Chapter 31
Morgan
When the front door slams open, I spin to find Sawyer.
His hair is mussed, like he’s run his hand frantically through the brown waves. His shirt is askew, his eyes wide with panic. Racked exhaustion vibrates on his features.
I rush to him, knowing something is wrong. “What happened?”
Sawyer stops short of me. Like he wants me nowhere near him. The sunlight glares harshly on our non-reunion. “She’s gone,” he says.
His hollow intonation clenches my chest. I need no confirmation of who he’s referring to or how he feels. What Sawyer’s saying is hauntingly clear.
“Kennedy,” he continues, exhaling shakily. “She…she said her goodbyes and she’s gone. Really gone. Forever.”
He mouths over the words like he’s eating glass. Forever.
He doesn’t cry. He looks like he’s in too much shock. While Sawyer’s world collapses, the garden paints the scene garishly—the clean white home gleaming, the palm fronds swaying gently overhead.
I want to comfort him the way I did the night of our first kiss. Feeling useless in my gardening gloves, I reach out for him. “Sawyer, I’m so, so sorry—”
He steps back. Something sharp pierces the shock in his eyes. “It doesn’t make sense,” he insists. “We never finished the yard. Her unfinished business is still unfinished.”
Her unfinished business.
Realizations rip into me. Kennedy’s unfinished business was not Sawyer’s untangled garden. I know it wasn’t.
But Sawyer doesn’t.
I have to explain to him what Kennedy shared with me, but the very idea makes words lodge in my throat. I don’t know how I’ll possibly tell Sawyer that what Kennedy really wanted was for Sawyer to move on. To embrace the possibility of new life, of new love…with me.
The fact Kennedy has finally passed on is paranormal proof of Sawyer’s feelings for me. It’s a haunted love note written in vanishing ink. His unspoken confession sculpted in the supernatural.
I remember passing a car crash driving on the 405 freeway. Metal on metal, collided forms wrecked into unrecognizable shapes. To say my heart feels like the collision is an understatement.
I want to feel the happiness this means for me. Living city to city, I never expect to matter much to neighbors, coworkers, one-night stands or one-month flings. The rotating cast of my mutable life.
With Sawyer, it’s different. With Sawyer, I not only fell in love. I fell into the reckless hope that I might matter to him the way he does to me.
Now I know I do. Every moment of closeness opened his heart the way he won mine. Every connection was reciprocated. Our kiss under the Huntington Gardens’ weeping peppermint trees—the greatest of my life—captivated him the way it undid me. He loves me.
I want to feel this joy with him. But I can’t. Not yet.
“Sawyer, the yard was never Kennedy’s unfinished business,” I say carefully. “She didn’t stay for the house. She stayed for you.”
He watches me, clearly sensing there’s something I haven’t revealed yet. “How do you know that?” he asks.
I’m proud of myself for holding his gaze. I want to skip this part. I want to escape this conversation into my secluded guesthouse, my gardening with plants who never, ever ask impossible questions.
Sawyer deserves the truth, I remind myself, mustering my nerves. He deserved the truth a long time ago.
“The night we…” I start.
I can’t quite force the word kissed. Sawyer’s stare won’t let me. The only way out of this mess, I know, is to keep going. I can’t stop in the middle and expect ghosts to clear away this debris.
“Kennedy came to me. She told me she needed you to move on,” I say.
Sawyer’s jaw clenches, his posture stiffening under the palms. When he replies, he’s clearly restraining his voice. “You didn’t—neither of you—told me.” His eyes water. Like his indignation, his rage, has found the only outlet they could.
“I’m so sorry,” I rush to say. “We should have. Kennedy believed you wouldn’t listen to her. That if she told you, it would just close your heart to—”
To me.
“I didn’t know how to tell you, either,” I say, speaking quickly, skipping what I can’t bear to have him reject. “I didn’t want you to think I was encouraging you to forget her, to choose…someone else,” I finally say. “I—I’m sorry.”
Sawyer does not look forgiving.
Familiar grief cracks his features now. His face contorts until he controls himself. “I don’t understand,” he says. “Why now? Nothing changed. We kissed yesterday, but…it wasn’t…It can’t be because of that, or she would have left yesterday. It has to be something else.”
I hate the jealous voice whispering in my heart. It wasn’t what?
I never wanted to be part of a love triangle with a ghost. I never signed up to pull Sawyer from his tragic true love. When I proposed we figure out our hauntings together, I envisioned swapping notes on occult rituals or recommending witchy tomes to each other.
Not this.
Instantly, my jealousy leads me to embarrassment. Wasn’t I just overjoyed that I—the wonderful, memorable Morgan Lane—had healed Sawyer with the overwhelming power of our love? Who the fuck was I kidding?
I honestly thought Sawyer wanted something deeper with me.
I thought the softest, most tender kiss I’ve ever experienced meant he saw something special enough in me to help him past his grief.
Of course he would rather hold on to his ghost fiancée instead.
I’m not Sawyer’s love. I’m his fucking consolation prize.
Which Kennedy knew. It’s why she never told him. She said so herself. Sawyer could never want me if he knew he might lose her.
Shame blooms red in my face.
“What were you doing right before Kennedy said goodbye?” I manage.
Sawyer looks uncomprehending. “I…I waved to you.”
I stifle my wounded indignation. “Well, like you said, I guess it’s not about me or us or whatever. Waving at me isn’t anything,” I return.
I falter when Sawyer goes pale. He looks like Zach when he lost control in the ghost-quake.
“It was,” he replies. “I thought you were gorgeous, and I couldn’t wait to go outside and start the day with you.”
My breath catches in my chest.
Sawyer reels like speaking the words has physically wounded him. I’m no ghostly love note, I realize. I’m the shards of something once beautiful, now shattered and embedded in his heart.
Sawyer stumbles backward. He sits down hard on his front steps. His eyes fill with tears. Looking lightheaded, he emptily surveys the yard. The horticultural canvas he offered me, unfinished now.
Stunned, I feel my own tears stinging my eyes. Sawyer didn’t use the words, but the feeling he’s described—I couldn’t wait to go outside and start the day with you—that’s love.
It panics me, because Sawyer looks…miserable. God, it’s just like the night we first kissed, isn’t it? Why don’t we get some ghostly Etta James playing? Sawyer loves me and hates himself for how he feels. He hates loving me.
This isn’t how we should share our feelings for each other. It’s horrible. It’s so desperately unfair.
Sawyer looks at me, his eyes red-rimmed. I can’t meet his wretched stare. “It’s my fault,” he says, realization making his voice empty. “I’m falling in love with you. I love you, and it’s cost me the final piece of Kennedy forever.”
I love you.
I want to plead with him not to say those three words. Not when they do this to him. Love shouldn’t do this.
I fall to my knees in front of him and remove my gardening gloves. Venturing to reach out, I put one comforting—I hope—hand on his forearm. “It’s not your fault. You’re human, Sawyer,” I say. “You can’t stop how you feel. You can’t stop your own heart.”
His stare goes vacant. “If I’d never met you, she’d still be here,” he says. “It’s like I’ve killed her.” He drops his head into his hands.
My heart splits. I want to hold him, kiss him, help him. I know Sawyer wants none of those things, though. On my knees, I have nothing except my words. “You can’t kill someone who isn’t alive,” I say. “She was already gone, Sawyer. She wanted to leave. She was ready.”
Sawyer doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. His silence, his posture, screams everything. He wasn’t ready.
I stay kneeling, feeling like I’ve found a wounded animal on the side of the road. Desperate to help yet having no idea how.
Finally, Sawyer’s breathing slows. I’m relieved, until he looks up.
Something I’ve never seen shadows over his face.
Sawyer hasn’t healed his pain. He’s smothered it in fury.
“You should have told me,” he says. Every word is deliberate, unflinching.
“If you’d told me that night, I would have asked you to leave.
I would have saved Kennedy. I would have kept her here. ”
My knees weaken under me. His words rip through me, shredding my heart until it looks just like his.
I knew he would choose her. I knew he would choose her, I remind myself ferociously.
Maybe, I reason, I can make myself hurt less the way Sawyer did—by changing pain into anger.
I rage at my naivete, my unimportance in the tragic schemes of the lives of others, my foolishness in imagining I could have meant more to him.
“You did save Kennedy,” I say, voice wavering. “By letting her go.”
Sawyer doesn’t react. The silence in the sunshine is crushing.
He isn’t hearing me. He can’t.
When he speaks, his voice comes out clear and empty. Sculpted and hollow, like one of his ceramic creations. “With Kennedy gone, the yard doesn’t ever need to be finished. Your work here is done,” he says. “You should leave.”
I let his rejection crash over me. I use the hurt to feed my anger. “You’re right. I certainly have no other reason to stay,” I reply.
Sawyer offers no objection.
I grab my gardening gloves off the ground, feeling infuriatingly helpless. I remember how optimistic Sawyer made me. Not just hopeful. Optimistic.
Un-fucking-believable.
I should never have stayed here. I should never have stayed in Sawyer’s life. Staying isn’t what I do.
I’m free to do whatever I want, I remind myself resentfully. If what Sawyer wants is to live in his house that no longer has a ghost but is certainly still haunted, then fine. I’m done.
Fighting down sobs, I return to the cottage, ready to pack my whole life up once again.