I scrape more egg into her bowl and quickly eat mine, but since she stares at me the whole time, I wind up giving her the last few bites. I think about leaving the dishes in the sink to soak, but I don’t let myself. Grandma Q would have hated that, so I hand wash everything and put the dishes in the cabinet.
“Okay, upstairs.”
We walk out the kitchen door, and I lock it behind me. Quincy stays at my feet as we make our way around the house. When we reach the bottom of the stairs, I think I may need to carry her up, but before I can reach down for her, she shoots up the wrought iron steps like a black arrow. At the top, she looks down at me, tail wagging and mouth open as if smiling about showing me this trick. I laugh again.
I reach the top, let us into the apartment, and when I close the door behind us, all laughter dies in my throat.
It’s after one in the morning. And across both backyards, for the first time in weeks, Evie’s bedroom light is on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
EVIE
I’ve slept with the light on the last three nights.
It’s not because I’m afraid or lonely, though I am both. It’s not because I’m not sleeping much anyway, though I am not. It’s because I know Drew can see the light from his window, and I need him to know I’m still here.
Tori is watching me like a hawk. She demands to see my phone at least five times a day, checking calls, texts, even emails. She’ll find nothing there, but I have tried to call Drew from work.
He won’t answer.
He may not know it’s me, though I’ve left two voice messages. So if he does know it’s me, he hasn’t tried calling back. I’ve asked at the studio every day if there have been any messages for me. None.
I’ve even left him a letter in Mrs. Vivian’s mailbox when I walked Gemini two nights ago, but the mailbox is stuffed full. I doubt anyone’s checked it in a week. And why would they?
Mrs. Vivian is gone.
I saw it in the newspaper yesterday. And, damn her to hell, so did Tori. She’s insisting we go to the burial. Not the funeral. The burial. She wants Drew to see me. She definitely wants me to see him. Watching us suffer would fit nicely into her revenge plan.
And no matter how much it will hurt, I do want to see him. Desperately.
So Tori is the one who drives us to Lafayette Memorial Park Thursday afternoon, but I’m the one craning in my seat as we park, trying to catch a glimpse of Drew before he spots me.
“Mrs. Vivian sure was popular,” Tori remarks as we step out of the car.
“Yes,” I say, emotion catching in my throat, thinking of Drew’s sweet grandmother and what she’d said about us that day the ambulance came. “She was a wonderful person.”
I don’t say this for Tori, of course, but for Mrs. Vivian. For Drew. For the scores of family and friends who are making their way from the snake of cars parked along the cemetery drive to the plot that’s clearly marked with a canopy and chairs for mourners.
When I leave the car, I don’t fall in line next to my sister, but put distance between us. She’s forcing me to be here, but that doesn’t mean I have to stand beside her. But she is right. A lot of people have come to pay their respects. A couple dozen white-haired ladies and a few elderly couples who walk arm in arm make their way to the plot.
As soon I clear the branches of a spreading live oak, I see him. I’ve seen him in jeans, coveralls, and nothing at all, but the sight of him in that black suit takes my breath away. It’s only been three days, but it feels like I haven’t seen him in years. Grief is etched all over his face, between his brows, the line of his mouth, even in the way his throat works as though he’s trying to keep his emotions in check.
How can he look so beautiful, even now?
He’s standing on the edge of the line of family, next to his sister and his Aunt Josie, up near the head of the casket. But when I get close enough, I see that his gaze isn’t on the skirted coffin, but anchored on the headstone just beyond it.
Anthony’s.
I’m not close enough to read the engraving, but I know it. I just know. And I ache to go to him. To stand beside him as he walks through his grief, new and old. I should be with him, promising him a life we will share together, giving him something to hold onto as he has to let so much go.
I glance back over my shoulder and see Tori coming. Her eyes meet mine, and she gives me that smug little grin. I want to slap her. She’s seen Drew, seen how much he’s hurting, and she can probably read the ache in my face, and she’s loving every minute of this.
I willneverforgive her. For what she costs us on this day alone, not to mention the pain I’ve lived in the last three days. Or the hurt I put in Drew’s eyes on Monday. When he wouldn’t let me touch him. When he thought I was abandoning him.
Or the way she’d teased me after, recalling his words when he left.Evie, it’s all I’ve got.She must have said them seven or eight times after mimicking me crying. Crying and telling Drew I loved him.
He didn’t fight for me.
