Page 101 of Dead Girls Don’t Forget

She loved them with everything she had.

“Sometimes I wonder if you’d even recognize me.”

I rested my palm against the top of the stone. “I hope you would.”

I left my hand there for a long moment.

The wind picked up, carrying cold air across the cemetery.

I rubbed my hands together and stood.

My sister’s grave was last.

Harmony Mitchell. Beloved daughter. Beloved sister. Your song lives on.

I set the yellow tulips down. They looked too bright against the gray stone.

“Hey, bug.”

The old nickname slipped out before I could catch it. I hadn’t said it in ten years.

“You’d hate this,” I said quietly. “Me kneeling in the wet grass talking to a headstone. You’d tell me to stand up before I caught pneumonia. You’d complain about my coat, then fix my hair without asking.”

A breath escaped me, almost a laugh.

“You’d want me to tell you everything. Nothing ever stayed a mystery with you for long,” I said. “You used to climb into my bunk at midnight with whatever magazine you’d been reading and force me to listen while you went through it page by page. By the time you finished I always had an opinion on some celebrity I’d never even heard of.”

I touched the corner of the plaque.

“There’s a boy.” The words came out small.

I brushed a few rain-soaked leaves away from the base of the headstone.

“You’d have been ruthless about him. Stolen my phone to read our texts. Asked me the same questions every single day until I gave up and told you everything.”

You never forgot anything. Except that twenty dollars you still owed me.

A small smile tugged at my mouth. I shook my head.

“You cheated at cards and somehow always convinced me it was my fault.”

I tried to picture her at twenty-six, the age she would have been now. I imagined her with messy hair, bare feet on my kitchen table, and her phone in her hand asking me what color his eyes were.

“I didn’t plan for him. I came here to do one thing, and he’s… something I didn’t account for. He’s good to me. But I can’t stop. You know I can’t. I just wanted to tell someone, and the only people I tell things to are dead.”

I let out a shaky breath.

“He’d have liked you. Or maybe he wouldn’t. You would’ve given him hell for the first month, then decided he was okay after all. After that we never would’ve heard the end of it.”

My hand tightened on the edge of the stone until the granite bit into my skin.

“I feel guilty,” I whispered. “For being alive. For wanting him. For letting myself care about someone.”

My cat stirred inside me, unimpressed. She had never understood guilt for surviving.

The silence pressed in until I almost laughed at myself. Did I really expect Harmony to answer?

A gust of wind tugged at my braid, loosening a strand of hair across my face.