Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
Nyx
The Funeral – Band of Horses
Achilles's funeral isn’t the saddest thing I've ever been through. After finding the man I love hanging in the garage. After having to call his mother to tell her that her son was dead. After organizing the funeral. After reading his last words over and over and over again and wondering why I didn't wake up on time, why I didn’t know forgiveness was an ending…the funeral is just something else on my never-ending list of pain. I also have to meet with the executor for his will, as well as his attorney. I believe that’s another item.
The funeral is another page in the new book of my life.
A life without Achilles. A life where every day is more agonizing than the previous and the ache never ends.
It's there when I fall asleep, and it's what wakes me up in the morning. Nothing has meaning, so no, his funeral isn’t the saddest thing I've been through.
The crowd is thin. We didn't announce it officially, too scared of the kind of people it would bring.
Fans, enemies, press. The music community has been pouring their hearts out on the internet, and sometimes, I feel like a groupie again, obsessively reading articles about the genius he was.
I think I'm just trying to keep him alive somehow.
As long as there's something new to read about him, he doesn't feel truly gone.
Except he is.
Wren is the one who speaks. His mother refused to come.
Poor Sophie won't even get to say goodbye.
In a sense, I also feel like he doesn't get to say goodbye to her, and that hurts even more.
His father is in jail without bail, waiting to be tried, but the asshole wouldn't have said one honest thing about Achilles.
And I…well, I can't even begin to say his name without bursting into tears. I'm in no state for a eulogy.
"Achilles," Wren concludes after a few short minutes of talking.
His voice is thick with anguish, and I'm crying in the front row, Kayla holding my hand.
"There are so many more things I could say about you.
So many more things I wish I could say to you.
But we'll let you have the much-deserved peace you need. Rest in peace, my dear friend."
God. God. God. This hurts. It hurts so deeply. It's so raw and real that sometimes I wonder if that's the pain Achilles felt inside. If so, I understand why he did what he did to make it stop. I wish it would stop.
Before his body is lowered into the ground of Stoneview Cemetery, I approach with his favorite violin in its case. The one he used to compose. The one he held in his hands when he wrote his last concerto about us. Mon trésor.
I put it on his coffin, somehow balancing it. And I watch it go down, my tears dropping onto the open ground as I lower my head.
And so, a week before he would’ve turned twenty-three, Achilles Duval is buried.
The love of my life disappears, and so does my soul, forever linked to his.
The happy beating of my heart, the giggles he triggered, the love we shared, the safety he created for us despite everything, the passion he built with me.
They're all there, in this very coffin. Locked away until the end of time.
In a world where Achilles doesn't exist, I'm nothing but an empty shell, waiting until it's my turn to go.
A hand grabs mine. It's Peach's. I turn to her and smile through my tears.
"If he could see me," I croak. "I’m surprised he’s not bursting out of that coffin to tell me off for putting a priceless violin in his grave. He'd probably make fun of me for it. Tell me I've lost my damn mind."
She chuckles sadly. "Probably."
His friends and I all walk away together, and Ella squints at the diamond around my ring finger. She doesn't say anything, but I do.
"I found it," I say, my cheeks burning. "It was in his stuff. In…in his violin case."
"It's an engagement ring," she says, half between shock and confusion.
I spent a lot of time in Achilles’s music room the days after his death.
It’s where I still feel the closest to him.
When I found the courage to open his case, I saw the box and the note.
Inside, there was a ring. A thin gold band, a small pear-shaped diamond with two small round diamonds on each side.
It’s elegant, so simple and discreet. Exactly the kind he would’ve chosen for me.
I hit a new low that day. I couldn’t feel any excitement at the fact that he was going to propose, because it was another thing I’d been robbed of. My future with him as his fiancée and one day his wife was disappearing before my eyes, and all I had left was the ring.
"I don’t know that it was for me," I say, doubt suddenly swallowing me. It felt like it was for me when I found it. But it almost feels stupid to say it out loud. If he wanted to marry me, maybe he would’ve stayed.
"I just…I wanted to wear it. It feels like he's with me.
" My eyes fill with tears yet again. "It's stupid.
I'm so stupid. Who knows what it was for.
I don't even know why I'm wearing it on this finger—"
"Honey, it's not stupid," Ella hurries to stop me from spiraling. "You are the love of his life. Of course, it’s for you. There was no one else; there never would’ve been anyone else. This ring belongs to you."
"Was," I murmur as I look at the ring. "I was the love of his life."
Her lips pinch, and she looks away as more tears roll down her face. "I know," she whispers. "I can't get used to it."
I nod silently as Chris takes her in his arms. "Let's get everyone home and warmed up in front of a fire. We all need it."
As they all get in their cars, I discreetly ask Alex if I can speak to her alone. We walk farther away, Xi's eyes on us.
"Alex, you're into grammar and all that, aren't you? You're really good at that stuff."
She chuckles, confused. "Yeah, I guess."
I pull something out of my handbag. The evidence plastic bag that Detective Turner had handed me. I keep the note in there, never touched it, never removed it because I'm too scared of damaging it. All I did was add the second one I found.
I show her the note. "See, Achilles and I had this silly thing we used to say to each other. I'm a dreamer. You should try it sometime."
I point at the note, and she reads it.
"Notice something?" I ask.
She looks at the note and then at me again.
"He made a spelling mistake?"
"That's right. He wrote sometimes. It changes the meaning, doesn't it? What do you think?"
She looks at me, the pity in her eyes something I choose to ignore. "Well, technically, it does, but sometime versus sometimes is a very common mistake people make."
"I know, I know," I say impatiently, something tickling my stomach.
"But Achilles and I didn't make that mistake because that saying was always the same. And he wrote two notes. One was in the garage, and one was in the ring box in his violin case. He didn’t make the mistake once, he made it twice.
So, what would you say changes? Sometime/sometimes. What's the difference in meaning?"
Her mouth twists with sadness over my situation, but this time, she doesn't deny me. "Again, technically, you should try it sometime would mean you should try it at one point in the future."
"Right, and that's what we used to say to each other."
She nods and continues. "You should try it sometimes means you should try it from time to time. Not just once in the future."
"Exactly," I say. That thing in my stomach, I can finally describe it. It's hope. "He was trying to tell me something. He was telling me to keep dreaming from time to time, like to keep hope, right? This could mean something important. What if… I know this sounds crazy, but what if—"
"Nyx," she says as she takes my hand in hers.
"I think you're going down a slippery slope right now.
I understand why. You're in pain, and this feels good.
Hope feels amazing. But at the end of that slope, all there is is disappointment, and ultimately more pain.
I know it's hard. It's very hard, and I wish he was still here too.
We're going to get through this together, but not like this. He's gone, sweetie."
I take a step back, my heart sinking as I realize that I might be truly going insane.
"It has no meaning. That's what you think," I say disappointedly, yet knowing she's right.
"What I think is that Achilles was in a lot of pain, and only one person helped him alleviate that pain from time to time.
That person was you. I think he found himself at the end of the road, and that the only person he was thinking of in that moment was you.
So he wrote you a note to let you know that.
" She shakes her head, her voice wavering as she tries to stay strong for me, and I feel horrible for putting her through this.
"I can only imagine what went through his mind to…
do what he did. And yes, he made a spelling mistake on both notes that he wrote that night because of the state he was in. "
I shake my head, laughing to myself. "Of course. I'm sorry." I put the notes back in my bag. "I'm so sorry for this."
"Don't be. You’re grieving. I'll be here every step of the way." She hugs me tightly, and we walk back together to the cars.
At the lake house, the seven of us share stories about Achilles.
We laugh, we drink his favorite whiskey, and for a brief moment, I don't feel so lonely.
Ella and Chris are the ones staying with me that night.
The one after, it's Peach and Wren. And then it's Xi and Alex.
It goes on for weeks, and sometimes, one of the girls has to sleep with me.
Every day, I wake up in the morning thinking he's here before I realize I'm in an empty bed or next to one of my friends.
Often, I'm already running down the stairs when I come to, certain I'll catch him before the act, forgetting that he's long gone.
The weeks go by, and stories come out that an anonymous student account called Hermes took down the biggest secret society in the world. People are arrested, but most often, the Shadows turn on each other, or the mafia kills them before they can talk, desperate to protect themselves.
The public begs to see the Hermes Files, but they’re never released to us.
All that happens is that we learn of webs of criminals in the elite world that no one would’ve known about if it weren't for Achilles.
That some women were forced to join and were now free and entitled to sue their perpetrators.
Other women were accomplices to crimes, but some did manage to switch sides at the last second and get away with it.
My mother never got arrested, for example.
The extent of all of this? We don’t truly know, but all I can think about is how happy he would be if he was among us. He had reached his goal, so why, fuck, why did he leave us?
It turns out that Sophie and I are the only two people listed in Achilles's will.
We each inherit a half of his fortune, and dear lord, it's a fortune if I've ever seen one.
I get the lake house, too, which was apparently in his name and not his father's, and I also get the most precious thing of all…
his work. Both his concertos are mine. I'm one of the richest women in the world, both in money and art, and yet there’s nothing but an endless well of sadness inside me.
In fact, I'm constantly sick to my stomach, puking my guts out and incapable of even attempting to live, let alone eat.
After a while, the hardest thing happens: Life keeps on going.
No matter how much power Achilles had, the world didn't stop spinning when he died. Only mine did.
It starts with small things. The sink gets blocked in the kitchen, and I have to call a plumber.
It's a new interaction I didn't expect, and Achilles isn't here.
Then I get a call from the ear doctor in New York because my hearing aid is ready.
I come back home with it, but I never put it on, incapable of living a life where Achilles isn't the first voice I hear with it.
After a couple of months, I have to get back to classes. Achilles would turn over in his grave if I gave up on my dream, but he's not there at orchestra rehearsals on Mondays.
Going back to SFU was just as hard as I’d anticipated.
The whole college is in mourning, having lost the person everyone wanted to get close to.
His death turned him from college king to legend.
I was told the orchestra held a moment of silence for him before I came back, too.
The student paper wrote an article about him, riddled with lies because they didn’t know him.
The students talk about him like he was their friend when he couldn’t stand any of them.
They share made-up memories, twisting their interactions.
But the whispers in the hallways are the worst. Because some of them strongly believe Achilles wasn’t suicidal before he met me.
And I’m forced to ignore them because he wouldn’t give them the time of day, and I know it’d make him proud if I don’t either.
My dad comes back from rehab, healthy and well, and Achilles doesn’t see the result of his selfless act. My dad wants nothing but a trailer on the North Shore, so I get him that. Soon, I'm alone in that big lake house, and our friends visit me once a week.
Winter turns to spring, spring to summer, and in the new school year, I'm chosen as the soloist for our orchestra.
That's when the saddest thing of all happens.
He's not here to celebrate with me, to reap the hard work that he put in with me, yet I feel proud and happy of what I achieved. And that day, I keep on living.
I go home, his clothes don't smell like him anymore, and I keep on living.
Sometimes, I watch videos of us we filmed in this very house, and his voice feels unfamiliar because I keep on living without him.
One day, I wake up in the morning, and my hand doesn't go to his side of the bed. I know he's not here with me anymore…and I keep on living.
That life I live that keeps on happening without him is what truly feels like the end.