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“You mean you weren’t hatched?”
His brow furrows. “What?”
A nervous tickle catches in my throat, and I shake my head, resuming the tapping on my leg. “Nothing, that’s just a rumor people around town sometimes say. The joke is that you’re not human, or something. The Devil’s spawn or... some kind of reptile.”
Clearing his throat, he crushes the petal in his fist and releases it. We watch it drift to the ground, ruined, and land with a silent thud.
“Anyway,” he says, the word grating on my nerves like nails raking down a chalkboard. It feels dismissive, and even though my comment is worthy of brushing past, I can’t shake the sense that I’m inconsequential.
To Kal, to everyone. A dramatic little princess whose only purpose for eighteen years was to be a companion to her mother. The child she got right. The one who’d take care of her when she needed it.
And now, like my entire life hasn’t mattered at all, I’m supposed to just relinquish that. To be okay with her leaving.
My fingers curl into themselves, the thread holding my sanity together unspooling until it lies in a tangled pile at my feet, useless and unnecessary. Guilt washes over me, shredding any remnants of self-worth as I sit there, and I grit my teeth so hard trying to keep the tears from spilling over, that it makes my jaw ache.
“She had cancer on and off my whole life. When I turned thirteen, I’d lost track of the number of times we’d sent her to hospice and she’d been sent home with a clean bill of health. Went into remission four times before it ended up stealing her from me.” He gets a distant look in his dark, almost black eyes, as if lost in his memories.
I study him from the edge of my vision, the tightness in my throat growing until I can’t breathe.
Pain etches into the lines of his face, wounds from his past making themselves visible. My eyes get lost tracing the evidence of his hurt, soaking it in as a salve for my own, a vampire feasting on emotional vulnerability.
“I was a poor kid with too much time on my hands, so I spent every second I could taking care of her, and when the time came to just hold her hand while she passed from this life to the next... I didn’t show up. Realized I didn’t know what the fuck to do with myself if I wasn’t taking care of her anymore, and I guess I thought that if I didn’t go, that’d somehow make her less dead.”
Fire ignites in my chest, flashing in a single spasm as he turns his head to meet my gaze. I don’t like what he sees, how it feels like looking into a mirror—if that’s the future awaiting me, one full of violence and death despite my attempts to avoid that fate, I’m not sure what to do with that information.
He seems to snap back into himself, as if just remembering who he’s talking to. “That’s not how this works, though. Death doesn’t wait for you to get on board, it just collects.” He raises an eyebrow. “You can’t keep her here, Fiona.”
My heart cracks wide open, the flames from my chest immediately filling the spaces in between, and I feel like I’ve been thrown down an elevator shaft and left for dead. “I’m not trying to.”
“Then you need to tell her that. She told you what she wanted. No one else.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Frankly, I don’t really care. I’ll still perform the procedure regardless, because that’s what she asked me to do. But I won’t be sitting by her side, waiting for her to fall asleep and not wake up. I didn’t do it for my mother, I’m sure as hell not doing it for someone else’s.”
Pushing to his feet, Kal brushes off the front of his black sweater, giving me a half shrug. “I coexist with my mistakes. I guess you should decide if you want to, too.”
The door slams behind him as he exits the greenhouse, leaving me to rot inside of my thoughts.
Standing up, I glance around the enclosed space, my fingers trembling as I press them into my sides. Bile teases the back of my throat as unease slices through me, and I walk through the back of the house, letting the silence surround me.
It’s not peaceful.
Not the way silence is supposed to be.
As I stand in the mudroom, staring down the hallway to the front door, the quiet waxes and wanes around me, scraping its fingers against my skin as it tries to push me over the edge.
My eyes flicker to the mess in the kitchen, a post-dinner disaster left for housekeeping in the morning. The aftermath of our first family meal without my mother, who always insists on cleaning right when we get up.
She says it helps the food digest quicker. Builds character.
Passing through the hall to the staircase, I take them slowly, trying to allow my brain the space to work through its quirks so when I enter the bedroom I can pretend to be normal.
Happy, even.
Kal didn’t say it, but I know that’s the kind of thing my mother needs right now.
I don’t want her to feel guilty for wanting to leave us behind.
