Page 225 of Slashed Bonds

It hurts to think of how pure she was. I don’t mean good, though she was good. I mean unmixed. She wanted life the way a plant wants a window, with her whole self, without strategy. She wanted to be loved the way people are loved in the movies she watched on the couch with her feet under my leg, the big kind, the kind with a speech at the end. She wanted a pack that would hold her up like a trophy.

And she found men who wanted a trophy.

That’s the whole story. She went looking for someone with her conquest and found someone with his own.

It came down. All of it. The deal and the engagement and the future, and when it came down it took her with it, and it took the kid, and it took the version of our father who smiled, and it took a boy who used to celebrate goals.

I don’t know how long I sit.

The music goes and goes. The frost under me goes to cold water through my jeans. Somewhere a long way off there’s a mower, or a truck, and then there isn’t, and the point inside my skull holds.

And then there’s a scent.

Through the music. Through the frost and the cut grass and the white flowers. Frost, first, like the air’s gotten colder in one spot beside me. Then the ozone. Then the thing under both, warm, that showed up in a shower five weeks ago and has been getting stronger since Lessard started pulling the chemistry out of her.

Mori.

I know before I open my eyes. I open them anyway, slowly, and the first thing I see is a second bouquet.

Beside mine. Not white. Purple, deep, almost black at the edges. Reds. Pinks, two kinds. A blue so dark it reads as night. A fistful of color laid down beside a fistful of nothing, and it’s wrong, it breaks a rule I’ve kept for three years, and I look at it and my chest does a thing.

Color’s for signs.

I turn my head.

She’s sitting beside me. Cross-legged on the frost in black leggings and a hoodie I recognize as Nikolai’s, hands pressed together in her lap, eyes closed. The way mine were. Her face tipped up a degree toward the gray sky with the black and red of her hair down over her shoulders, breathing slow, not moving.

Fuck. How can stillness be that beautiful.

I’ve seen her on a sheet of ice taking a man’s wall away from him. I’ve seen her spin on one blade in slush with ten thousand people screaming. I’ve seen her with her nails in my throat in a bathroom asking for permission to use me. And none of it, not one frame of it, has done to me what this does, a woman sitting still on a grave with her eyes shut.

Nobody comes here.

Killian and Nikolai came once. Three years ago, the first anniversary, when I’d gone off the grid for two days and they’d pulled a string with somebody who owed Nikolai’s gym a favor and found me here at dusk, on my knees, weeping on the granite like it was a door that would open if I made enough noise. They stood at the edge of the plot and didn’t come closer and didn’t leave, and when I was done they drove me home and nobody said a word in the truck. They’ve never come again. I never asked them to.

And now there’s a woman I’ve known five weeks with her knees on my sister’s frost.

Her eyes open.

Slow. Her hands come down from their press and settle on her thighs, and then her head turns, as if she’s felt me looking the way I feel her in a room, and her eyes find mine.

She doesn’t say anything.

Neither do I. We sit there, in a cemetery in the first frost, with the music still going in my ears and a bouquet of color beside a bouquet of white, and we look at each other.

And something in me opens.

That’s the only way to say it. Vulnerability and comfort, both at once, which I’d have told you a month ago were opposites. The feeling of having hidden a thing for a long time, out of fear of what someone would do with it if they saw, and then looking up and finding a person in front of you who’s already seen it and hasn’t done anything with it at all. Hasn’t flinched. Hasn’t pitied. Has sat down beside it on the cold ground and closed her eyes.

I don’t have to hide it from her. I didn’t know that was a thing I was carrying until it lifted.

And the lifting is why my eyes go glassy.

I notice it late. A heat behind them, a blur at the edge of her face. Like there’s something to be sad about, which is strange, because I’m not. Not in the way the word means. Three years in and it isn’t sadness anymore, it’s something you carry the way you carry a shoulder that never healed right, and you don’t cry about the shoulder.

But a tear goes.

One. Down the side of my face, cold by the time it reaches my jaw.