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“Tell me what you’ve been up to since we saw each other last.” How long ago was that? Four years? “Any new tattoos?” She shook her head no, and I wasn’t sure what possessed me to do it, but I closed the space between. I reached for her glasses and removed them. “You never took that government job, did you?” I wasn’t sure how I managed to remember any details about a girl I barely knew, but it was as if I were drawing them from a hat. They were just there.
Her eyes narrowed. “How can you tell?”
“You don’t look sad.” I shook my head. “Funeral-sad, yes. Not the other kind.”
“Oh.” Her eyes moved to the sky, the snow starting to fall heavier, before coming back to my face. “Your eyes are?—”
“Not sad. They’re dead.”
My knee-jerk comment had her studying me, likely trying to find something else to say to break the tension. That, or comfort me.
“You must be cold,” was what she settled on as I quietly slipped her glasses back on.
“I can’t feel anything.” Now I was the one slipping my gaze overhead as if all the answers would be written there—an indication as to how I ended up alone at almost thirty-nine, my other half gone. “I can’t even . . .”
“Cry?”
I zeroed back in on her face, thankful she’d said the hard part out loud, because I doubted I’d have been able to. I nodded, the words stuck in my throat.
“Shock. Denial. Anger. That’s why. When you saved me, I was in shock that day and . . .” Her voice sounded as fragile as life was.
“I saved you, but I couldn’t save her.” My hand landed over my heart at the tight squeeze of pressure there. “I listened to her scream a half a world away, and I couldn’t do anything. Not a fucking thing.”
I told her I hated her just before . . . That line would forever play like a broken record in my head. Haunt me until the day I died.
As Diana wordlessly reached for my other arm, I locked on to the tattoo emerging in view on her wrist as her coat sleeve slid up. Holding my forearm, she offered, “If you’re up for it now, maybe it’d be easier to do it with an almost stranger?”
I forced my attention back to her face, and as my eyes grew blurry, I sputtered, “Do what?”
“Cry,” she whispered, her voice soft, calming, free of judgment and expectation.
All I could do was stare at her. Unmoving. Everything went quiet as she kept hold of my arm.
Time stopped as we stood there without talking, but the pain started to push forward. I could feel it now. In my chest. Head. It hurt. Fuck, it hurt everywhere for so many reasons. “I should be alone.”
“That’s the last thing you should be.”
Something inside me snapped. Broke.
I dropped to the ground and fell back onto my heels, Diana following me down, never letting go.
Snowflakes hit my face, but there were tears there, too.
Then this near stranger slid around next to me, offering me her shoulder, and I took it. Buried my face in the side of her neck, and I cried for the first time since Rebecca died.
I let go like I’d probably never done in front of anyone else. Rebecca hadn’t even witnessed me cry once during our marriage, not even when my father died. Nor my mother’s funeral. I’d broke down in private alone.
I snaked my arm up around Diana’s back, drawing her closer, searching for some solace in my new hell.
“I got you,” she promised, her voice choking me up.
After another minute of losing control, the tears started to slow. Catching my breath again, I turned my head toward her, and my cheek brushed against hers—and God, she was freezing. “You should go inside.”
“Not until you’re ready to go with me.”
I opened my eyes, shocked at the strange comforting feeling taking over my body, and said the first thing that came to my mind, “Oxytocin.”
“What?” she whispered.
