Page 63 of Keep Me

The front door opened minutes later. “Hello? Seren? Austin texted me to come over, said it was important—” Blair’s voice trailed into the kitchen ahead of her, light and easy, completely unprepared for what she was walking into.

She stopped in the doorway. She looked between us, the letter on the counter, the weight in the room that did not need explaining once you were standing inside it.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Austin stood up. He did not say anything clever, did not soften it the way I half-expected him to. He just picked up the letter, walked it over to her, and put it in her hands.

“It’s from Henry,” he said. “Zane found it last night. There’s a part about you.”

Blair’s face went through several things very quickly. Confusion. Then something sharper. She looked down at the pages, and I watched her recognize his handwriting before she had even found the part that was hers, the way you recognize a voice before you understand the words.

“Can I—” She looked up at Austin, then at me. “Can I sit?”

“Of course,” I said.

She sat down on the stool I had been on, and Austin and I gave her room, moving to lean against the counter, and she read it. Her eyes moved fast at first and then slowed when she reached her own name. I watched her go very still, the same stillness I had felt myself last night, the paralysis of seeing your own name in a dead person’s last words.

She read it twice. I could tell because her eyes went back up the page once she reached the end. When she finally looked up, her eyes were wet, but she was not crying the way I expected. She looked almost relieved.

“He thought about that summer,” she said softly. “I always wondered if he even remembered it. We were so young. I thought maybe it didn’t matter to him the way it mattered to me.” She pressed the letter flat against her chest, the same gesture I had made with the photograph I found, like the act of holding something to your heart was simply what people did when words ran out. “He remembered.”

“He did,” Austin said.

“Fate had other plans,” she read again, quietly, the words clearly doing something to her that none of us could follow from the outside. “He believed in it too. I didn’t know that.”

The kitchen was quiet except for the low hum of the refrigerator and somewhere outside, faint, the rustle of wind through the hydrangeas.

“Seren,” Blair said eventually, setting the letter down with a careful, deliberate motion, like she was putting something fragile back exactly where it belonged. “Austin told me a little in his texts. About the dream. About the graveyard.” She looked at me steadily. “You’re scared this means Zane didn’t choose you. That Henry chose you for him.”

I didn’t say anything, which was its own answer.

“I used to be obsessed with fate,” Blair said. “Really, obsessed. I used to think everything that happened to me was supposed to happen, that there was a plan, that the universe had already decided how my story went and all I had to do was follow the breadcrumbs.” She smiled, small and a little rueful. “I met Austin and I built this whole theory in my head. That fate put him in the room where Cherry overdosed so I could be the one to save her. That fate had decided we were meant to find each other.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“Austin told me fate was bullshit,” she said, and laughed, soft and surprised, like the memory still caught her off guard. “Right to my face. He said fate didn’t bring us together, we did. We chose this. And it broke something in me, hearing that, because if fate wasn’t real, then what was I supposed to hold onto when things went wrong?”

I watched her think it through, the same way she must have thought it through the first time, years ago.

“But here’s what I figured out,” she said. “I didn’t need it to be fate. I just needed something to trust. And it turns out the thing worth trusting was never some cosmic plan. It was just him. Showing up. Every single day, whether some bigger force was orchestrating it or not.” She looked at me. “Fate might have put Henry in a graveyard at the same time as you. Fate might have put a dream in Zane’s head. I don’t know. Maybe it did. I still believe in some of that, more than Austin does, probably more than I should.” She shrugged, light. “But fate did not make Zane stay for four years. Fate did not make him keep choosing you after Jax died. Fate does not keep choosing you on a random Tuesday when nothing is forcing his hand.”

I mulled her words over in my mind. She was right. Zane stayed when he did not know how close I was to the edge. He stayed when I was about to jump. But he also stayed when I had walked away from the cliff completely. When there was not any more danger of falling.

“He chose me at seventeen,” I said quietly. “He chooses me now.”

“There you go,” Blair said. “That’s not Henry’s choice. That’s just Zane’s.”

I thought about the feeder. I thought about Tom filling it every single morning for twenty-one years, not because anyone was forcing him to, not because Anwen was standing over his shoulder enforcing a contract, but because somewhere in the doing of it, the obligation had turned into something else. A man could stop filling a feeder any morning he wanted. Nobody was checking. The birds would have survived without him. He just never stopped.

That wasn’t obligation. I had gotten that wrong, sitting on the kitchen floor last night, twisting it into something smaller and sadder than it actually was. It was the opposite of obligation. It was a vow so repeated it stopped needing the original reason behind it.

Zane could stop choosing me any morning he wanted. Nobody was checking. He just never stopped.

“He knew you,” Blair said, looking down at the letter one more time, her thumb tracing the edge of the page the way Austin’s had earlier. “And he knew Zane, and he knew me,” she said to me. “And maybe he knew, somehow, wherever he is, that we’d all end up exactly here. All of us. In this kitchen.” She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

Austin looked at her, something soft passing over his face. “I told you that once,” he said. “In your room. After I found the picture.”

“You did,” Blair said. “I didn’t believe you then.”