Page 12 of Sorrow & Strangers

We climb the stairs, and both of us pause in front of his door. Uriel brushes his hand over his son’s name crudely etched into the wood before gripping the door handle and looking at me. “Together.”

He pushes the door open, and the pain splinters through me as Connor’s scent envelops me. I shake my head. “I can’t,” I whisper.

“Neither can I, but he said we have to.”

I exhale a sob and close my eyes, trying to center myself before we walk into the room, but it doesn’t help. The room looks as if it’s been left in stasis, time and space frozen to preserve this memory. His bed is still unmade from that morning. The morning that I decided to go for a run. The morning I left him in bed, sleeping so peacefully.

I inhale deeply, letting his scent fill my lungs, and it’s the most blissful agony.

“He’d hate us crying like this,” Uriel says, his voice cracking. He clears his throat as he looks around the room, and I follow him.

Connor’s jersey is draped over the back of his chair, and his desk is littered with textbooks, papers, and framed photographs of us, his brothers, and his friends. I pick up one of the photos. It’s so stupidly blurry, but we’re obviously kissing in it, and I’m smiling against his lips.

“He told me something else,” Uriel says, pulling me from my memory, and I turn to look at him. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gold bangle, one that I would know anywhere. Connor’s halo. It’s in perfect condition, except for a small dent at the inner edge.

“This is yours,” he says. “For us, death is not the end. It is the start of something new. A new duty to the souls that enter Heaven and Hell.”

I shake my head, looking at the halo.

Uriel steps closer and lifts my left hand, sliding the halo onto my wrist. It glows faintly and then settles, almost as if accepting me as the new wearer. “You are the first non-angel ever to wear one.”

I shake my head again. “No, I don’t deserve this.”

“You don’t get to decide that, kiddo.”

Another soft sob comes from me as I stare at it and then around his room, and I swear the halo hums. The vibration is slight, but I am sure I feel it.

Uriel kisses my head again. “Azrael says he’s watching you all the time.”

It is not fair that he can see me. That he can watch me, yet I can’t see him. I want to rage and scream, but all I can do is sob.

“It’s time, Summer. Time to stop crying for him.”

“He’s gone.” I repeat Max’s monstrous words. “How can he be gone?” I ask. It’s not a question for Uriel but for the whole fucking universe, to the traitor gods who took him from me.

Uriel wraps an arm around my shoulder as he looks around the room. “I know.” He pauses for a moment, time enough for me to sob again. “But he would have it no other way.”

“It should’ve been me,” I say, speaking my truth finally, and it’s so freeing.

Uriel shakes his head. “No, that’s only exchanging one tragedy for ­another.”

“A better tragedy.” Connor was good. He was kind and smart. The realms need him. Not me.

“No,” Uriel says immediately.

Uriel walks to the desk and picks up one of Connor’s baseball caps. “He was always trying to help and do right by others.”

I look down at the photo of the two of us again.

I feel Uriel’s kind gaze on me. “He loved you so much, Summer. He never regretted his choice.”

I brush my fingers over the blurry photo.

“Not once,” Uriel repeats, walking to me and looking at the photo.

“I thought you all hated me,” I say, speaking another of my ugly truths.

“Never.”