Page 61 of Keep Me

“I did,” I breathed like a sigh. “I did.”

“How?”

“Before Jax. Sophomore year. I used to walk to the graveyard at night before it got really bad. I was just lonely, or I don’t know. I was just fucking sad. I couldn’t sleep, so I would go sit at my mom’s grave. One night, there was a boy there. I’m not sure why, but I asked him a question. He sat with me for three nights. He told me his name was Alex.” I watched Austin’s face change in real time. “It wasn’t Alex.”

Austin went very still. “Seren.”

“It was Henry,” I said. “I sat with Zane’s best friend for three nights in a graveyard when I was sixteen and I never knew his real name. And then he died. And I never knew that either. I thought he just stopped coming. I thought he moved on.”

“Jesus Christ,” Austin said quietly. “What was the question? You said you asked him a question. What was it?”

I chewed my lip, looking down at my fingernails. It was not that I did not remember. It was that the question felt like a secret I was keeping. Not a secret for myself, but a secret between me and Henry. We never said it, we never verbalized it, but I always felt like the graveyard held an oath that we agreed to. What we said there was not to be repeated.

“Tell me,” Austin urged, clearly seeing my hesitation.

“I asked him if he ever felt like giving up,” I said quietly.

Then I looked up at Austin, with a feeling of guilt launching in my stomach. My eyes watered as I locked my eyes with his. “I asked him if he ever felt like giving up, Austin. I… I didn’t know he had already decided.”

“Oh, love,” Austin took my hand, shaking his head. “It’s not your fault. Like you said, he had already decided.”

“He wrote about it,” I said. “In the letter. To everyone. There’s a part about me.”

“Wait,” Austin tilted his head. “You said it was a letter from his parents. What you’re really saying… Seren, you are saying Zane found Henry’s note. His suicide note.”

“Yes,” I cemented it for him, and for myself. “Zane found his goodbye.”

“What does it say? About you?”

“That I saw him,” I said. “That I was drowning too. That I was—” My voice caught on the word, even now, even saying it again. “He called me his mercy. Morphine before the cancer won. He wrote you won’t fall Seren, I’ll make sure of it.”

Austin’s hand had gone flat against the counter. “Okay.”

“And Zane read it,” I said. “And he thought it meant something it didn’t. He thought Henry was in love with me. He thought maybe I’d loved Henry back. And then he told me about the dream, and I understood that the whole reason Zane ever found me, ever noticed me, might have started because a dying boy told him to.”

“Austin,” I caught his gaze again. “The last conversation that Henry and Zane had… it was about me. Henry told Zane about me. And Henry told me about Zane. Not by name, oh I wish he had said names. We would have known, we could have figured it out. He…”

I trailed off, not wanting to finish my thought because I did not know what the shape of my thought truly was. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like this was script, a play written by Henry and we had just followed it.

“You called me Alex once,” he told me. “I thought you were just high.”

I did not remember that. He was right, I was just high. But he was also right because I knew now that it was not the only reason I called him that. It had slipped from my tongue from habit, not mistake.

Austin did not say anything for a long moment. His muscles worked, the way it did when something was costing him.

“So, you’ve been sitting here,” he said slowly, “wondering if your whole relationship is built on a dead person giving orders.”

I flinched, but he was right. This was the haunting of Henry. “Something like that.”

“That’s insane,” Austin said, but there was no heat in it, just the gentleness he saved for when his guard dropped. “Seren. That’s insane and I love you and I need you to hear me say that. And I need you to hear me when I tell you that you can’t rewrite the last five years because of this. Zane loves you. I love you. Blair loves you. Cassidy loves you. You.”

“I know it sounds—”

“Can I see it?” He interrupted me. “The letter.”

I slid it across the counter. It had replaced my dad’s phone. The thing that said too much and deserved a place in the open to remind everyone it said too much. He read it slowly, like he knew every word mattered, his eyes moving down the page with a kind of careful attention I did not often get to watch from him. I saw the moment he hit the Blair section. His whole body went still, the half-eaten toast forgotten in his hand.

“Fate had other plans,” he read aloud, quiet, to himself. He set the letter down. He didn’t say anything for a while.