Page 66 of The Immortal’s Mark

“He was sixty-seven when he died. I held his hand through the last night.” The words come out flat. Controlled. “His skin had gone papery by then. Thin as rice paper. But still warm. Still reaching for mine.”

I remember the exact temperature of his fingers. The way they curled around mine, weaker than a child’s grip.

“That was when I learned.” I make myself say it. “Love is just a longer word for loss. Stay too long, you watch them die. Leave too soon, you never really had them.”

I force a breath.

“Either way, it ends the same.”

The silence stretches. I wait for the rest of it—the pity, the platitudes, the I understand from someone who’s lived thirty-four years and thinks he knows what centuries feel like.

He doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t offer comfort.

“Thank you for telling me.”

Four words. Quiet. Simple.

I wait for the rest. The philosophical observation about suffering. The imperial wisdom about how grief teaches us. The gentle attempt to fix what can’t be fixed.

It doesn’t come.

He’s not looking at me with pity. Not looking at me like I’m broken, or tragic, or in need of saving. Just looking. Just seeing.

Just present.

“That’s it?” The words come out sharper than I intend. Armor snapping back. “No sage advice? No observations about how love is worth the pain?”

“Would you want me to say those things?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t.”

The simplicity of it undoes something in me. Some knot I didn’t know I was carrying. People always want to help. Always want to offer the benefit of their thirty or forty years applied to my eight centuries of grief. As if wisdom could be borrowed.

He doesn’t try.

“You didn’t tell me because you wanted wisdom.” His voice is steady. No tremor, no false warmth. “You told me because you wanted someone to know.”

I hate that he’s right. I hate that he understood what I was doing before I did. That he listened to eight hundred years of grief and let it be what it is—not smaller, not fixable. Just real. Just witnessed.

I hate that I don’t hate it at all.

“The garden is yours now too,” he adds. “Come here whenever you need quiet.”

It’s not a declaration. It’s something more dangerous.

Permission. To be here. To be broken. To be seen.

“Careful.” My voice isn’t quite steady. “I might redecorate.”

The joke falls flat. We both know it. He doesn’t call me on it.

The jasmine keeps opening. The moon keeps its slow climb. And for a moment—just this moment—I let myself feel what it’s like to be known.

Not fixed. Not saved.

Just seen.