Page 62 of Keep Me

“She doesn’t know,” he said finally. “Blair. She doesn’t know this exists.”

“No.”

“He wrote about her.” Austin’s voice had gone rough. “He wrote about her in his last letter and she has been walking around for five years not knowing he thought about her at the end. She thinks about him a lot. He… he plays a role in the way she thinks. The way she got better. The way she fell in love with me.”

“I know.” And I thought, join the club. Henry shaped a lot of things. His memory changed the future. It shaped people’s actions. He was not in the past, he was everywhere. He was a version of time that was kinder than the real thing.

A memory from the graveyard pulled through, one I had not examined yet. The dark, wet graveyard, the stone against my back, Henry sitting beside me. His words came back to me. I don’t want to just come and go. I want to leave something behind. Something that doesn’t disappear the second I do. Something permanent. Another sigh escaped me. I felt stupid. I was hearing his words and applying them to my own thoughts. I thought he was talking about leaving something behind in life. Something that was not attached to him, something that stayed when he changed rooms and when people moved apart, like life forces them to. He was talking about leaving something behind in death. So clearly, and I did not consider it.

“She needs to see this.” Austin was already reaching for his phone. “Not over text. Not me reading it to her.” He looked at me. “She needs to see that he thought about her the same way she thinks about him.”

I did not argue. While we waited for her, I picked at what was left of the toast.

“The past just doesn’t seem to stay where we leave it,” I said. I was thinking about that call with Lucy, the one where she told me this was true. I did not want to believe her and sometimes I hated how right she always was.

Austin looked up. “No, it doesn’t. I wish it did.”

“I went to the graveyard the other night. I went to go see my dad… and my mom, I guess I just went to see my parents. I was sitting there on the ground, and I was so angry at Jax.” I watched his face for the flicker I knew would come. “I went there to be sad about my dad and somehow I ended up doing this whole math problem about everything he took from me.”

“That tracks,” Austin said carefully. “Doesn’t it always go there eventually? I don’t know, sometimes it feels like Jax was the catalyst. What he did… it set everything in motion.”

“I thought it would stop,” I said. “I thought three years of therapy meant I had gotten past needing to drag him into every single hard thing that happens to me. But I sat there with a bottle of my dad’s vodka and all I could think about was him. Not Tom. Not my mom. Him.”

Austin did not say anything right away. He turned his coffee mug a slow half-circle on the counter.

“I think about him, too, sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, the old reflex.

“Don’t,” Austin said, sharp enough that I knew he meant it. “He took something from all of us. He took the most from you. Of course, you’re angry. Of course you’re angry, Seren.”

“Do you think it stops?” I asked. “I thought I was in the after but now I realize I never really made it there.”

“I don’t know,” Austin said. I waited. I knew from the look in his eyes that he had more to say.

“Sometimes you talk about how Zane was the first person to see the real you. And not in that bullshit way that people usually mean it. Not like he saw the good, shiny version of you that you keep hidden. Like… he saw all of it, the good parts. The bad parts. Sorry to say, but back then you had a lot of bad parts. But he saw them all and it didn’t matter. You were still worth something. Even with all the bad parts, you were still worth loving.”

I was still as Austin spoke, running my eyes across the way his face had gone somber. “Yeah,” I agreed because I think he was looking for that.

“That’s how I feel about you,” he told me, a flat smile crossing his face. “Blair did that too, of course. But you were the first person to see how fucked up I was and choose to love me anyway. And you are the first person’s love that I decided to be worthy of.”

“You are worthy of love,” I reminded him. “Especially mine.”

“Well, part of being worthy of it is protecting you. Then, your dad sits across from me, signs a stack of papers like everything is fine, calls me Saturday morning to tell me he’s stepping back, and I told him that was great.” His voice cracked slightly on great. “I congratulated him. Same as I congratulated him on the contracts. I missed it completely. Same as I missed Jax.”

“I know how to read people. That was my deal. My version of your deal with time. I was going to see things. I was going to catch them early enough to matter.” He set the unlit cigarette flat against his knee. “I didn’t catch this before it hurt you, and I hate that. I failed.” Austin finally took a steady breath and looked at me.

“That’s not fair to anyone,” I told him. “You and Zane… you both have to stop this. You did not fail. And you especially did not fail me. You never have.”

“I failed you twice,” he said.

“You didn’t fail,” I said again, and I let it come out hard, because soft wasn’t going to reach him. “You didn’t fail me with Jax because Jax built an entire life designed to be missed. He fooled everyone. He fooled me, for longer than I want to admit. He fooled himself, Austin. And you didn’t fail me with my dad because my dad spent eight months being deliberately, professionally invisible about it. He had a lawyer. He had a system. He was better at hiding than you were ever going to be at catching. This wasn’t your job.”

Austin’s eyes were wet. He did not wipe them. He let out a breath that shook a little on the way out. “I don’t know how to stop feeling like it was my job,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But you could not have protected me from this. Even if you knew. Even if you realized. He still would have died. This pain would still be here. This was inevitable.”

He reached across the counter and gripped my hand, hard, the way he did everything, and we sat there for a minute not saying anything else, because some things did not need more words put on them.