Chapter 37
GRIFFIN
Iwalk through the back hallway with my phone in one hand and my keys in the other, already thinking about the email waiting in my inbox, the contractor I need to call back, and the drawings spread across my desk that I have been pretending matter more than the woman who has been avoiding me in my own house, when I hear Tiana laugh.
The patio doors are cracked open, letting in a thread of cool evening air and the faint scent of fresh-cut grass.
Tiana is sitting cross-legged on the outdoor sofa, one of my old sweatshirts swallowing her frame, her curls piled high in a messy knot that looks seconds from collapsing.
Sylas is sprawled beside her with his head in her lap, his sneakers kicked off, his socked feet pressed against the armrest while she absently drags her fingers through his hair.
My son is rambling the way he does when he is comfortable enough to let every thought in his head spill out without checking if the person listening is tired of him yet.
“And then Theo said dinosaurs don’t count as dragons, but that’s only because he doesn’t understand science,” Sylas says, frowning up at her with grave disappointment. “Some dinosaurs probably breathed fire. We just don’t have proof because it was a long time ago.”
Tiana nods as if this is a serious academic debate.
I lean one shoulder against the hallway wall and stay where they can’t see me.
I should go. This is their moment, not mine.
But then Tiana smiles down at my son, and the sight of it hooks into something behind my ribs.
So I stay.
“Also,” Sylas adds, “if dragons were real, I’d get one.”
“Oh, obviously.”
“And I’d train it.”
“Respectfully, you don’t even put your socks in the hamper.”
His nose scrunches. “Dragons are different. They listen better.”
“Than socks?”
“Than me.”
Tiana laughs under her breath and taps the tip of his nose. “You’re a tiny chaos goblin.”
He considers this. “Is that bad?”
“For me? No.”
My throat tightens.
Sylas looks up at her for a long moment, his little face open in a way that makes my chest ache. Tiana’s fingers keep moving through his hair, slow and gentle.
I don’t think I understood until this moment how close they’ve become.
I know my son adores her. Sylas talks about her constantly, reaches for her when he’s hurt, asks if she’ll be home for dinner on the weekends, saves the best crayon colors for her without thinking.
I’ve seen all of that, but this is different.
Sylas is resting against her like his body already knows she is safe. And Tiana looks down at him like loving him costs her nothing.
The realization moves through me with such force I have to press my palm against the wall.
I have been so busy managing my guilt, my grief, my fear, that I missed the simple, devastating truth blooming in the middle of my house.
Tiana did not just become important to me.
She became essential to him.
“I have to tell you something,” Tiana says.
Something in her voice changes, and I straighten without meaning to.
Sylas tilts his head back farther. “Is it bad?”
“No.” She smooths a hand over his hair. “Not bad. I’m going to Los Angeles for work.”
Sylas’s toes stop wiggling against the sofa. His hand pauses where he has been picking at the seam of her sweatshirt.
“For how long?”
“A week.”
“A whole week?”
Tiana nods. Sylas sits up, turning to face her. “And you’ll sleep there?”
“Yes.”
“And eat breakfast there?”
“I assume so.”
Sylas goes quiet, and Tiana shifts closer to him, tucking one leg beneath her. “Hey. Talk to me.”
Sylas looks down at his hands. “I don’t want you to go.”
Tiana’s lips part, but she doesn’t rush to fill the silence. She lets him be upset without trying to fix the feeling.
“I know,” she says quietly. “I don’t really want to leave you either.”
“Then don’t,” Sylas huffs.
“I have to, buddy. It’s for work. It’s a really big opportunity for me.”
He nods. “But you’re coming back?”
Sylas’s voice is so low that I almost don’t hear the question.
Tiana goes very still. “Of course I’m coming back, bug,” she says, leaning toward him. “Why wouldn’t I come back?”
Sylas shrugs and my heart stops before he says it.
“Some people leave,” he whispers. “They leave and don’t come back. Mom did.”
His words land like a gunshot in my chest.
For a moment, I’m not in the hallway anymore.
I’m in a hospital room with white walls and a machine making a sound I still hear in nightmares.
I’m holding a hand that has already gone too cold.
I’m standing in front of a coffin with my son in my arms, too young to understand why everyone is crying, too young to keep the memories of his mother unless I give them back to him piece by piece for the rest of his life.
I close my eyes. I thought I had been protecting him.
All this time, I thought the routines, the stability, the careful boundaries I built around our life were keeping him safe from the worst of it.
I thought if I loved him hard enough, if I stayed steady, and if I never let anyone too close to matter, he would not grow up waiting for people to disappear.
But grief is clever. It finds you anyway.
When I open my eyes, Tiana’s face has crumpled.
“Oh, baby,” she whispers.
Sylas’s chin wobbles, and I almost step forward. But Tiana moves first.
She pulls him into her lap, even though he is getting too big for it. He goes without hesitation, folding into her chest as Tiana wraps both arms around him and rests her cheek on top of his head.
“I’m coming back. I need you to hear me, okay? I’m going to LA for work, then I’m coming right back here.”
Sylas sniffles. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
“What if you like it better there?”
Tiana pulls back enough to look at him, hands cupping his little face. “There is no version of any city, anywhere, where I like being there more than I like coming back to you.”
My chest cracks open.
Sylas’s eyes search hers. “Really?”
“Really.”
His mouth trembles again, this time closer to a smile. Tiana brushes her thumbs under his eyes with such care it almost brings me to my knees.
“I know people leaving feels scary,” she says.
“And I know sometimes people leave because they have to, and sometimes they don’t come back because life is unfair and mean and stupid.
” Her voice breaks on the last word, though she breathes through it.
“But me going away for work is not the same as leaving you,” she continues.
“Do you understand? I would never choose not to come back to you.”
Sylas wraps his fingers around the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “What if I miss you a lot?”
“Then you miss me a lot, and that’s okay.”
“What do I do?”
“You tell your dad. You call me. You send me dramatic voice messages about how I abandoned you with his cooking.”
A watery laugh escapes him. “I can’t go back to cereal for breakfast, TJ.”
My throat tightens again, but differently this time.
She laughs, small and soft. “And I’ll send you pictures. I’ll show you my hotel room. I’ll FaceTime you before bed if your dad says it’s okay. I’ll even bring you back something from LA.”
His head lifts. “Like a dragon?”
“If I find a dragon and can smuggle him through airport security, yes, I will absolutely commit a federal crime for you.”
“Promise?”
“On my snack drawer.”
He gasps, because in this house, Tiana’s snack drawer is sacred. Then he leans into her again.
Tiana holds him. “You’re allowed to be sad when people go,” she murmurs into his hair. “But don’t let sadness tell you that everyone leaves forever. Sadness lies sometimes.”
Sylas is quiet. I look away because the pain in my chest has become unbearable.
Something in me is breaking, but something else is being repaired in the same breath.
Tiana didn’t try to step into a place that wasn’t hers in that conversation. She didn’t tell my son not to hurt. She didn’t promise him the world would never take anything from him again.
She simply gave him a way to survive the fear.
I love her.
And not in the panicked, guilty way I have been trying to manage with distance and silence and control.
I love the woman sitting in my backyard with my son in her lap, teaching him that absence is not always abandonment.
I love her humor, her softness, her stubborn, aching heart.
I love the way she makes room for Sylas without taking anything from Lila.
I love the way she has walked into the haunted parts of my life and somehow made them warmer without asking me to tear the past down first.
I have been so afraid of moving on because I thought it meant leaving Lila behind.
Maybe moving on is not leaving.
It’s carrying what was and still reaching for what is.
For the first time in a long time, I know exactly where I need to go.
Sylas holds my hand as we walk through the rows of the cemetery, his small fingers tucked into mine, his other hand wrapped around the stems of the flowers he insisted on choosing himself.
Yellow tulips. A little too bright against the gray sky, but he said they looked happy, and I could not argue with that.
The grass is damp beneath our shoes. A cool breeze moves through the trees, carrying the clean scent of rain and earth. For years, I hated days like this. I hated how peaceful it could be here when there was nothing peaceful inside me.
Today, it feels different. Not easier, but less like a punishment.
We slow down when we reach her grave.
Lila Nora Hayes.
Beloved daughter, sister, wife and mother.
Sylas crouches and lays the tulips carefully against the stone. “Hi, Mommy.”
My throat tightens. I lower myself beside him, one knee pressing into the damp grass.
“I picked yellow because TJ said yellow looks like sunshine, and I think maybe you like sunshine because Dad says you used to like summer.”
I look down at him. “You remember that?” I ask.
He nods without taking his eyes off the stone. “You told me she liked wearing yellow dresses.”
“She did.”
“Did she have a lot?”
“Too many.”
His brow furrows. “Like Tiana’s shoes?”
A laugh slips out of me. “Maybe not that many.”