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With a single finger, I traced the outline of her name in the stone. Alana Sheryl Rhodes.
Born…
Died…
Beloved daughter, mother, and friend.
Part of me hated myself for hesitating on marriage. Alana had wanted to wait, of course, but I should have at least asked. If we’d done it the way everyone had wanted to, if we’d had a wedding, had become husband and wife, Alana would also have wife on her headstone. She would have had my mother’s ring on her finger when she died.
And I would be a widow.
But, instead, I was just a foolish man, a single father, who’d lost the love of his life.
“I named her Anna,” I continued, digging my fingers into the soft soil. “I hope that’s okay.”
I wished I could feel her there, six feet underneath the ground, but of course I didn’t. There was no more warmth, no more heartbeat inside her. Come home to me, she’d said that night. And I had. I’d done as she asked, killed the bad guy, saved the day, I’d done everything right. But, she’d still been taken from me.
Maybe the Varasso curse wasn’t a myth, after all. We were doomed.
I’d been fated to lose her all along.
I choked back a sob. For the smallest of seconds, the stone wall around my heart threatened to crack right down the center. With a gasp, I patched it back up and forced myself back into nothingness.
Up above me, the thunder rumbled through the sky. I glanced up, watching thick, black clouds roll in from the north. A flash of lightning, fleeting and bright and beautiful, burst furiously across the sky. Seconds later, the downpour started.
But I didn’t move.
I sat there, frozen, still as stone, as the rain hammered into the earth.
In that moment, despite the cold and the nothingness, I couldn’t help but think of Alana’s favorite poem. It seemed macabre now, that she loved a poem about death so much. But, Alana was a strong, resilient woman. I could hear the words of the poem in my mind, spoken in her soft, smiling voice.
“Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.”
I took a deep breath and blinked through the rain as it soaked through my clothes.
Her whispers floated through my head, resting on the new cold stone of my mind like freshly fallen snow.
“I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.”
“Alana,” I whispered, closing my eyes tight and shivering. The world was drowning around me, the rain so torrential and unrelenting that it was practically biblical.
“Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I did not die.”
I yearned to feel her hand on my shoulder, her lips on my cheek. But, I was, for the first time in years, truly, completely, absolutely alone.
Alone.
Epilogue
In the end, something always breaks, whether it is a porcelain plate, a human heart, or a fragile life. Such is the fate of the Varasso family.
The Sunday evening after the death of Alana Rhodes, the Varasso family cook busied herself in the kitchen, as usual. Sunday dinners had been a fixture in the Varasso household for decades, even when Valentina died, even when young Gabriel appeared, even when Angelo’s mistress disappeared.
