Page 63 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I push to my feet.

I look at her name one last time.

“I'm going to be a father,” I say. “I know what I said to her. I know what I called it. I know I'm still carrying the scan in my pocket. I've known what that means since the second I put it there and I haven't been able to say it until now.”

I stay on the grass longer than I intended.

That's not something I do. I don't linger. I make decisions, I execute them, I move to the next thing. Lingering is for people who have the luxury of uncertainty, who can afford to sit with the unresolved and let it breathe. I have never been that person and I have never wanted to be.

But I stay.

The cemetery is cold and completely still. No wind. No sound except the distant machinery of a city that doesn't know or care that I am sitting in the wet grass in front of my sister's headstone at two in the morning talking to someone who cannot answer me. The clouds have cleared enough to show a thin strip of stars above the tree line and I look at them because looking at her name for too long does something to my jaw, makes it lock up, makes breathing complicated.

I’ve talked to her bear.

I have done that before, sat in her room, held the ratty thing, spoken to it in the dark. Cas knows. He has never said a word about it, which is one of the many ways Caspian Vought has earned his place without either of us ever naming what that place is.

This is different.

This is her actual grave. I am her actual brother and for the first time in two years I am saying the things out loud that I have only ever let sit in the dark of her room, at three in the morning when everyone else was asleep. The things I have been protecting behind the careful architecture of rage, strategy and forward motion, all the weapons I built to avoid having to feel what happened.

I feel it now.

Not cleanly. Not in some cathartic wave that resolves into peace. It doesn't work like that, I know it doesn't work like that because I have been functional enough to understand that the movies and the books lie about grief, that it isn't a thing you move through so much as a thing you carry, and the carrying gets easier with time, not because the weight changes but because you get stronger.

But I let it in.

I let myself think about the specific way she laughed. The fact that she always stole my hoodie and denied it. I always found it on her chair. The way she said my name when she was worried about me, not X not Devlin just Xay, the way she could make my name sound like something worth being. I let myself think about the last conversation we had, which was an argument about something I cannot remember now and would give everything I own to take back. I let myself think about the phone call I didn't answer the night of the accident, because I was at practice and I didn't check my messages until it was already done.

I told her she wasn't here. I stood at the back of that crowd two years ago and told myself she wasn't in that box, that this was a performance and not reality, that grief would make me useless and I had things to do.

She's here.

Whatever here means, whatever lives on or doesn't, whatever my father believed and my sister believed and I have spent two years refusing to have a position on, she is here in the sense that matters. In the sense that I built two years of my life around her absence. In the sense that every choice I've made since that night has been a conversation with someone I couldn't bring myself to visit.

“I'm here,” I say.

It comes out rough.

“I know that's… I know it's two years late. I know you'd tell me I'm an idiot for waiting. You'd do that thing with your face.” I exhale. “The disappointed one. Not angry, you were never much for angry, you always said it was too expensive. Just disappointed. The one that meant you expected better from me and you were right to.”

The headstone says nothing.

The stars say nothing.

I say the rest of it anyway.

“I thought I was doing it for you. The war. All of it. And some of it was, some of it was genuine, Emery, I need you to know that. I loved you and they took you and I couldn't make it mean nothing. I couldn't just absorb it and move on and I'm not apologizing for that.” I press my knuckles into the wet grass. “But some of it was for me. Some of it was because staying angry was easier than sitting in this grass and admitting that I miss you every single day and I don't know what to do with that. That I keep waiting for you to walk into a room and I know you're not going to and I can't⁠—”

I stop.

I breathe.

“She has your eyes.” The words arrive from somewhere I wasn't expecting. “Toren. Not the color, hers are blue and yours were gray, same as me. But the quality of them. The way they look when she's decided something. That particular thing you both have, where you look at a person and they feel known.” I look at her name. “You would have found each other. If the world had been different. If none of this had happened. You would have found each other and you would have driven each other absolutely insane and I think⁠—”

My throat closes.

I let it.