dani could feel me, just like I could feel her.
So instead of speaking, I just sat with her. There was no wind, not through the fog, and so it was almost like sitting in silence with her. My heart beat was loud but steady, my breaths calm though I wasn’t. I ran a hand over the edge of her stone, traced the letters of her name, and then I leaned my forehead against the granite.
And I cried.
My shoulders shook, chest aching, tears rushing from my eyes and running along the bridge of my nose until they fell into the grass at my knees. Just when I thought I was out of breath, stomach clenching and lungs burning as my ribcage crushed in on them, my body would think for me, inhaling deep and starting the process all over again.
It hurt.
It healed.
Time passed like a lucid dream, seconds and hours one in the same. By the time I’d released every emotion I’d harbored for seven years, my eyes were just slits I peered through, swollen and red and raw like every other part of me felt. I ran the back of my wrist under my nose with a sniff, balancing on shaky knees until I found the strength to stand.
“I love you,” I finally spoke, voice foreign. “And I will always remember you, but now I promise to live for you, too.”
It was short, simple, but it was everything I felt. It was my heart and soul in just a few words. And as I turned to leave, I dropped the weight there in the cemetery, and it was Dani’s voice I heard in my head as I did.
Let go.
My next breath was cleaner, easier. It was the first in a new life. I’d let go of the guilt, of the pain, and now I would move forward. But the hardest was still yet to come.
Dani was first, but Wren was next. And though I knew I had to let her go, every cell and molecule in my body held tight to her, as if she were the lifeline, as if she were the blood and the air.
I knew I had to let her go.
I just didn’t know if I actually could.
RUMINATE
ROO-muh-nayt
Verb
To engage in contemplation : meditate
One week.
It was all I had left before I went back to my old life.
Except, my old life wasn’t the same as I had left it, either. The truth was I didn’t really have anything to go “back” to.
Yes, I would be going back to work, back to my old circle of friends, back to my city—but the life I would make there would be different than the one I’d left behind just three months before. And now I had only seven days left to get what I needed from my little escape, to find whatever it was that I was searching for.
Maybe it was that notion that made me wake uneasy, my stomach a mess as I made a pot of coffee and held a clammy hand to my forehead. I didn’t even want cinnamon rolls, which clearly meant something was wrong. Still, I tried to push through it, filling the largest mug and grabbing my sketch book before moseying out to the front porch.
I had always been a firm believer that we, as humans, have gut instincts for a reason. Maybe it’s that we’re in tune with the universe, or maybe it’s something chemical within us—but we know when something is wrong, or when it’s about to be wrong. It’s the reason we leave five minutes later for work one day, or call a friend we haven’t in a while, or pick up a book we’d walked by so many times before. It’s a feeling, deep within us—something we can’t ignore.
I thought the uneasiness I’d awakened to was from everything I still had yet to figure out in Seattle, or from Anderson, or from my still-lackluster sketches. But when a car I knew too well pulled into my drive, I realized my body had been warning me of something else entirely.
Every hair on my body stood on edge, electricity coursing through me, adrenaline spiked just at the proximity of him. He was still in his car, and there was plenty of space between us, but I knew that wouldn’t last long. And seeing his black Mercedes parked in my sanctuary was like spotting a lion in a coral reef. He didn’t belong here. He was a threat and yet he’d never survive long enough to be one.
He needed to leave.
Keith cut the engine, the barely-there purr surrendering to silence as he pushed his door open and climbed out. His dark eyes locked on mine and he stood with one hand on the roof and the other on the door still propped open, waiting, watching me. I swallowed, closing my sketch book and calmly laying it beside me on the bench, and then I stood.
He sighed, taking in the full sight of me, his eyes softening as he finally shut the door and crossed the space between us. I counted every step, the sound of the gravel crunching beneath his cherry-brown Sutor Mantellassi shoes a direct line to my heartbeat.
As his steps grew faster, so did my pulse, and then he was on my porch, just three feet away. The man I wasn’t supposed to love, but always would. The man who made me feel less than. The man I’d left behind. And now he was here, in the one place in my life that hadn’t been touched by him.
He was robbery in a suit.