Page 64 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“I think you would have loved each other.”

The silence that follows is the longest one of the night.

I don't fill it.

I let it be what it is: an acknowledgement. A confession. The truth that I have been skirting around for months, every time I saw Toren look at something with that particular quality of attention that reminded me of my sister, every time she said something that caught me off guard because it was the kind of thing Em would have said.

I haven't been keeping Toren alive because she's a Kellar and her death would be inconvenient.

I haven't been unable to kill her because she's carrying my child, though that's real too.

I have been keeping her alive because she is the closest thing to Emery I have found in two years of looking for reasons to stay in a world my sister left behind.

I am going to have to do something about that.

“I'm going to fix it,” I tell her. “I don't know what fixing it looks like yet. I don't have a plan and that should alarm me more than it does.” A pause. “She deserves better than what I've given her. I know that. You know that. You'd be furious with me, honestly, you'd probably have told me to get my shit together about four months ago and then refused to speak to me until I did.” Something shifts in my chest that I recognize, not grief exactly, not yet, but the neighbor of it. Something that might eventually become the kind of love that doesn't destroy things. “I'm going to try.”

I push to my feet.

My knees are damp from the grass, my hands are cold and I am covered in the residue of a night that has cost more than I knew I was paying. I look at her name one last time.

“Till death do us part,” I say. Quiet. Final. The vow I made when I was sixteen in the kitchen and she had her arms folded, her chin up and she meant every word of it. “I'm still here, Em. I'm working on the worth living part.”

I turn away from the headstone.

I walk back to the gap in the east wall.

The city is dark and waiting and there is a girl in a hospital bed with my number on her jersey and my baby under her ribs and whatever I do next, I am not doing it from a cemetery at two in the morning.

It's time to move.

I owe you a life worth living.

I'm working on it.

The apartment is lit up when I arrive. The guys have cleaned it the best they can but it looks nothing like it did before she destroyed the place.

Cas is in the kitchen with a coffee gone cold beside him, that he won't drink. He looks up when I come in and does the fast sweep he always does, cataloguing damage, checking my temperature, running his own private assessment of how tonight has left me. He's been doing it since we became friends and I have never once told him to stop because the truth is… I'd do the same for him.

“You went to the cemetery,” he says. Not a question.

I drop my keys on the counter. “Don't.”

“I'm not.” He holds his hands up slightly. “Just nothing.”

I pull out a chair and sit down across from him.

“She'll be here in twenty minutes,” Cas says. “She texted.”

“Of course she did.” Something shifts in my chest at that. The fact that she's coming. The fact that she said she would and she is, because Toren Kellar doesn't say things she doesn't mean and that quality, that specific infuriating quality, was supposed to make her easier to predict and has only ever made her harder to fight.

I look up at Caspian.

He's looking at me with that careful expression he gets when he knows something is wrong and he's deciding whether to say it.

“Say it,” I tell him.

A beat.