Chapter 10
Sawyer
I’m ninety-nine percent certain I’m not the only one waiting in my living room while Morgan showers.
While I can’t confirm Zach is nearby because he’s invisible to me, I feel an unusual energy on my couch. It’s not spooky, nothing like his accidental stunt in the garage. It’s more…anxious.
I understand why. Soon, Zach’s entire life—or rather his afterlife—could change.
With Zach’s guidance, Morgan quickly relit the pilot light and then rushed to take a shower.
We don’t have long before she has to go to work, but she promised she would shower fast enough for a quick Zach recon session.
Her exact words were This will be the highest-stakes stalking of one of my exes, ever.
The back door opens and clatters shut. Morgan sweeps inside, her hair still wet and piled on her head in a large clip. She’s holding her laptop. “I need the Wi-Fi password,” she says breathlessly.
Instantly, I feel bad. I should have remembered to give it to her last night. I just haven’t had to share it with anyone in a long time. “Kintsugi,” I say.
Morgan pauses before typing.
“It’s spelled K-I—”
“I know how to spell it,” she replies, darting a mildly offended look over her shoulder as she opens her laptop on the coffee table and starts typing.
“It’s a Death Cab album. Also a Lana Del Rey song.
But I’m guessing you chose it to reference the pottery thing.
Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, right? ”
I blink. For someone with one plate, she knows more about pottery than I expected. I suppose landscaping is art, though. In a way, both of us work with materials right from the earth—her plants and me clay.
Or I used to, at least.
“I do love the Death Cab album,” I say. “Can’t listen to it much anymore, though.”
Morgan looks like she wants to say more. She opens her mouth only to close it and glare to my left. “All right, Zach, jeez. I’m doing it now.”
The coasters on my coffee table rattle in reply.
Eager myself, I stand and move behind Morgan so I can get a clear view of her screen.
The empty space next to me feels frigid.
We, I’m assuming, watch as Morgan types in, Los Angeles son of family-owned hardware store owners dead.
Seemingly as an afterthought, or maybe at insistence from our spectral spectator, she adds, tragically.
“Do you really think that will be enough detail?” I ask. If we can just find out Zach’s full name, we can find his family. We can talk to them, learn about Zach’s life. They’re our best chance of discovering whatever Zach died having left unfinished.
Morgan glances at me. “You have clearly never tried to find the social media of the cute guy who you met at a bar whose only information you got was his first name and that he did tattoos.”
“Admittedly, I have not,” I reply.
Morgan presses enter. We wait as hits start to populate her screen.
“Told you,” Morgan crows.
Near the top is a local paper’s memorial announcement nearly three months ago. She opens it quickly.
Join family and friends at a celebration of Zach Harrison’s life at Harrison’s Hardware from 1 to 4 on Saturday. There will be music, spicy foods, surfing stories, and all of Zach’s favorite things. All are welcome. Speeches will be given by immediate family.
Everyone is silent for a moment. Or, I assume, Zach is silent. Morgan doesn’t seem to be listening to him.
“Zach Harrison,” Morgan repeats, reverent in her success.
Then she glances over her shoulder. “Zach, look, you’re a surfer and you like spicy food.
You probably love the ocean, hence the Shark Week obsession.
We already knew of your love of pop music, of course,” Morgan says.
She’s smiling, genuinely pleased for her ghost. He’s not just an invisible phantom. He was—is—a person.
I take out my phone, open a maps app, and plug in the hardware store. “It’s only twenty minutes away. Open from nine to five.”
Morgan’s eyes light up. “His parents are probably there right now. We can talk to them—” She stops when she sees the time in the upper corner of her computer. “Crap. I’m going to be late for work. I won’t get home in time, either. But I’ll take tomorrow off and we can go first thing.” She stands.
“I can’t wait to hear what you find out,” I say, stepping back to clear her path.
Morgan whirls, aghast. “You promised to help. You’re coming with us!”
“I didn’t know Zach,” I protest. I shove my hands in my pockets, suddenly uncomfortable. “I don’t need to intrude on this family in their grief.”
I’ve been around enough grieving parents for one lifetime. Sitting with Kennedy’s parents at her funeral was the hardest thing I ever had to do. They’re nice people, and we remain friends. They’ve since moved away to be nearer to Kennedy’s brother.
I was so glad when they told me they were leaving. Seeing them and how their loss affected them only made me feel mine more keenly.
It made it difficult to savor what I did have of Kennedy—her ghost. When it’s just me and Kennedy together, it feels like she never left. Like she’s still alive. But when we’re in the room with her parents, it’s…different. They couldn’t see her. It was hard for me and harder for Kennedy.
“You think I want to intrude on their grief?” Morgan fires back.
“I’m just a girl who hooked up with Zach in her car once.
They aren’t going to know who I am. I didn’t even want to meet Zach’s parents when he was alive.
It’s, like, a million times worse now that he’s dead.
” She’s speaking quickly, her voice rising in pitch.
I don’t know where her fear is coming from. Morgan just faced down a scene from The Blair Witch Project in my garage, and it’s Zach’s parents that have her begging for my help? I thought she would be thrilled at getting closer to sending Zach on.
“You’ll be fine,” I reassure her. “You can say you and Zach were friends. I mean, you basically are now.”
Her eyes are wide. The whites large in her small face.
“They’ll ask how we met and I’ll say Tinder, and then they’ll want to know why it didn’t work out with us.
I’ll be the asshole who didn’t love their dead son.
What am I supposed to say? That he got me off in my car, but we weren’t a personality fit? ”
“I would maybe leave those details out—”
“No. Sawyer, please. Please.” She steps closer to me like she wants to grab my hands. “I can’t do this on my own.” She stops herself. “I’m not the girl who meets people’s parents. I’ve never, like”—she stammers—“done that.”
I feel my brow furrow. “You’ve never…met someone’s parents?”
Morgan presses her restless palms to her work skirt. “Not someone I was, you know, involved with. I’m not like that.”
“Like what?”
“Serious!” Morgan blurts. I’ve never seen her so frantic. There’s no pink in her cheeks. She’s as pale as—well, a ghost. “Committed. I don’t do that. Never have,” she snaps. “Never will.”
Committed. Memories of record-player dancing and pizza-delivery nights in, of engagement photos and secondhand credenzas rush through my head. “It’s not so bad,” I say defensively before I can stop myself.
Morgan’s eyes dart to mine. I see her grasp onto confrontation, her handhold to pull herself out of everything else she’s feeling. “Please. I do not need more judgment from you.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I’m not some careless free spirit.” Morgan charges on. “I’m a fucking liability, okay?”
This quiets me. I almost reach for her just to help her calm down.
My surprise quickly gives way to sympathy when I see her visceral reaction.
The instant open-faced pain of this statement is unhidden on Morgan’s vivacious features.
“I’m…sure that’s not true,” I muster, hearing how useless it sounds.
“Well.” Morgan’s voice is low. “It is. The closest I ever came to meeting the parents was when I got engaged. I was twenty-two. Look how that turned out.”
I can’t help myself. The sharp revelation, so out of place with the Morgan I know, intrigues me immediately. She obviously wouldn’t welcome prying, though, which leaves me not knowing what to say.
When Morgan checks her phone, the fight seems to leave her. Her frame slumps. “Please, Sawyer,” she repeats, sounding exhausted. “Don’t make me do this on my own.”
Suddenly, I know I have no choice. Of course I’m going to help her.
Her fear is bigger than her fleeting connection with Zach Harrison.
Morgan—with her nomadic life, her dread of commitment—has never stuck around long enough for these sorts of conversations.
This discomfort is what waits on the other side of her exuberant restlessness or is the reason for it.
Maybe it’s why she leaves so often, why she doesn’t want memories of her former homes.
I can’t say I don’t see the appeal. Sometimes when people break, you can’t glue them back together with gold and make them more beautiful than they were.
Sometimes, people are just too shattered.
When you’ve committed to them, though, you have to sit among the pieces.
It’s a consequence of commitment Morgan has no experience with.
I do, though.
“Okay. Okay,” I say reassuringly. “I’ll go with you.”
Morgan exhales. Color returns to her cheeks. Her eyes. The brown of her irises is so warm. Like earth or clay.
She looks to my left, then back to me. “Zach says thanks. He doesn’t trust me to do this on my own, and I’m not even offended. It means a lot to him. To…both of us.”
I give her a small smile, self-conscious.
Their gratitude warms me more than I expected.
I haven’t helped someone other than Kennedy in longer than I’d like to admit.
I don’t think it’s selfish to focus on yourself when you’re drowning, but I guess I didn’t realize how helping someone else might calm the waters.
“I need some things for the house anyway,” I say, not wanting them to feel indebted to me. “I should finish patching and painting while you’re working on the yard.”
“Of course,” Morgan says, but some knowing quality in her voice tells me she’s seeing through me.
When she starts to close her computer, I have this unexpected straining feeling. Like I can’t let her leave. Not yet.
“You’re not a liability,” I say.
I feel Morgan’s startled pause. She withdraws, then straightens to look me in the eye. Skepticism, worn and weary, joins with hesitant hope in her eyes. I watch her evaluate me, like she’s gauging whether I give a shit.
I do, Morgan. I do.
I hold her gaze with everything I have. Zach, I figure, is probably nearby. I can’t see him like Morgan can, but I’m guessing he’s listening. I wonder what he thinks.
Finally, she sighs. “I am. I promise,” she says.
“I dropped out of college when I was twenty-one. Three years in. I was…really struggling. I was desperate to be my own person, to make my own choices. I wanted to prove to my parents I was independent, that I’d dropped out because I was ready to live in the real world. ”
“Dropping out of college does not make you a liability,” I reply, going for the right combination of gentle and firm. “You’re clearly great at what you do.”
Morgan pinches her lips together. “That’s only part of it,” she says.
“I was living in North Carolina on my own, and I met Michael. Michael Hanover-Erickson. He was seven years older. I thought it was perfect. We dated, fell in love, yada yada yada. When he proposed, I…said yes. We moved to Seattle for Michael’s job, started planning the wedding, the whole nine yards.
I didn’t know if I was ready. I just knew I really wanted to be. ”
She shrugs.
I hate how hollowed out she looks. I hardly know Morgan, but innately, something in me wants to keep her from punishing herself like this.
Kennedy, I guess. Love like ours didn’t just make me happy.
It made me want other people to be happy.
It makes me want to fight whatever has Morgan convinced she’s not worth hope or commitment.
“Of course my parents were supportive,” she goes on.
“They’ve only ever been supportive. They started helping us pay for wedding stuff.
Everything was moving fast, but Michael didn’t care.
He wanted the rest of our lives to start.
Then the date started getting nearer, Michael started mentioning trying for a baby…
Suddenly I realized how not ready I was,” she confesses.
“I bailed. On everything. Michael was heartbroken. My parents were blindsided, but they helped me relocate.”
She looks down. She’s utterly crestfallen.
“I know better now,” she says. “It’s better when I don’t commit.”
I wrestle for something to say. It’s comedic, garishly.
World’s loneliest man, who only converses with his personal ghost, called upon to comfort someone he hardly knows over the labyrinthine wounds of her love life.
I wonder if Zach’s heard this story. I wonder if he’s extending her reassurances right now in a voice for only her to hear. I hope he is.
I have to offer her my own, though. Or try.
“I’m sure Michael wouldn’t have wanted you to go through with a marriage you were uncertain of,” I venture.
Morgan scoffs. I scold myself for the misstep. I just want to make her hurt less. “Sure,” she replies drolly, “but I’m sure he’d have preferred he never wasted his time with me in the first place.”
Now I know exactly what to say. “It wasn’t wasted time,” I reply. “Even when engagements don’t lead to marriage, they’re not wasted.”
Morgan has no quick rejoinder. How can she when doing so would be telling me my engagement to Kennedy was wasted time?
I’m relieved when she seems to really hear me. The empty shame haunting her eyes seems to part, clarity emerging from its reaches.
She looks down, where she notices the time on her phone in her hand. “Shit,” she says hastily. “Now I’m definitely late.”
She reaches for her computer, then pauses.
“Zach,” she addresses the cold corner of the room, confirming my guess—the ghost never left our midst. “If you want, I can search your name now and probably find out how you died,” she offers.
I wait. Honestly, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to think of Zach as dead. I don’t want some horrible thing to have happened to him, like I speculated in the garage. I can’t even see him, but I like him.
But I won’t be a coward. If Zach wants to find out what happened to him, I won’t leave Morgan to read the details by herself.
The laptop slams shut on its own.
Morgan nods, her expression a mix of sadness and relief. I don’t need her to convey whatever it is Zach’s said.
Zach wants to learn about his life. Not his death.