Page 62 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Raven hair down to her waist. Gray eyes the same shade as mine. The particular kind of laugh that made everyone in a room feel like they were the most important person in it.

She looked at me like I was the version of myself I hadn't become yet. Like she was just waiting, patient and certain, for me to catch up.

She never got to see if she was right.

I lower myself to the grass in front of her headstone and I sit there for a long time before I say anything. The wind moves through the cemetery. The trees shift. Everything is wet, cold and quiet and I am here, finally, two years too late, and there is nothing to do about that except be here now.

“I should have come sooner,” I say.

It comes out rough. Stripped of everything.

“I know that. I knew it when I didn't come the first week and I knew it when I drove here two years ago and sat outside the gate for three hours and couldn't get out of the car, and I have known it every day since.” I stare at her name in the stone. “I told myself you weren't here. That's true enough. But the fuller truth is that I couldn't come because coming meant accepting that you were gone and I needed you to be— ” I stop. Press the heels of my palms against my knees. “I needed the grief to stay useful. If I came here and let it be real, actually real, it would have stopped being fuel and started being just what it is.” My voice drops. “Loss. Just the ordinary unbearable loss of losing you. And I couldn't afford that. Not until I'd finished what I started.”

The wind moves.

Nothing answers me.

Because the dead can’t fucking speak.

“I've almost finished it,” I say. “Or I've begun to. Meekan is gone. Steven is dead. Masen has a bullet in his chest and his empire is in pieces.” I pause. “It didn't fix it. I thought it would. I thought there would be something on the other side of it, some moment of clean, clear peace. There wasn't. There's just you still gone and me still here and a girl with blue eyes who is pregnant with my kid and who I told, tonight, to get rid of it.” I exhale. “I said that out loud. To her face. Standing on the beach near where you died.” I look at her name. “I think you already know what I'm going to say about that. I think you're already looking at me the way you used to look at me when I did something stupid and waited for me to figure out why.”

I reach into my pocket.

The ultrasound.

I hold it in both hands and look at it in the thin moonlight. The little blur. The bean-shaped shadow of something real and irreversible that I have been calling nothing and carrying everywhere, every hour of every day, like a piece of evidence I can't bring myself to file.

“I told her to get rid of it,” I say again. “And I'm still carrying the scan.” I fold it back into my pocket. “I know what that means, Em. I just need another minute before I say it out loud.”

“You used to say till death do us part,” I tell her.

The words come from somewhere old. Somewhere that belongs to a version of me that existed before the accident and the grief and the two years of building a war around the shape of her absence.

“You were twelve. We were in the kitchen. You'd seen some film and decided all serious relationships required a vow and you made me say it to you while Dad was out. You were completely serious about it. You had your arms folded, your chin up and that look you got when you'd decided something was important and you needed everyone around you to understand it was important.” Something moves through my chest. “I said it. I meant it. Every single word.” I look at her name. “I meant my death, Em. Not yours. That was the arrangement. That was always the arrangement. You were supposed to outlive me. You were supposed to stand at the back of a crowd at my funeral and be furious with me for dying stupidly, then go home and carry the family forward the way only you could.” My voice holds. Barely. “I was supposed to go first. That was the deal. I don't know who I made it with but I made it and I have been furious every day for two years that it wasn't fucking honored.”

I sit with that.

“You were supposed to lead this family,” I say quietly. “Not me. Never me. Dad wanted me to be the weapon and you to be the Don, that was his design. The muscle and the mind. He was building both of us, just in different directions, and you knew it and I knew it and we never talked about it because some things are too real to say out loud when you're teenagers just trying to survive the house you grew up in.” I pause. “But you never said no, Em. That's the thing I've never been able to get past. He prepared you for it and you let him. You sat through every meeting, every lesson, every carefully designed piece of grooming he called education, and you never once told him you didn't want it.” My jaw locks. “Because you knew that if you said no, I'd have to say yes. You knew if you refused the seat, I'd end up in it. That was always the math. There were only two of us.”

The wind picks up.

I look at the trees rather than the headstone for a moment, because looking at her name when I say this is too much and I am only human, regardless of what everyone in these two towns believes.

“You stepped between me and the Don's seat so I could have the ice,” I say. “So I could have hockey and three hours a day where I was just a player. So I could have Neave and Miles and something outside of the family that was worth having.” I swallow hard. “Miles looked at the Cosa Nostra and saw a cage. He looked at me and saw something worth more than a foot soldier. He told me that the first year we were friends and I didn't believe him, but I held onto it anyway because he was one of the only people who'd ever suggested there was a version of me outside of what Dad was building.” I close my eyes. “Neave used to talk me back from the edge. When the pressure got inside my head and I couldn't see out of it, I'd call him and he'd answer no matter the hour and we’d talk until the noise stopped.” I open my eyes. “You gave me them. You took the family onto your back so I could have a life that wasn't just the family, and you never asked me to acknowledge it. Never threw it in my face. Never once said look what I'm carrying for you.”

I press my hands flat against the cold wet grass.

“I'm acknowledging it now. Two years too late, sitting in front of a headstone in the middle of the night, but I'm saying it.” I look at her name. “You gave up the right to refuse the life Dad was building for you so that I could refuse mine. So I could have the ice, the boys and something worth living for outside of these two towns. Then the accident happened, you were gone and they were gone. I was left holding the family I was never supposed to lead, and there was no Neave to talk me back from the edge and no Miles to remind me I was worth more than a weapon, and I went over it. I became exactly what Dad was building me to be all along and I think about that every day.” I exhale slowly. “I think he'd be satisfied. I think you'd be horrified. I think you'd be standing here right now telling me there's still time and I'd be arguing with you about it, and neither of us would win because that's how it always went with us.”

Silence.

The specific silence of a cemetery in the small hours that holds everything you say and gives nothing back.

“Her name is Toren. She seems to think you already know her,” I say eventually. “Her brother killed you. Her family buried the truth of it and let four people go without justice and used the crash as currency in their own war. Every reason I had to destroy them was real.” I pause. “But she sat in the warehouse and watched without looking away. She offered me her life when she could have run. She came to the beach and told me the truth about Fiona Williams when she had every reason to keep it as leverage and no reason at all to help me.” I feel the ultrasound against my ribs through my jacket. “She said she loves me, Em. In the warehouse. With a scalpel at her throat. She said it like it was a fact she was reporting, like she'd made peace with it and she was going to say it anyway, even knowing what I'd do with it.”

I sit with that for a moment.

“You would have liked her,” I say. “I know you would have. She's infuriating. She has this phrase she repeats when things get bad, to teach is to learn, to learn is to excel, to excel is to thrive, to thrive is to live, like it's a prayer. Like if she says it enough times the universe has to comply.” Something shifts in my chest. “You would have recognized that. The way you used to say it's going to be okay until it was true. I used to think that was naive. I don't think that anymore.”