Page 55 of Keep Me

I did not know what we were on the other side of this. I was not sure there was a word for it yet.

How do you come back from the forceful understanding that your love story might not have just been a love story, but a haunting?

Love Story

Cassidy was the one who found me in the morning. I was not sure how she got in, if she had a key, or if the door had simply been left unlocked the entire time, I was sitting here with my spinning mind.

She had that calm look on her face as she approached me, the one I used to see when she carefully watched Zane’s grief. It was the same look, just directed at me this time.

“Hey,” she said, her voice was soft and it seemed motherly in a strange way, not in the way of being older, not with maturity, but the nurture that it held.

I sighed, peeling my face from where it had pressed against the cool tile. “Hi.”

She sat down beside me, barely leaving any space between her body and mine. She didn’t say anything else right away, it felt like she was taking in the atmosphere of this room, gauging the emotional temperature.

“I heard,” she eventually said. She did not have to explain. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I’m trying to understand it all. I’m thinking about Zane. I don’t… he thinks…”

“I know,” Cassidy saved me from running in circles. “It wasn’t what I expected.”

“Did you read it?” I asked her.

“I did,” she nodded, her lips twisting just slightly. “And Zane told me a little bit.”

“He’s mad.”

“No,” Cassidy shook her head, disagreeing with my assessment quickly. “He’s confused. He’s holding on to the script of grief he has in his head. The one he’s spent years writing and memorizing. This broke that script.”

“It didn’t just break the script,” I said, “it changes everything.”

Cassidy fell silent again, letting the weight of my words hit the ground with its full gravity. “Does it?” she asked me after a moment. “Does it change everything?”

“Yes.”

“What does it change?” she asked me, and I did not really know how to answer her.

So, I didn’t. I sat in the question, and it was that moment of not being able to verbalize a feeling that felt so strong inside your mind but fell short of logic when put into words.

“You knew Henry. Henry knew you. But you know Zane and Zane also knows you. And Henry doesn’t change that.” Cassidy’s words sounded like a riddle I did not particularly want to solve right now.

“You’ve been through a lot,” she continued. “Your dad just died. Now, you found out that your friend died, too. Even if it happened a long time ago. You didn’t know, and now you do. This hurts Zane, I know. It also hurts you. I know that, too. But I want you to remember it. Don’t push it away.”

I looked up at her, my vision blurring slightly as the exhaustion of the night finally caught up to me. “Remember what, Cass? The fact that my life feels like it’s built on a foundation of shifting sand?”

Cassidy reached out, her hand resting warm and solid against my forearm. “Remember that your grief deserves room. You are allowed to mourn Henry. You are allowed to be angry about your dad, and you are allowed to feel completely lost right now.”

She leaned her head back staring up at the ceiling. “When Zane lost Henry, he built a wall around that pain,” she said softly. “He made it his entire identity. Then, he met you, and he let that identity go. You talk about how Zane saved you; I don’t think you understand that you saved him, too. In a way, you are the reason he was able to let what happened go. Henry was his past and you became his future. Now, finding out that Henry had this whole other connection, his past colliding with his future, well, maybe right now the past and the future are blending for him. They aren’t as separate as he thought. But… that’s life. And he will remember where the boundary lines are. He just has to work through it. Let him.”

I let out a shaky breath, the cool tile beneath my legs the only thing keeping me grounded. “He looked at me like I was the one who hid it from him. Like I’m guilty by association.”

“Because it’s easier to be mad at the person standing in front of you than it is to face a ghost,” Cassidy replied, her voice dropping to a fierce, protective hush. “But you didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did Zane. And neither did Henry. No one needs to confess their sins and ask for forgiveness. It just needs some recalibration.”

She turned her head to look at me, her eyes steady and clear. “The script is broken, yeah. But maybe the old script was a tragedy anyway. What does it change? It changes the past, sure. But it does not change who you are to Zane, or who he is to you. Unless you let it.”

Zane did not knock this time.

The front door opened, and I heard it from the kitchen floor, where I had not seemed to move from, and I already knew. Not because of the sound. Because of the way the air changed, the way a room rearranges itself around one specific person. He had been doing that to rooms since we met. Walking into them and quietly shifting everything two degrees toward somewhere safer.