Chapter Nineteen #3
I let myself think about the specific way she laughed.
The fact that she always stole my hoodie and denied it.
I always found it on her chair. The way she said my name when she was worried about me, not X not Devlin just Xay, the way she could make my name sound like something worth being.
I let myself think about the last conversation we had, which was an argument about something I cannot remember now and would give everything I own to take back.
I let myself think about the phone call I didn't answer the night of the accident, because I was at practice and I didn't check my messages until it was already done.
I told her she wasn't here. I stood at the back of that crowd two years ago and told myself she wasn't in that box, that this was a performance and not reality, that grief would make me useless and I had things to do.
She's here.
Whatever here means, whatever lives on or doesn't, whatever my father believed and my sister believed and I have spent two years refusing to have a position on, she is here in the sense that matters.
In the sense that I built two years of my life around her absence.
In the sense that every choice I've made since that night has been a conversation with someone I couldn't bring myself to visit.
“I'm here,” I say.
It comes out rough.
“I know that's… I know it's two years late.
I know you'd tell me I'm an idiot for waiting.
You'd do that thing with your face.” I exhale.
“The disappointed one. Not angry, you were never much for angry, you always said it was too expensive. Just disappointed. The one that meant you expected better from me and you were right to.”
The headstone says nothing.
The stars say nothing.
I say the rest of it anyway.
“I thought I was doing it for you. The war.
All of it. And some of it was, some of it was genuine, Emery, I need you to know that.
I loved you and they took you and I couldn't make it mean nothing.
I couldn't just absorb it and move on and I'm not apologizing for that.” I press my knuckles into the wet grass.
“But some of it was for me. Some of it was because staying angry was easier than sitting in this grass and admitting that I miss you every single day and I don't know what to do with that.
That I keep waiting for you to walk into a room and I know you're not going to and I can't—”
I stop.
I breathe.
“She has your eyes.” The words arrive from somewhere I wasn't expecting.
“Toren. Not the color, hers are blue and yours were gray, same as me.
But the quality of them. The way they look when she's decided something. That particular thing you both have, where you look at a person and they feel known.” I look at her name.
“You would have found each other. If the world had been different. If none of this had happened. You would have found each other and you would have driven each other absolutely insane and I think—”
My throat closes.
I let it.
“I think you would have loved each other.”
The silence that follows is the longest one of the night.
I don't fill it.
I let it be what it is: an acknowledgement.
A confession. The truth that I have been skirting around for months, every time I saw Toren look at something with that particular quality of attention that reminded me of my sister, every time she said something that caught me off guard because it was the kind of thing Em would have said.
I haven't been keeping Toren alive because she's a Kellar and her death would be inconvenient.
I haven't been unable to kill her because she's carrying my child, though that's real too.
I have been keeping her alive because she is the closest thing to Emery I have found in two years of looking for reasons to stay in a world my sister left behind.
I am going to have to do something about that.
“I'm going to fix it,” I tell her. “I don't know what fixing it looks like yet.
I don't have a plan and that should alarm me more than it does.” A pause.
“She deserves better than what I've given her.
I know that. You know that. You'd be furious with me, honestly, you'd probably have told me to get my shit together about four months ago and then refused to speak to me until I did.” Something shifts in my chest that I recognize, not grief exactly, not yet, but the neighbor of it.
Something that might eventually become the kind of love that doesn't destroy things. “I'm going to try.”
I push to my feet.
My knees are damp from the grass, my hands are cold and I am covered in the residue of a night that has cost more than I knew I was paying. I look at her name one last time.
“Till death do us part,” I say. Quiet. Final. The vow I made when I was sixteen in the kitchen and she had her arms folded, her chin up and she meant every word of it. “I'm still here, Em. I'm working on the worth living part.”
I turn away from the headstone.
I walk back to the gap in the east wall.
The city is dark and waiting and there is a girl in a hospital bed with my number on her jersey and my baby under her ribs and whatever I do next, I am not doing it from a cemetery at two in the morning.
It's time to move.
I owe you a life worth living.
I'm working on it.
The apartment is lit up when I arrive. The guys have cleaned it the best they can but it looks nothing like it did before she destroyed the place.
Cas is in the kitchen with a coffee gone cold beside him, that he won't drink.
He looks up when I come in and does the fast sweep he always does, cataloguing damage, checking my temperature, running his own private assessment of how tonight has left me.
He's been doing it since we became friends and I have never once told him to stop because the truth is… I'd do the same for him.
“You went to the cemetery,” he says. Not a question.
I drop my keys on the counter. “Don't.”
“I'm not.” He holds his hands up slightly. “Just nothing.”
I pull out a chair and sit down across from him.
“She'll be here in twenty minutes,” Cas says. “She texted.”
“Of course she did.” Something shifts in my chest at that.
The fact that she's coming. The fact that she said she would and she is, because Toren Kellar doesn't say things she doesn't mean and that quality, that specific infuriating quality, was supposed to make her easier to predict and has only ever made her harder to fight.
I look up at Caspian.
He's looking at me with that careful expression he gets when he knows something is wrong and he's deciding whether to say it.
“Say it,” I tell him.
A beat.
“I care about her,” he says. Simple. Direct.
“I know you don't want to hear that. I know what she is to you and what her name means and what her family did.
I'm not dismissing any of it.” He holds my gaze.
“But I've known Toren for years, and I've watched her in the last few months, and I'm telling you as your best friend and the only person in this city who will say this to your face—" He pauses.
“She isn't your enemy anymore. She might have been once. She isn't now.”
The silence stretches between us.
“She has Kellar blood,” I say.
“So does your kid.” His voice is quiet and completely without apology. “You going to hate it for that too?”
I stand up.
Not to go anywhere. Just because sitting still with that sentence inside the room is not something I'm capable of.
I walk to the window. Look out at the town in the dark. My town. My streets. The weight of everything I've built and everything I've destroyed to build it pressing down on the city like a hand.
“The baby is real,” I say. I don't know why I say it out loud.
It arrives from somewhere unguarded and I let it come because I'm tired.
Because the cemetery and the parking lot and the beach, then the scalpel on the warehouse floor have all accumulated into something I don't have the energy to hold shut.
“I know it's real. I've known since she said it at the rink.
I knew when I looked at the ultrasound. I've known every second since and I've been treating it like not knowing was still an option.” I watch my own reflection in the glass. “It's not.”
Cas says nothing behind me.
“That doesn't mean anything changes,” I continue. Because I need that to be true. Because if it doesn't mean anything changes then I can still control the shape of this… Still decide who I am in it. “It means I have to stop lying to myself about whether or not it exists. That's all.”
“Okay,” Cas says.
“Okay,” I repeat.
Neither of us believes the other but we both let it stand.
The buzzer sounds.
I turn from the window and look at the door.
Twenty minutes. She said twenty minutes and it's been eighteen.
She came early.
Something happens in my chest that I am going to call nothing and move on from immediately.
I cross to the buzzer and press it without speaking.
I hear the door open downstairs. The particular sound of her footsteps in the stairwell that I have memorized without meaning to, slightly uneven from the shoes she puts back on wet, always slightly too fast, always like she's moving toward something rather than toward somewhere.
The knock.
I open the door.
She's still wearing my hoodie.
I don't say anything about that. She doesn't either. Her hair is still damp, there's sand on her shoes and she's holding a USB drive in one hand, looking at me with those blue eyes that have always seen too much and she is the most dangerous thing I have ever let through a door.
“Devlin,” she says.
“Tink.” I step back, letting her in. “We have a war to plan.”
She walks past me into the apartment and I attempt to close the door behind her but a boot lands on it, I glare at the sight of fucking Carnage De Santis.