6. Grim
GRIM
Ido not think she wants to be forgotten.
The thought follows me as I make my way through the side streets toward Belladonna Blooms. Lavinia's words from the other evening have lingered far longer than they should.
"The dead are like anyone. They want to be seen. They want to be remembered."
So do you.
The words had risen to my tongue before catching there, stubborn as a thorn beneath the skin.
I have known tens of thousands of living souls, and yet the first person to truly unsettle me is a florist who leaves her shop after dark to sweep fallen petals from the pavement because she dislikes seeing beauty left to decay beneath someone's boots.
The bell above the shop door remains silent when I try the handle.
Locked.
Through the glass, Belladonna Blooms sits wrapped in quiet. Buckets of flowers glow softly beneath the front windows, their colors muted by the overcast afternoon. Lavinia's coat still hangs on the hook beside the register, and taped neatly to the inside of the glass is a handwritten note.
At cemetery. Back soon.
—L.
I should consider it a fortunate coincidence.
Had she been here, I possess no errand capable of surviving even gentle questioning.
The vase I borrowed still occupies the center of my kitchen table.
The novel she insisted I read rests beside it, barely begun despite the uncomfortable certainty that I already know precisely how it ends.
The dark chocolate she declared a proper housewarming gift remains untouched in my freezer because I cannot decide whether eating it would somehow diminish the kindness with which it was given.
None of those reasons would have convinced her.
Certainly not the truth.
I simply wished to see her.
I tell myself I should leave.
My feet disagree.
Before I fully realize where they have carried me, I am climbing the old ridge overlooking the original cemetery, the oldest corner of Blackthorn Bay where the headstones lean into one another like elderly friends.
Three hundred yards separate it from the newer section, yet it feels centuries older.
Wind and rain have softened many of the inscriptions beyond recognition, leaving only fragments of names for the living to puzzle over.
I pass the garden center, the library, and the little café whose cheerful staff continue laughing through a future only I can see. A loose gas fitting. An unnoticed leak. A single spark that will arrive exactly when it must. Fate is rarely dramatic. More often, it is simply patient.
The cemetery greets me with its familiar stillness.
My shoes sink into damp earth already marked by mourners, groundskeepers, and the occasional teenagers who mistake forgotten mausoleums for hiding places. The patterns never truly change. The living polish granite and marble in hopes of leaving something permanent behind.
I wait quietly at the edge of every story.
Today, however, my attention belongs elsewhere.
Lavinia kneels before a weathered grave tucked beneath an ancient cedar.
Mud stains the knees of her pea-green parka, and loose strands of copper hair have escaped her braid, dancing across her cheek whenever the wind stirs.
With careful, practiced hands she trims away stubborn grasses before arranging a small bundle of wildflowers she'd gathered along the path.
She speaks as she works.
I cannot hear the words from this distance, but I know her voice well enough to imagine them. Gentle. Patient. Warm enough to make even silence feel companionable.
She belongs here.
The thought settles over me with surprising certainty.
Not because this is where she works.
Because this is where she chooses to spend the quiet hours no one else ever sees.
For a moment I remain where I am, reluctant to intrude upon whatever small ritual is unfolding before me.
Then she looks up.
She always sees me.
Even through rain.
Even across distance.
The smile that finds her face is effortless.
Not the polite smile reserved for customers.
The smile reserved for someone she had secretly hoped might arrive.
"I had a feeling you'd come by."
She lifts one gloved hand in greeting, pruning shears flashing briefly beneath the gray afternoon sky.
"I stopped by the shop," I tell her as I cross the damp grass. "You left a note."
"Shop was dead."
She winces dramatically before laughing at her own joke.
"This time of year it's either funerals or absolutely nothing. Come here."
I obey before realizing I've done so.
The earth yields beneath my boots, soft with yesterday's rain. She pats the patch of grass beside her without the slightest hesitation. She never asks why I've come. Never questions why I keep appearing wherever she happens to be.
She simply makes room for me.
"This one's my favorite," she says, brushing damp moss from the stone. "Nobody visits anymore. Not on birthdays. Not on All Saints'. Not ever."
She smiles softly.
"So I do."
Her gloved fingertips trace the worn edge of the marker.
"Someone ought to."
I lower my gaze to the weathered stone.
Time has claimed nearly everything except the initials.
S.J.H.
1883–1901
Not quite eighteen.
The carving of a tiny star remains visible near the base.
I brush my fingers lightly across the cool lichen.
"Sarah Jane Holloway."
Lavinia looks over.
"How do you know that?"
"She loved animals," I continue quietly. "Especially stray dogs. She once smuggled an injured fox into her father's barn because she was certain no one else would care for it."
Lavinia studies me with open curiosity.
"That's . . . oddly specific."
For a moment I consider telling her the truth.
That I remember the fox.
That I remember Sarah Jane laughing because it bit her father instead.
Instead I offer the gentlest explanation I possess.
"It's a small town."
I glance toward the rows of weathered stones stretching across the hillside.
"Some stories survive longer than the names carved above them."
She laughs, soft and pleased. "Yeah, that's true. You always seem to know more than you let on."
I wonder if she means it as an accusation. But she does not know how small this world is, not truly, and how the only way to keep it bearable is to remember something for everyone, even the ones who are long since decomposed to atoms.
Lavinia shakes off her gloves and places the new bouquet at the base of the marker.
"You know, I started doing this when I was little," she says.
"My mother wouldn't let me keep pets. Too much responsibility, she said.
So I adopted graves. Each one, I'd give a little flower, talk to them, tell them about my day.
Eventually I got a part-time job at the cemetery, and now .
. ." she spreads her arms, encompassing the rows and rows of the forgotten, "I have all the orphans I could ever wish for. "
I look at her, the only living person in a field of the dead, and something inside me stirs—a longing, dense as a planet, to tell her what I am, what I know, what I have seen. To tell her that what she does here heals more than memories.
"I like what you do," I say, in my way.
She collects a stray lock of hair behind her ear, glances sideways. "You know, most people think it's a little morbid, hanging around here."
I smile, or I try. "Most people don't know what it means to be seen even after you're gone."
She stands, brushing off her knees. "You coming?" she asks, heading for the next row.
I follow. I always have.
She stops at another grave—tiny, granite, set with a chipped angel—and kneels again.
The inscription is nearly gone. "Her name was Millie," Lavinia tells me, like she's letting me in on a secret.
"Never made it past six. There's no family left, but she deserves a flower too.
" This time, rather than a bouquet, she places a single violet.
It looks like a droplet of spring, defiant against the gray sky.
"She wanted to be a veterinarian," I say, and this time it makes Lavinia go still.
She turns, studying me. "That's not in any of the records."
"It wouldn't be," I answer. "Sometimes the records are . . . incomplete."
She smiles, but it's a different sort of smile. Cautious, as if sensing the boundaries of a conversation she did not know she had entered.
She stops at another marker. Its marble is the color of spoiled cream, the letters ghosting away under moss and lichen. "Poor Mr. Holloway," Lavinia says, voice full of the peculiar ache she reserves for things past saving. "No one's visited in years."
"He loved peach pie," I say, before I can stop myself.
Her head turns, slow as a weather vane in a weak breeze. "How on earth do you know that?"
I smooth my thumb over a divot in the stone. The memory is small and sharp: a tang of late-summer air, the haze of kitchen steam, a trembling hand reaching for one last bite. "He told me," I answer.
She laughs, a little startled, delighted. "You mean, before he died?"
I nod.
She stands and gives me the kind of look people reserve for the clever, the odd, or the deeply lucky. "You're a good listener, you know that, Grim?" The nickname again, this time said soft and fond, like it is not just a private joke but an amulet.
I have no answer for that. I let her lead, winding through the maze of stones and sunken grass, the sharp scent of cut greens and old snow.
She pauses sometimes, to greet the ones she knows—Mrs. Dvorak, who won every homemade cookie contest for sixty years; the infant twins, whose parents drive three hundred miles each spring just to sing them "You Are My Sunshine"; the high school teacher, buried with her lesson plans.
With each marker she touches, I feel something unfurl.
A memory, a filament, a little proof that none of these lives truly vanish.
We reach the old iron fence at the cemetery's edge.
Morning glories climb it in lazy spirals, even now in the chill—Lavinia's doing, no doubt, coaxing them along each summer so that something will be blooming when the last of the mourners leave.
She stops, transfixed. "Look at them! They're not even supposed to survive the frost."
She fingers a bloom, pale blue and creased like tissue. "I know someone who likes these," she says, side-eyeing me with a mischief I haven't earned.
She takes out her shears, snips the thickest stem near the heart of the vine, and holds the blossom out to me.
For a small eternity, I do not move. In seven thousand years I have seen every flower, every hand, every moment when the living bestow a token of care on the dead.
But never for me. The recognition seizes me whole.
I accept the flower. Her gloves are dirty, roughened by cold and work, but the squashed scent of green lingers on my palm. She waits for my response, tension flickering over her lips.
"Thank you," I say. The words are foreign, clumsy, but true.
She flashes that lopsided smile, blue eyes bright. "You're welcome." She makes a show of dusting off her hands, pretending the flower was only ever intended for the stone and not, in some impossible accounting, for me.
We walk together to the gate. The morning glory looks ridiculous in my fist, a ribbon of color in a world built for mud and shadow, but I will keep it: uncrushed, untossed, proof that something survived the frost.
At the corner, she squeezes my arm. "Come by again?" she asks, no trace of expectation—just hope, spun out over the gap between us.
I nod, and watch her walk away, hair flaming in the weak winter light, boots leaving perfect, damp imprints along the path. She will linger in the world, for decades if she's lucky, but she has already marked me in the only way that matters.
After she is gone, I sit on one of the old bench seats, the flower between two fingers.
I try to think what to do with it. The blue is luminous, impossible.
I want to tell her how, for all my centuries, this is the first time I have been given a flower, not as tribute or farewell, but as proof of having been seen.
I tuck the morning glory in my coat, careful as a thief, and walk home with the fragile thing still alive in my hand. It is a memory, a promise, and—if I am brave enough—a beginning.