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And the lingering sense that justice couldn’t truly be served nagged at Ruby.
But now Caitlin was being laid to rest. Not as she should have been twenty-three years ago, for she never should have been killed, but at the very least, as was right, given the interminable wrongness of the situation.
Nathan went with Ruby to the funeral. It was Dana who had issued the invitation.
They’d gone to her house last night and sat at her small kitchen table, the most unlikely trio.
He had talked to Dana about Caitlin. Not about her being gone. But about the girl she’d been. And Ruby had never been more sure she loved him than when she watched him give her that gift. Of new stories, new memories.
The town would be laying a symbol to rest.
But she wasn’t a symbol for Nathan and Dana.
For them, she was a real person. A whole person.
Not a story.
And in the end, that was what they were all fighting for.
When the service was over, Nathan stared at Caitlin’s picture for a long time. A picture of a girl who would be fifteen forever.
But Nathan wasn’t fifteen, and his life hadn’t ended then.
“She was just a really sweet girl,” he said, heavy, hard.
Final.
Marianne, Dahlia and Lydia came to stand with them in front of her picture. Chase was with Lydia, Carter holding Dahlia’s hand. And Jackson stood behind Marianne, that committed shield, now that her mind had stopped protecting her.
He would always be there.
“I think on some level I knew. It was why I was so afraid. He had done it once and he had gotten away with it. And what would’ve stopped him from doing it to me?” Marianne said.
“Nothing,” Ruby said.
“Nothing but you. Nothing but your birth. That was too big of a risk. Too big of a tangle.”
“And thank God,” Jackson said.
“I understand it’s PTSD,” Marianne said. “Survivor’s guilt. But I just... Poor Caitlin. The exact same thing was happening to her and I didn’t even know it. I never even thought about it. How many other girls before us...”
“No more,” Ruby said. “That’s the important thing. No more. Because of you, Marianne.”
After the funeral, just the sisters went down to Sentinel Bridge. And the four of them stood there, staring up at the white circle with 1917 at the center. At that pathway home. At the place where Caitlin had stood last.
The place where Ruby had been left.
The place where Ruby had been found.
She took a breath, and she felt it all. Everything she was. The miraculous and the truly grim. The light and the dark. It was all there. It was all what made her the woman she was.
She wasn’t the miracle, not on her own. She didn’t have to be.
She was just one star in a sky scattered with diamond dust.
Of all the brilliant things that came with that, the freedom was the greatest. The freedom to live, to love, to be angry, sad and a little bit dark. To feel the miracle of life in most of her breaths, and sometimes the irritation of it.
To be more than a symbol, but a whole person.
