Chapter Twenty-Eight
A iden died being held.
You cradled him against your chest and listened to a creature—like you, but not, like you, but worse—die with him.
He’d looked small, hadn’t he? For someone who’d filled a room with his laughter, halted people in their tracks with his smile, Aiden Moore had stopped breathing while being held by you .
The man the sea had tossed onto shore, who hadn’t loved him enough, who had loved him too much, who couldn’t save him from himself.
Love was a strange, overgrown thing, rooted inside you, vital and fervent.
You’d seen it pass through candlelight and gild his skin.
Watched it wake on his eyelashes when he’d stirred in the night.
Found it on his breath, gusting in your mouth, and hammering through his pulse, guiding hot, sweet blood to your lips. There you were, holding him.
Baby , you thought, wake up.
Stillness didn’t suit him, and yet he’d gone still against you.
“Aiden,” like no, no, I’m here, I’m right here, c’mon, don’t ? —
But Laura was limp, too. She lay strewn on the grass with a fungal rock propped beneath her head—smaller, like him, younger, like him.
You didn’t look at her for long, couldn’t look at her for long.
You’d naively wiped her from your thoughts after New Mexico.
Whatever she’d wanted from you, he hadn’t let her take it.
And, god, remember that? Feasting in an endless desert and watching him fall.
You’d thought, so clearly, I’ll catch you . You hadn’t then. You didn’t now.
Eyes burning hot, you placed quivering fingers around the knife and loosened the blade from beneath his ribcage.
How many times had you thought to tell him? Aiden Moore, I love you.
How many days had you spent pacing in your bedroom, knowing he would hate you for leaving? You’d been a fool to think he’d follow you.
How many nights had you spent typing and retyping messages, searching for the courage to hit send? Can we talk? I screwed everything up. I’m sorry. I miss you. Fuck, I miss you .
You cried onto his bloodied shirt, onto the bruises you’d printed on his throat, onto his curtained eyelids, and prayed to the God you’d known in church so, so long ago.
Not the God you’d taken to your tongue on a sour cracker.
Not the bearded, pale-skinned prophet, son, father— whatever —depicted on Bible dust jackets.
You held him, and you prayed to the God you’d found in the hard, empty silence of a church after midnight.
Hollow pews left open for you and whoever worked the night shift.
Whoever listened. You prayed to a nameless, faceless God, to the faith you’d found in music, to the hymns you’d discovered at the bottom of a bottle.
You prayed to the God living in the grooves on Aiden’s palms, pressed to your cheeks, beneath your clothes, brought to your mouth in the early mornings.
You prayed wholly, and you prayed viciously, and you asked God to give him back.
Maeve King—like you, but not, like you, but stronger—knelt beside you, and him, and spoke with conviction. “You must act quickly.”
Letting him go might’ve been the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You draped him on the grass, and something caught in your throat. Grief shaped like coal. The sounds scared you, the ones you made after black stormed your eyes. That severe, animal pain. You thought, is this how a lion mourns?
Near the porch, Kelly Angelica Crawford held a pillar candle.
Maybe she was praying, too. Her lips made fast, clipped words, and she swayed rhythmically, speaking to the silence in a way you didn’t understand, but needed.
She was a light-worker, after all, and you craved yesterday’s sun, and a new day, and the way firelight licked shadows across his blushing skin.
Maeve handed you a clean kitchen knife and showed you where to cut, there, deep into the belly.
You sank the silver blade into a sad, naked bird, half-plucked and gone cold.
The heron didn’t make a sound, just bled for you like it was supposed to, in a circle around buried feathers.
When you pressed ink to the torn corner of your journal, you hadn’t expected the words to shatter you.
But they did. You wrote: Unfinished Future . Each letter landed like a fist.
“Yes, honey, like he did,” Maeve cooed, and gestured to your mouth.
You burned that intent, that wish, that unfathomable truth, and swallowed the hot ashes. You leaned over him, held in stillness, and kissed the wound on his torso. Tasted him again. Prayed to a God who’d never answered and begged for Aiden Moore.
Come back to me, you thought, and drove the hunting knife he’d pushed into you and taken into himself into the earth. Come back to me.
All at once, the world went silent.