Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 87068 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 435(@200wpm)___ 348(@250wpm)___ 290(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87068 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 435(@200wpm)___ 348(@250wpm)___ 290(@300wpm)
EPILOGUE: A LONG-AWAITED REDEMPTION
Trevor
The cemetery is all slope and shadow, a ragged grid of stones gnawed down by time. At the edge of the city, the graves are packed tight, names fighting for territory in the brittle grass. Half the markers lean in toward each other, gossiping in the hush. The air is cold enough to frost a lung. My hands are empty except for the flower and the key fob in my pocket, which I click obsessively as we walk, some idiot’s talisman to keep the ghosts at bay.
Aleatha Romero is easy to find. Her grave is low and flat, the stone worn blank where the elements got to it first, the name and years eroding back toward dust. There’s no ornament—just the little oval set in the granite, a grainy photograph of a girl with straight black hair and a smile so tentative it looks like an apology. The ground around her is pocked and uneven, the grass never quite growing over the wound. There’s a beer bottle at the base, empty and half-sunk. Kayleigh nudges it away with her sandal and says nothing.
I stand there with the flower, watching the picture, trying not to let the old itch crawl up my neck. I used to dream about Aleatha’s funeral. I didn’t even go because I didn’t know she’d passed at the time, so my dreams are of an imagined funeral that never actually happened. But I can see it in my mind’s eye—the color of the sky, the faces in the crowd, the feeling that everyone was just waiting for me to confess. They all knew. Every single person knew that I was the reason she was in the ground, and that made it worse than any sentence.
But I know better now. Aleatha was very sick, and the guilt I felt was the reeling of a young man who didn’t know better. Meanwhile, Kayleigh doesn’t say a word. She waits, her body close but not touching mine. She’s in a sundress, grey with white dots, the kind of thing a vintage shop would price at $8 but I’d pay a grand for just to see her in it again. Her hair is loose. There’s a blue-green streak on one arm where she leaned against a fresh-cut juniper at the park. She looks gorgeous, as always.
I kneel, slow, my knee joint clicking loud enough for her to hear. I set the white flower on the grave, right next to the photo, and brush the dirt from my palm. The stone is cold, but the light is warm—amber and low, just bleeding through the trees like the last exhalation of the day.
I think about the last time I saw Aleatha alive. It’s always the driveway that gets me—the way her arms wrapped around her elbows, the way she stared at the sky like she was waiting for an answer that would never come. She knew I was going to break up with her. She knew it before I did. The only thing I ever gave her was a confession, and by then it was way too late.
Kayleigh puts a hand on my shoulder. Not a squeeze, just a presence. I let her rest it there for a minute before I stand and dust the dirt off my knees. The grass stains my jeans a little, and for some reason that’s the thing that makes me want to laugh and punch something at the same time.
We stand there. The silence is so deep it echoes in my teeth.
“I used to come here and just stand,” I say, not looking at Kayleigh. “Sometimes in the winter, I’d have to dig through the snow just to find her. Other times, I’d just drive by, circle the block, park where I could see the headstone through the fence. Like she was a checkpoint, or a speed bump. Sometimes I’d say stuff out loud, but it never made me feel any better.”
Kayleigh is quiet. She lets the wind fill in the blanks.
I go on. “Therapist says that’s normal. That you keep circling the thing that hurts you until you learn to walk around it. But I never got past it. I just wore a rut.”
She moves her hand from my shoulder and slides it down my arm, threading her fingers through mine. Her skin is cold, but her grip is strong.
“I learned something,” I say, staring at the grave. “Last session, he told me that I can stop trying to bury the secret. That maybe the worst part wasn’t what happened, but the fact that I wouldn’t talk about Aleatha after she was gone. Like if I just didn’t talk about her, she wouldn’t drag me down with her.”
The grass shifts in the wind, a soft sizzle.
I look at Kayleigh. She’s watching me, her face calm and open, the blue of her eyes so pale in the dusk it looks lit from inside. I love her for this—for the way she lets me be ugly and weak and not hate myself for it.