Page 70 of Keep Me

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he agreed. “But I intend to be there when you do. We’ll go together. Whatever winter it is. Whatever year.” His hand tightened around mine. “That’s not fate either, by the way. That’s just a plan. I’m allowed to have those about you now. Nobody’s dying to give me permission this time.” He smiled as he said the last sentence, and his smile made me warm again.

I laughed, and it felt good to do.

“I need to say something,” Zane said, his tone turned serious. “I read that letter and it took the ground out from under me, wondering if four years of my life had a string attached to it, one I never saw. And I want you to know, now, with all of it, the dream and the letter and the graveyard and everything neither of us knew, I would choose you again. Today. Knowing everything. I would choose you again, and again, and every single morning after that, the same way your father chose that feeder, the same way I’ve been choosing you since I was seventeen years old and didn’t even know anything about you, yet.”

“Zane.”

“You asked me if I would have seen you if none of the bad things happened. And I would if I had the chance. I would choose you again,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a sentence, it was a vow finding its second wind, “I would choose you again if there was no fate in it whatsoever, no dead friend, no pain, no dream. I would choose you again because you are the easiest, hardest, most necessary thing I have ever done with my life, and I am never going to stop doing it.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I existed beside him.

“I choose you too,” I said finally and I remembered the time I had said the same words, at the cliffs so many years ago. “Not because you found me broken and I don’t know how to be anything else.” I squeezed his hand once, hard. “I told Austin once that I thought you and I were inevitable. That we would have found our way to each other in any universe. I still believe that, Zane. You were meant for me, and I was meant for you. My love for you was always inevitable.”

He pulled me in, my head finding the place against his chest that had always fit, his heart going steady beneath my ear.

“Okay,” he murmured into my hair. “Okay.”

“You’re stuck with me,” I said softly. Like it was just a fact. “You found me and now you have to keep me.”

“And how should I do that?” he asked me.

“By knowing me, the good parts and the bad, and loving me anyway,” I looked up at him, and found he was already staring back at me. “The way you always have.”

“Knowing you and loving you,” he nodded, smiling. “That’s my favorite thing to do.”

Snow

Endings do not announce themselves.

You expect the last day of something to feel different in your hands, heavier maybe, the way a sigh feels before the exhale. It does not. The last day just feels like a Thursday with boxes in it. You do not know you’re living inside an ending until you are already several rooms deep into the middle of one, and by then it is too late to pay closer attention to the parts you would have wanted to keep.

The house sold in five days. Faster than anyone expected, faster than the realtor had warned us to prepare for, a young couple with a little girl who liked the porch and did not ask a single question about the hook on the railing. I signed the papers the way I had signed everything else that spring, at the kitchen island, a pen someone handed me, my name coming out steady because my hand had learned the motion without needing my permission anymore.

Today was the last day of my existence here.

“You’re doing the thing again,” Cassidy said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a roll of packing tape around her wrist like a bracelet. “The staring thing.”

“I’m not staring at anything.”

“You’re staring at the cabinets like they personally wronged you.” She held up the tape. “Come help me with the good dishes before Austin wraps them in newspaper and calls it his method.”

“It is my method,” Austin called from the dining room, not even looking up from the box he was destroying with too much enthusiasm. “This is a system, Cassidy.”

“It’s chaos with a deadline.”

Blair laughed from somewhere near the hallway closet, a sound I’d grown accustomed to over the years, and O’s low voice answered her about something I couldn’t make out, and Gavin came through with a lamp under each arm like he’d been personally assigned to lamps and had accepted his fate. The house was fuller today than it had been in weeks, fuller than it had been since the funeral, every room holding someone I loved doing something ordinary with their hands.

Zane was upstairs. I could hear him above me, the sound of his footsteps moving across what used to be my father’s room, and something in me had stopped flinching at that sound and had started hearing it instead as just another part of the house’s noise.

“Seren.” His voice, calling down. “Come up here a second.”

I found him in the attic doorway, ducked slightly under the low frame, a box in his hands he was looking at like it had asked him a question he didn’t have the answer to.

“It was pushed back behind the insulation,” he said. “I wasn’t even looking for anything. I just saw the corner of it.”

He set it on the floor between us and opened the flaps. It looked so old that the frame might collapse if we handled it the wrong way. It was dusty and stale, and I knew that it had been forgotten in the truest sense, left alone for so long that it faded into questioning its true state of existence.