Page 227 of Ex Somnis

A lonely old man in a quiet room, kept alive by machines and visited by roses, his body is here and his whole self is gone.

“How long…” I start, then swallow, before I make myself ask. “How long has he been like that?”

“Twenty-two years.”

EPILOGUE PART TWO

FIVE YEARS LATER

Lennon

The bread is soaking in the custard when I realize what I’m making.

I knew, obviously. I cracked the eggs. I whisked in the cinnamon, vanilla, and the little bit of orange zest because I can’t leave anything without citrus. It’s a compulsion at this point. I laid the thick slices in the dish to soak. I did all of it with my hands while the rest of me was somewhere else, running the day’s list, and it’s only now, standing at the stove in the kitchen with the butter going gold in the pan, that the front of my brain catches up to my hands.

French toast.

I haven’t made French toast since my dad died.

I stopped making it that day. I never decided to. It quietly fell off the list of things I do, how a song you loved becomes one you skip, and I never once questioned it. Some absences are shaped like a person, and you learn to walk around them.

I stand at the stove and look at the butter, feeling my eyes go hot.

“We don’t wait for reasons to make something good, Lenny. We just make it.”

My mother said that to me a hundred times in this voice she used when I was overthinking, when I was waiting for permission to want something.

We don’t wait for reasons. We just make it.

So I lay the first slice into the butter, and it hisses, the kitchen filling with the smell of my whole childhood, the good part, the part before, and I let it sting.

I’ve earned that.

“You good?”

Nevan is in the doorway, sleeves shoved up, an apron already on because he was hauling chairs. He clocks the pan, the custard dish, the look on my face, all in about a second, because he’s spent five years learning to read me from across rooms.

“French toast,” I say, as if that explains it. With him, it does. I told him about my dad years ago, on a bad night, how you tell people things at two in the morning.

He crosses the kitchen, lets his thumb glide over my nose before he turns me and wraps me up from behind, chin on the top of my head, holding on while the slice cooks.

“She’d be eating it straight out of the pan,” he says into my hair. “Your mom. She’d be standing right here stealing it before it hit the plate.”

A wet laugh punches out of me. “She absolutely would.”

“Want me to steal one? For authenticity?”

“Don’t you dare.”

He steals one. Of course, he does. He’s grinning around it when I turn to swat him, and I’m laughing. The sting is still there, but it’s sitting next to the laughing now, both of them at once, which is the only way grief ever really works.

Rule three. Bad days don’t go alone.

Even the good-bad ones.

He steals one more on his way out with a “Structural support, I’m hauling chairs, I need my strength,” and ducks under the doorframe, gone to go set up. The kitchen is quiet for about as long as it takes me to flip the next slice.

Then the door bangs back open.