Gentry’s gaze didn’t waver, full of quiet understanding. “Because he loves you.”
A sob caught in my throat, raw and unfiltered. The truth settled in, not as a burden, but a gift. “I don’t have to carry it anymore. I can live. Love. Be human.”
I closed my eyes and breathed in the stillness, feeling the curse shatter with a soft crack like breaking glass.
“I choose life,” I said. “Not guilt. Not fear.”
thirty-nine
It was nearly impossible to find his tombstone. The cemetery sprawled endlessly, a labyrinth of weathered stones and tangled shadows. Though I had wandered these grounds before, the family plot remained elusive, swallowed by creeping ivy and the chill of forgotten years.
I traced my fingers over countless names, each etched like a whisper in stone, until at last I stumbled upon the Reeves. The first name that met my gaze was Astoria Reeves (my namesake) her grave marked by a solitary star carved above the letters.
A fresh bouquet of white bluebells rested upon her stone, petals delicately intricate, seeming almost to glow against the cold granite.
I turned to the stone beside hers—August Reeves. My father’s name. The same pristine flowers lay there, too.
Panic rose like a cold wind as I scanned the row, eyes darting wildly. Only five other graves bore such offerings, silent sentinels flanking my father’s resting place—their stones shrouded beneath alabaster petals, like a secret kept close beneath the gathering dusk.
I stepped up to the first,Leo James DuPont…
Heart hammering, I went to the second,Arthur Charles DuPont…
Beatrice Lucille DuPont.
My mother’s name greeted me next,Lucille Mary Tempest.She was laid to rest beside Beatrice, causing a lump in the back of my throat. But beside her…
My grandmother’s tombstone. There it was, etched in soft, clean stone.Emaline Colette Tempest. I gasped, welcoming the sudden rush of magic as it marked me with remembrance. Instead of the drooping bluebells, forget-me-not flowers decorated the edges of her stone.
Sitting below, at the base of her tombstone was my basket. The same one I had finished weaving with my own hands. Tight-wound reeds and frayed ends smoothed by weeks of labor. The same one I'd left in Grim's cottage. My throat bobbed as if I'd swallowed something sharp. Heaps of letters were tucked carefully inside, each sealed and dated. Resting on top was one wrapped in black. I reached for it, fingers trembling as I tugged the silk ribbon loose. It unfurled between my hands…
My knees hit the cold earth, mud soaking through my dress as a sob raked through my chest.Grim did this. The tombstones were fresh, as if they’d been carved this morning, only wet with the morning rain. Their dates inscribed below, and under that, “Fiercely loved, they live on through the heart of a star.”
It was too much.
Whether their bodies actually laid at rest here or not, it wasn’t about their bones, but about the sword I felt I could finally lay down. Could I have been wrong abouthim? Judged him too harshly? This was more than I ever stood to deserve.
I couldn’t speak, didn’t dare move. Because my grandmother’s quiet stone meant that it was really over. The Tempest women existed now.
Not just in pain. Not just in murmurs. Inhistory. In granite. In memory.
Somehow, in that stillness, I felt her—my grandmother. My mother. Alice…
Every woman who never got the ending they deserved.
I would live for all of us.
I felt it in my chest first. Not a pull. Not a sting. Just… stillness. Like my ribs had been carrying some invisible weight for so long, I forgot what it meant to breathe without armor.
Laying down beside my family, his familiar scent clung to me. Salt and oleander. Even if he wasn’t here, the markings of him were never far.
A cemetery would be the closest I’d come to Death. I flicked through every letter, each sloppily scribbled as if he couldn’t get pen to paper fast enough. They didn’t possess his usual measured patience. They were the same as my own diary entries, filled with moments between us over the century. His memories of us, of me…
Setting them out around me, I pulled my own notebook from my bag, thumbing to a fresh page. I was close to finishing. Mymemories filled seven notebooks already. What’s left, not yet written.
I chose a dry patch beneath a yew tree, its dark limbs drooping low, brushing the earth in solemn bows like mourners at vigil. The air was hushed beneath its canopy, the world muffled as if holding its breath.
Words did not come as easily as they once had. I had saved the chapters about Death for last, knowing that speaking his truth would be the undoing of mine. To write it down was to admit it had happened, all of it. That he had happened. That I had loved him. That I still did.
