Page 101

Hundreds of young sunflowers stretch out around me, tall green stalks disappearing into a sea of yellow that seems to go on forever, while beyond them the Wyoming mountains are still dark against a sky slowly changing from pale blue to soft orange and gold.

For a moment I can only stare as the first edge of the sun appears above the mountains, sending a thin ray of light across the field until it reaches my face.

I close my eyes and tip my head toward its warmth without even thinking.

When I open them again, I look around and notice something I somehow missed before.

The sunflowers are facing it too.

Hundreds of young heads turned toward the rising sun, all of them waiting for the light.

“Oh my God.”

The words leave me on a breath.

I turn slowly, taking in more of them everywhere I look, sunflowers as far as I can see, and something bubbles up inside me that feels so foreign after all this time that for one terrifying second I don’t even recognize it until a laugh escapes my lips.

My laugh.

I press a hand over my mouth, but another one comes, and then another, until I’m laughing so hard my eyes sting.

I walk deeper into the field, my fingertips skimming over petals as I pass.

“Jude!”

I don’t even know why I call his name.

I just do.

I turn around, then again and again, like a child or a complete idiot, and for once I don’t care. The flowers blur into streaks of yellow and green while the sky spins above me in orange and gold, and I tip my head back and laugh.

God, when was the last time I did this? When was the last time something felt beautiful without being bittersweet, without immediately reminding me of something I had lost, but simply beautiful because it was?

I stop spinning, my chest rising and falling as I stare at the sky.

How long has death been the only thing I could see, until every memory had become hospital rooms and white sheets, needles and machines, ashes and black clothes and all those empty spaces where Damiano should have been? Somehow I had started living as if the world ended because mine did, as if everything beautiful disappeared the moment he took his last breath, but standing here with the sun warming my face and hundreds of flowers surrounding me, I realize it didn’t.

The realization hurts, because while I was buried so deep inside my grief that I forgot to look, the sun kept rising, flowers kept growing and people kept laughing, and the world outside my pain kept being impossibly, indescribably beautiful.

A tear slips down my cheek, but I’m still smiling.

I’m still fucking smiling.

I turn toward Jude.

“I—”

The words disappear.

He’s standing several feet away.

He hasn’t followed me or interrupted whatever just happened, and his hands are shoved into the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders relaxed while the mountains behind him are bathed in the first orange light of morning, turning the edges of his dark hair gold.

And he’s watching me.

His eyes are on my face with an intensity that makes something inside me go very still.

It’s strange.