Hopelessly, calamitously bad. “And you, Winters.”
Her mouth is hot and wet when it finds mine again. “Ah, fuck it,” she mutters, sliding the straps of her swimsuit off her shoulders.
She’s everything. She’s the words, the clues, the black spaces that hold the whole puzzle together. She’s every color in my paint set, and the brush that turns them into something beautiful.
She’s the one thing I was once too scared to dream she’d be:
Mine.
Epilogue
ALEX
FOUR YEARS LATER
One of my favorite things about Ophelia is how red she goes when I sing her “Happy Birthday” each year.
This year is no exception, her face buried in her hands as I sing the final line, lighting shitty gas station candles haphazardly stuck into shortbread cookies and Jelly Babies. “Twenty-five. How does it feel?”
Her cheeks turn even pinker when she leans forward to blow them both out. Her floral dress—a birthday present from me—clings to her in a way that makes me wish so badly that we didn’t have evening plans. “It feels …” She lies back against the grass, staring up at the copper leaves of the tree above us with a contented sigh. “It feels so peaceful.”
Our weekend away to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday always had to be to Scotland. We’ve missed it since we left after our graduation two years ago.
The first threads of autumn are beginning to stitch their way across the landscape. The sun paints her hair in shades of red and gold, the leaves fading from yellow to orange.
Orange is my favorite color.
It’s Ophelia. It’s my mood on so many days, lately. It’s the shade of the small diamond that looks so pretty on her ring finger. It’s the sunset where I married her last year, the flowers tucked into Vincenzo’s pocket as he walked her down the aisle. It’s the fire that crackles in the hearth of our crumbly, badly insulated, money trap of a cottage in the English countryside. It’s the stupid beans on toast that Josie, Charlotte, and Élé eat before school.
It’s the robin that sat on my mother’s windowsill during her final weeks.
I survived my mother’s death. Somehow, weallsurvived it.
I thought I wouldn’t, but here I am. Alive and grateful.
If I thought I knew grief after my dad went to jail, I wassowrong. This grief felt inescapable, unsurvivable, completely and utterly overwhelming. It drowned the delicate tissue of my lungs in tar, filled my skull with lead, shackled my limbs to the bed.
I couldn’t breathe most nights, couldn’t work, couldn’t talk as I desperately tried to make sense of a world where my mother would die and my father would live.
It was Ophelia who forced us to eat, Ophelia who explained it to Josie over and over with the patience of a saint, Ophelia who stood at my side at her wake and finished the speech that I could not. It was Ophelia who told me the world wouldnevermake sense, and the sooner I accept it, the better. When the girls went to bed each night and I fell apart, it was Ophelia who pieced me backtogether again like I was a puzzle she knew so well that she could do it upside down and blindfolded.
On those days where we miss her so painfully that it feels insurmountable, it’sstillOphelia who leads us through.
All her patients at the clinic where she works as a childhood grief counselor couldn’t be in better hands.
Somewhere, at some point, I must’ve done something right.
“Fucking candles. Absolute waste of time,” she grumbles, as she passes me a shortbread splattered in orange candle wax.
“World’s gone to shit,” I mutter, echoing the favorite phrase of Mabel, who lives in the tiny cabin at the end of our garden. Only Ophelia would befriend an elderly woman on a plane and get so attached that she adopted her as a grandmother for all of us.
She wraps her lips around the shortbread, torturing me without meaning to. I’ve really fucked up by making plans for us tonight. I’d rather recreate last night. “It really has.”
I lie back beside her, the early September sun a warm, soft blanket on my skin. This feels surreal. Every day feels surreal with her.
I trace my finger over her clear phone case, over the torn-out crossword page that lives inside. I run it over all the letters that sit in the shaded gray boxes, hastily written on one of the best days of my life. Except Ophelia got a clue wrong, so the shaded letters spellMARAY ME.
Had the same effect, though.
