Remy
The cemetery was quieter after the storm.
Tuesday morning, pale gray light filtering through the live oaks that had stood sentinel over this patch of consecrated ground for two hundred years. Spanish moss hung heavy and dripping, still waterlogged from the hurricane, swaying in the breeze. The air smelled like wet earth and decay and something sweeter underneath—jasmine, maybe, from the wild bushes that had overgrown the wrought-iron fence years ago and nobody had bothered to cut back.
I'd checked on the houseboat first. Made sure she was still floating, still tied down, still home. I took the rest of the night resting and picking up small things around the boat. Then the nest morning I dove here, because that's what I always did after storms. Made sure the water hadn't washed away the only piece of my baby brother I had left.
Luc's grave was in the back corner, near the old magnolia tree that had been struck by lightning the summer he turned ten. The headstone was simple—the family could have affordedsomething grand, something befitting the Thibodaux name, but Mama had insisted on modest. Just his name, the dates, and three words that had never felt like enough.
Beloved Son and Brother.
"Hey, petit." I crouched down in front of the stone, my knees sinking into the soft mud, not caring that it was soaking through my jeans. "Storm missed you. Mostly." I reached out to brush away a scatter of leaves and small branches that had collected against the granite, my fingers lingering on the carved letters of his name. "Couple branches down, but nothing hit the stone. You're still here." My voice came out rougher than I expected, thick with something I didn't want to name.
The words felt stupid as soon as I said them. He wasn't here. He was bones and memory and a hollow space in my chest that had never quite healed over, no matter how many years passed, no matter how many smiles I plastered on, no matter how many songs I wrote trying to make sense of a world that had taken him and left me behind.
"I met someone." I settled back on my heels, pulling my jacket tighter against the morning chill, the leather creaking softly with the movement. "Well. Three someones, technically. It's complicated." A laugh scraped out of my throat, rough and humorless. "You'd like her, though. Artemis. She's got this way of looking at you like she can see right through all your bullshit. Calls me on it every time." I picked at a blade of grass, twisting it between my fingers until it split. "You were getting good at that too. Before." The word hung in the damp air, heavy with everything it meant.
The silence stretched, broken only by birdsong and the distant rumble of a truck on the parish road. I used to hate coming here, used to avoid it for months at a time because the weight of it—the grief, the guilt, the endless fucking unfairness of it all—felt like drowning.
"I almost told her everything." I swallowed hard, the words catching in my throat like fishhooks. "During the storm. We were all trapped together, and she asked about my family, and I almost—" My voice cracked, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes, feeling the sting of tears I'd sworn I wouldn't shed. "I couldn't do it. She knows you existed, knows I lost you, but I couldn't tell her the rest. Couldn't say the words out loud. Twelve years, and I still can't talk about what really happened without feeling like I'm going to shatter into a thousand pieces."
The magnolia tree rustled overhead, and for just a second, I could almost hear his voice. The way he used to laugh at everything, the way he'd follow me around like I was something special instead of just his screwup older brother who couldn't live up to the family name the way Jean-Pierre could.
Jean-Pierre. The golden child. Law degree AND medical school, because one wasn't enough for a Thibodaux heir. He'd done everything right, married the right woman, produced the right grandchildren, carried the family legacy on his perfect shoulders. And me? I'd killed our baby brother and run away from home before I turned nineteen.
"I almost called Jean-Pierre last week." I laughed, bitter and sharp. "Can you imagine? Twelve years of silence, and I almost picked up the phone because I wanted to tell someone about her. About them." I shook my head, mud squelching beneath my knees as I shifted. "He wouldn't understand. He never understood anything about me. You were the only one who did." My fingers found the St. Cecilia medal beneath my shirt, rubbing the worn silver like a talisman.
This was the part I never said out loud. The part I'd carried alone for twelve years, a weight so familiar it had become part of me, woven into my bones like scar tissue.
Luc died because of me.
He was twelve. I was seventeen, and I was supposed to be watching him while the rest of the family was at some charity gala I'd begged off from. But Margot Breaux had called, and she had that laugh and those eyes and she said her parents were out of town, and I figured Luc would be fine for a few hours. He was a smart kid. He knew not to go near the water alone.
Except he wasn't fine. And he did go near the water.
They said he must have slipped on the dock, hit his head on the way down. The bayou took him before anyone even knew he was missing. I came home at midnight, drunk on cheap wine and Margot's perfume, and found my mother screaming on the phone with the sheriff.
They found his body the next morning, tangled in the roots of a cypress tree a quarter mile downstream.
"I should have been there." The words came out barely a whisper, scraped raw from a throat that had spoken them a thousand times in the dark. "You were twelve, Luc. Twelve years old, and I left you alone because some girl smiled at me." I pressed my forehead against the cold granite, feeling the edges bite into my skin. "You trusted me to take care of you, and I chose a night I can barely remember over your whole fucking life." The grief seized my throat, and I let it sit there, heavy and familiar.
The guilt was a living thing, coiled in my gut like a snake, always ready to strike when I let my guard down. It was why I smiled so much, laughed so easily, played the charming fool. Because if I stopped performing for even a second, the weight of what I'd done would crush me.
The family said they forgave me. Mama held me while I sobbed, told me it wasn't my fault, that accidents happen. Papa never looked at me the same way again, but he never blamed me out loud. Jean-Pierre said all the right things at the funeral, put his hand on my shoulder, told me we'd get through it together.
But I saw the way they looked at the empty chair at dinner. Heard Mama crying in Luc's room when she thought no one was listening. Watched Papa drink himself to sleep every night for a year.
So I left. Packed a bag three months after the funeral and disappeared into the world, figuring they'd be better off without a constant reminder of what they'd lost. Spent years drifting from town to town, girl to girl, bottle to bottle, trying to outrun a ghost that lived inside my own bones.
"She makes me want to stop running." I stared at his name carved in stone, blurred now through the tears I'd given up trying to hold back. "Artemis. The others too—Harper and Silas. They make me feel like maybe I could be... real. For the first time since you died, I feel like I could actually let someone see me. All of me. Even the parts I've been hiding."
I pulled out my phone, scrolled to the last message from Artemis. Three words that had made my chest feel like it was cracking open in the best possible way.
Miss you too.
"I'm scared, petit." I admitted it to the headstone because I couldn't admit it to anyone else, not even the woman who'd somehow become the center of my gravity in the span of four days. "I'm scared that if I let myself be happy, it means I've forgotten you. That if I stop carrying this guilt, it means your death didn't matter. That if I—" My voice broke completely, a sob tearing loose that I couldn't swallow back. "That if I let them love me, I'll lose them too. The way I lost you." The last words came out broken, barely audible over the rustle of the magnolia leaves.
The magnolia tree swayed, and a single white blossom drifted down to land on Luc's headstone, delicate and perfect and impossibly alive.
