Chapter 44
Sawyer
Two months have passed since Zach left. Two months of grieving. Two months of loving each other. Two months of something I never got the chance to do, or maybe never took the chance to do—confronting loss’s long shadows with the light of someone else’s spirit, courageous and compassionate.
When Morgan needs me, I’m there. When I need her, not only to deal with Zach’s departure, but to struggle through the profound emptiness of Kennedy from this house she long inhabited, Morgan is there for me.
We plan a trip to visit her parents. She tells me she wants to see them more often. I start calling mine every Saturday. I ask old friends out to dinner. Even the ones I’ve neglected for too long are quick to invite me back into their lives.
I meant it when I said I would gladly move for Morgan, but she told me she’d found her home on the Silver Lake hillside. She was ready, in her words, to put down roots.
Morgan has many plates now. She stands in the kitchen, washing the dishes I made new for our home while I watch her from the doorway.
We didn’t leave Los Angeles—for Massachusetts or otherwise.
Instead, Morgan moved into my once-haunted home on the hillside.
The guesthouse is only for pottery these days.
I might have expected it to hurt, seeing Morgan where I’d once planned a lifetime with Kennedy. It doesn’t. It heals me. I’m so grateful for them both, for the memories of Kennedy I have here and the ones of Morgan I’ll make here.
Unlikely? Maybe, but I once drove a ghost to a seven-year-old’s birthday party. Nothing surprises me these days.
The dreams I shared in this house with Kennedy haven’t disappeared—dreams don’t work like that. They’re not just ideas from the past. They’re living things. They change. They pick up new inspirations and joys and colors, like ceramic infused with gold. This isn’t my dream home anymore. It’s ours.
My gaze catches the framed photograph beside the window over the kitchen sink.
It’s from the Perfect Weekend. Layla captured it while Morgan and I weren’t aware.
Morgan looks gorgeous, laughing, effervescent with life.
Beside her, lit in flames, I watch her with unconcealed infatuation.
It’s the perfect memory and the perfect prologue to us.
It’s not why we love the photograph, though.
Over Morgan’s shoulder in the photo shimmers a warped speck, an unusual lens flare. Distortion in the firelight.
Morgan gasped when she saw it. We both know it’s the closest thing we have to a photograph with Zach, the three of us together.
Finishing washing the dishes, Morgan glances over. She shuts off the water, her eyes finding what I hold in my hands.
It’s the first piece of pottery I made after she left here in the wake of Kennedy’s vanishing. When we got home from San Onofre, I showed it to Morgan, just like Zach encouraged on the drive.
In their ungainly canister in my closet, my fiancée’s ashes have waited for five years.
Needing to make her urn myself kept me from pottery.
It had to be me who crafted it. It couldn’t be me.
With what vessel could I possibly give voice to our life and love?
To my loss? How could I endure the feeling of combining my greatest joy, my release, my soul’s endeavor, with the deepest pain I’d ever felt?
How could I go on making pottery after such a legacy?
The questions kept me from my craft for five years.
Until Morgan.
The day she moved out, furious, hurting, and freed, I went into my pottery studio and let my hands guide my heart. My grieving gave way to creation, to the piece I hold right now.
“You’re sure?” Morgan asks.
I set it on the dining table, then pull Morgan close to kiss her swiftly. “I’m sure,” I say.
She nods, touching my face softly. Her breath warms my cheek. She pulls back to head to the front of the house, and I delicately pick up my pottery.
It’s not an urn, really. Or not a traditional one. It’s a flowerpot, painted swirling midnight blue and black.
Joining Morgan on the porch, I carry Kennedy’s final resting place.
Together, we continue into the front yard, which is finished now, Morgan’s vision complete in flourishing color.
In the weeks since she moved in, she’s worked to exhaustion pruning, tending, making routine trips to the nursery, until finally, this morning, she incorporated the final components—yuccas, carnations, sunflowers—the memories she shared with me when we went to the Huntington Gardens.
Planting pieces of her own past in this sanctuary of our present and future.
She’s brought her homes here to mine. She’s put down her roots in our garden.
It’s perfect. The house Kennedy designed, I finished, and the yard, Morgan created. Pieces of all three of us, reified in one home.
Morgan leads me to the space we’ve chosen for the flowerpot, visible from our bedroom window.
Once, Kennedy’s jacaranda tree stood here, until Morgan helped me make space for new dreams instead of mourning old ones.
Gently, I lower the hardened clay to the place Morgan sculpted of her preferred materials—soil, soft low grasses, and reinforcing rocks.
With her, I researched how flowers could be planted in ashes. We’ve chosen lilies. Where Morgan is my sun, Kennedy is the moon in my life. Her memory is the purest light in the deepest darkness I’ve ever known.
I don’t cry while I empty the canister, Morgan helping me evenly mix the fine gray powder with the nourishing soil. Instead, as we plant something that will grow and change in her memory, I concentrate on every happy moment with Kennedy. On how much I loved her. So, so much.
On how loving Kennedy is the only reason I know how to love Morgan, the only reason we met. How loving Morgan is how I learned to let Kennedy go. Yet, in a way, in loving Morgan, I will always hold on to Kennedy. A living tribute, like these flowers.
We lower in the lilies. Morgan’s expert hands cover the roots with utmost care, the most I could ever want. Under the pristine wide faces of the flowers, Kennedy looks like she’s home, too.
She was half right. My kids will play in front of her flowers one day. I don’t need her ghost here to know it’s what she wanted.
With dirt on her fingertips, Morgan takes my hand. I hold on tight. In the perfect early evening, a soft wind picks up suddenly over the hills, gently blowing our hair and the petals of the lilies. I close my eyes, breathing deep.
“I think it’s her,” Morgan murmurs.
I peer down, meeting Morgan’s eyes. “I think so, too.”
Floating on the wind, music enters my head. The sweetest refrain, familiar and eternal. “A Sunday Kind of Love.”
Holding on to Morgan’s hand, I welcome the possibility of what this means. Maybe Kennedy is with us right now. Maybe Zach is, too.
Maybe no one ever really leaves. They just…change. From souls to soil, shattered pieces to loving completion, dreams to dust to memory. They live on, the ghosts of past lives made new forever.