Chapter Forty-Two #2
He scoffed. “Rachel does care, but she cares more about being right. Jackson cares about keeping the peace. I’m the only one that would make the world stop turning for you.”
I felt the words gather at the base of my throat—acidic, mean, and more true than false. “You’re so sure you’re the hero in this story, but you’re not. You’re just as selfish as anyone.”
He absorbed it, let it pass through him, then said, “Maybe. But at least I’m honest about it.”
I paced, needing motion. The living room felt like a cage, the furniture suddenly in the wrong places, all the familiar things made strange by the trauma of last night.
“We need to figure out what happens now,” I said. “We can’t just go back to… whatever this was before.”
Cam sat on the arm of the couch, hands clasped, staring at the floor. “What do you want to do?”
I stopped by the window, staring out at the city—traffic crawling, people scurrying with their own emergencies. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.”
He looked up, and for the first time in weeks, I saw the old Cam: confident, commanding, almost unbreakable. “You want to know what I think?”
“Not really,” I said, but he ignored me.
He crossed to where I stood and, gently, cupped my face in his hands. The touch was so careful it almost didn’t register, but it was there—warm, real, and terrifying.
“I think you’re scared,” he said. “I think you’re waiting for someone to tell you what the right move is. But there’s no right move. There’s just what you can live with.”
His thumbs brushed my cheeks, and I realized I was shaking.
He continued: “If it’s not me, that’s fine. I’ll walk away. But don’t pretend you’re better off alone if you’re not. Don’t punish yourself because you think it’s what you deserve. Or what I deserve.”
The city hummed outside, unaware of any of this.
I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that I was fine alone, that I didn’t need saving—but I didn’t.
Instead, I looked at his face, the lines of exhaustion, the dark circles under his eyes, and thought about the last ten years of our lives. The good, the bad, the endless cycling between hope and disappointment. I thought about how many times I’d chosen to stay, and how many times I’d regretted it.
But in that moment, all I could think about was how much I didn’t want to be alone.
Cam let his hands fall to his sides. “Whatever you decide, Livi, it’s your call. Just… don’t make it harder than it needs to be.”
He walked away, leaving me by the window, the glass cold against my forehead.
I stood there for a long time, watching the world move on without me, and wondered how many more decisions I could survive.
∞∞∞
That evening, the apartment was quiet enough to make my ears ring. Cam had gone for a run, or maybe just left to clear his head, and I sat in the kitchen with the lights off, working my way through a mug of microwaved tea and a pack of saltines Rachel had left behind.
The phone rang, shrill and immediate, so loud it made me jump. For a second, I just stared at it, convinced it was another spam call or, worse, Nate from some unknown number. When I picked up, the display read “Jackson.”
I answered, voice small. “Hey.”
He sounded tired. “Hey, Livi. You got a second?”
“Yeah. I’ve got all night.” It was only half a joke.
He cleared his throat, and the silence that followed was heavy enough to tip me off. “I just wanted to let you know…” He trailed off, then started again. “Richard passed away. It was last night. Peaceful. In his sleep.”
It shouldn’t have shocked me—he’d been on borrowed time for months—but my throat clamped shut anyway. I pressed the phone so hard to my ear it left an indent.
Jackson kept talking, his voice starting to tremble. “They said he didn’t suffer. They said he had a book in his lap when they found him. I thought you’d want to know.”
I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me. “Thank you,” I whispered. My hand shook so badly I had to anchor my elbow to the table.
“We’re putting together something. Small service, just the regulars. You and Cam are welcome, obviously. I know things have been… weird.”
I forced a breath. “We’ll be there. Just let me know when.”
Jackson exhaled, a long shudder that made the line crackle. “He really cared about you, Livi. You made him laugh. Not many people could do that.”
I let the words wash over me, unsure whether to feel grateful or hollowed out. “He was a good man. One of the best.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said, then went quiet. “Call me if you need anything. Seriously.”
“I will,” I promised, even though I knew I wouldn’t.
After we hung up, I let the phone rest on the table and stared at the carpet, the pattern swimming in and out of focus.
My body felt too heavy to move, every limb sunk in cement.
I replayed the conversation in my head, then replayed every conversation I’d ever had with Richard, wishing I’d listened more, or said something smarter, or just… been better.
The darkness closed in. I hugged my knees to my chest, phone still gripped in one hand, and waited for the world to start making sense again.
It didn’t.
But the ache in my chest said this mattered. And maybe, for now, that helped.
∞∞∞
Three days later, the city woke up soggy and gray, every streetlight blurred by drizzle, every branch outlined in cold.
Cam drove us across town with both hands on the wheel, silent except for the low, staticky drone of public radio.
Rachel and Jackson followed behind in her battered Mini.
I stared out the window and tried not to think about the day ahead.
St. Mark’s Chapel looked smaller than I remembered—a shoebox of limestone squatting on a block crowded by high-rises and pawn shops.
The arched windows were streaked with rain, and the marquee out front still had the old-timey movable letters, spelling out “A Life Well Read: In Loving Memory of Richard Porter.”
I barely recognized the woman who caught her reflection in the passenger window: hair smoothed and twisted up, eyes shadowed with more than mascara, lips pressed together like a wound that refused to heal.
I reached for Cam’s hand, expecting him to flinch or pull away, but he laced his fingers through mine and squeezed.
“Ready?” he asked, voice gentle enough to take the edge off.
“Not even close,” I said, but got out of the car anyway.
The sidewalk was slick with wet leaves. Jackson waited for us at the corner, tie askew, shoes already dark with water. Rachel hovered behind him, hair flattened by the mist, her umbrella snapped in half and dangling from her wrist.
“You look like you could use a drink,” she said, handing me a thermos that definitely wasn’t coffee.
I took a sip—scotch, maybe bourbon, sweet and burning all the way down. “Bless you.”
She smiled, eyes bright but rimmed with red. “Don’t say I never do anything for you.”
Inside, the chapel was already filling with people—regulars from the bookstore, old faculty from the university, a scattering of neighbors and extended family I didn’t recognize.
The pews were dark oak, polished so smooth they caught the light from the candelabras up front.
The air was thick with white lilies and the faint tang of beeswax.
At the front of the chapel, the casket was draped in a simple white cloth, a stack of hardcovers arranged at the base like a shrine.
Photos of Richard—young and grinning behind the counter of Timeless Treasures, older and dignified in his bowtie, laughing with a pair of kids outside the shop—lined the table beside it.
My knees almost buckled, but Jackson was there, steadying me with a hand at my waist. “He adored you, you know,” he said, voice pitched low for my ears only. “Talked about you like you were a lost limb.”
I swallowed hard, unable to form a response. Rachel squeezed in on my other side, hand finding mine and holding tight.
“We’re here,” she whispered, then added, “Don’t you dare faint. You’ll mess up my mascara when I freak out and cry.”
I choked out a laugh, and for a second the ache in my chest faded. Cam slid an arm around my shoulders, pulling me in close, and pressed his lips to my temple. The gesture was so unexpected, so soft, I wanted to cry for a whole different reason.
A hush fell as the funeral director stepped to the pulpit. He wore a suit that looked like it had never been tailored, but he had the calm cadence of someone who’d seen every variety of human grief and found them all worthy.
He welcomed us, spoke of Richard’s legacy: the years of teaching, the sanctuary he built with his store, the way he gave so much of himself to people who needed it.
As he talked, I scanned the crowd, recognizing faces from the shop, some I’d seen every day but never spoken to.
They were all here, holding each other up with nervous hands and wet tissues.
There were readings—one from Shakespeare, another from a modern poet I’d never heard of.
A former student stood and told a story about Mr. Porter reading the entirety of War and Peace out loud to his literature class over the course of a semester, refusing to let the narrative get lost in SparkNotes and Wikipedia synopses.
The memory made me smile, and I pictured his voice—dry, patient, unyielding—carrying through the walls of the chapel, demanding attention even now.
Then it was Jackson’s turn. He stood, straightened his tie, and walked to the front with the calm confidence of someone who’d practiced the speech a hundred times but still didn’t want to say it.
He talked about how Mr. Porter had given him his first job, how he’d listened without judgment, how he’d offered a place to belong even when the rest of the world didn’t.
“He was a hard man to know,” Jackson said, looking right at me. “But once he let you in, you were his for life.”
He paused, and his voice trembled, just a bit. “I think he’d want us to remember that. To look out for each other. To keep the stories going, even after the last page.”
He sat down, and Rachel reached over to pat his knee, but her own hand was shaking too hard to make contact.
I caught her wrist, anchored her, and for a moment the three of us held on together, a tangle of hands and knuckles and grief.
Rachel didn’t know Richard well, not really, but she shared our grief all the same.
When the service ended, the director invited us to pay respects at the casket. We waited our turn, filing up the aisle with the rest of the mourners. The line moved slowly, each person lingering a moment too long, as if reluctant to let go.
When it was our turn, I knelt by the flowers, let my fingers brush the edge of the white cloth. I wanted to say something profound, something worthy of the man, but all that came out was, “Thank you.” The tears were silent, but they came anyway.
Cam rested a hand on my back, steady and certain. Behind us, Rachel and Jackson stood close, shoulders touching, faces turned toward the light filtering in through the arched windows.
Afterward, we gathered in the chapel’s basement, where someone had set up a spread of bagels and cheap coffee.
The conversation was soft, full of stories and laughter and the kind of remembrance that’s half truth, half myth.
People talked about the old days, about Richard’s terrible puns and his uncanny ability to recommend the exact book you didn’t know you needed.
I wandered the room, collecting fragments of his life from the people who loved him. Every story was a puzzle piece, and together they built a man even larger than the one I’d known.
At the end, when the room was emptying and the lights were going off one row at a time, I stood outside with Cam, Rachel, and Jackson, the four of us lined up like survivors after a shipwreck. The air was sharp and cold, the rain having finally cleared, leaving behind a sky scrubbed clean.
Rachel was the first to break the silence. “I wish he could see us now,” she said.
Jackson nodded. “He probably does. He’s probably critiquing our outfits from beyond the grave.”
We all laughed, and it felt good, even if it only lasted a second.
We walked back to the cars together, arms linked, heads bent against the cold. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe the world could still hold a little bit of kindness, even for people like us.
At the curb, Jackson turned to me. “You gonna be okay?”
I thought about it, weighed the question the way Richard would have, searching for an honest answer.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I really might be.”
He smiled, and I saw the relief settle in his shoulders.
Rachel hugged me, tight and fierce. “Text me, okay? Even if it’s just to complain about the bagels.”
I promised I would.
As Cam and I got into the car, I glanced back at the chapel, its windows glowing gold in the dusk. I imagined Richard standing there, arms folded, watching us go. The idea made me smile.
We drove home in silence, but it wasn’t empty. It was full of everything we’d lost, and everything we still had.