I watched her closely. Her lip trembled. She didn’t speak.
“You didn’t survive all this time to perform worthiness. And you don’t owe the world a legacy just to justify your existence.”
Her lips parted, and her chin wobbled.
"You think you've done nothing, but you’ve endured. You’ve loved. You’ve grieved. You’ve woken up every morning in a world that’s forgotten you, and you’ve still chosen to breathe. That’s not nothing.”
She blinked, and I saw it—the way my words hit something in her chest. A stone dropped in still water. A ripple, trembling outward.
“And even if you’d spent these years doing absolutely nothing but drinking bad coffee and watching the seasons pass…” My throat tightened around the words. “You would still be enough.”
She broke then. The soft collapse of a soul too tired to fight its own self-loathing anymore. I pulled her into my arms and held her as if I was anchoring her to the earth, when really, she’d been anchoring me.
twenty-eight
Astoria
November 2018
Routines were something I was not accustomed to. At least, not since the early nineteen hundreds. We’d had a fairly simple routine as a family, back when it was just James, the kids, and me. More and more, I found myself yearning for those moments, wishing I had basked in the mundane a little longer. Family life was something I had most certainly taken for granted.
My current routine was mundane too, but in a new way.
Each morning, I woke to a handwritten note from Grim, usually propped crookedly against the sugar bowl—a thought for the day signed with a promise he'd be home later.
I’d eat breakfast, and then spend the next few hours bundled in every layer of clothing Grim owned, sitting cross-legged inthe grass, desperately trying to weave something, anything, that resembled a basket. At this point, I'd settle for a shallow bowl shape.
After weaving all morning (or mangling whatever poor reeds Grim had found for me), I’d eat lunch and dance in the kitchen to whatever random song Grim prompted the House to play. Sometimes it was blues, sometimes jazz—once, memorably, it was polka, a choice I was certain the House had made out of pure spite.
On warmer afternoons, I'd walk down the grassy hill and sit on the black sand, watching the waves kiss the shore. But it was winter now, and the weather had been mostly brutal, sharp winds and biting cold, the kind that made the sea look wild and endless.
Other days, I'd stay tucked inside, writing, filling notebook after notebook with small memories of my life. Eccentric thoughts. Hopeless dreams. Stupid jokes I’d overheard in cities long since fallen.
I was turning one hundred and forty-seven in a few days. There was a strange kind of peace in reading through my own thoughts, seeing my life laid out in messy ink and crumpled margins.
Dinner would arrive, and with it Grim. He always returned just as the sky turned velvet dark, after spending the day... doing whatever it was Death did.
We’d talk for hours, about anything and everything.
I learned he hated sunsets but instead loved the sunrise.
That yes, Death could rest, but he didn’tneedtrivial things like food or water. Still, he had grown to love his corporeal form and found a strange pride in living as humanly as possible. He believed it only fair, he said, to subject himself to the human experience if he was meant to be the executioner.
Grim wasn’t humorous. Not by nature. But sometimes, if you looked closely, there was a spark of amusement in his dark eyes—a ghost of a smile.
I found myself digging for that smile more often.
I also learned that the books littering his living room hadn’t been collected all at once. They were curated slowly, over centuries, as he discovered a love for storytelling. Artifacts lined the walls in the same delicate, careful, and intentional way. Not trophies, but memories. Little pieces of humanity he couldn’t bring himself to let go of.
But tonight was different.
Because Death did not return home.
Nor the next night.
The notes he left were short—almost clipped—with no explanation for his disappearance. Just his looping, careful handwriting scrawled across the page.
I’ll return soon. Be safe.
