Chapter 37 #2
Sylas smiles and touches one tulip petal with the tip of his finger. “Was she funny?”
I settle back on my heel, the question opening a door in my chest I don’t walk through often enough.
“Very funny, but not in a loud way. Your mom had this quiet kind of humor. She would say something under her breath, and if you weren’t listening, you’d miss it.
But if you caught it, it was usually the funniest thing anyone had said all day. ”
“Did she make jokes like TJ?”
“Not like Tiana.” I glance at him. “No one makes jokes like Tiana.”
Sylas nods like that is obvious.
I look back at the headstone, my hand resting on my thigh, thumb rubbing slowly over my wedding band.
“Your mom liked music in the morning,” I tell him. “Soft music, usually. She said houses felt too lonely if they woke up quiet.”
Sylas leans against my side.
“She liked pancakes more than waffles, even though I told her waffles were structurally superior.”
“What did she say?”
“She said breakfast was not a construction project.”
He giggles. The sound threads through the cold air.
“Your mom used to dance with you in the kitchen,” I continue, voice quieter now. “When you were a baby. You were very serious about it. Didn’t smile much at first. Just stared at her like you were judging her technique.”
“I was a baby.”
“You were a judgmental baby.”
Sylas presses closer to me. “Did Mom love me?”
The question nearly guts me.
I wrap my arm around his shoulders and pull him into my side. “Yes. More than anything.”
He looks up at me. “Even though she left?”
“She didn’t want to leave you.” I turn toward him, needing him to understand this in whatever way a seven-year-old can.
“Your mom would have stayed with you forever if she could have.” I smooth a hand over his hair.
“Sometimes people don’t get to choose how long they stay.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t love us. It just means we have to carry their love differently. ”
Then he says, “TJ said sadness lies sometimes.”
I close my eyes briefly. When I open them, my son is looking at me with Lila’s eyes and my frown, and a heart I’m trying very hard not to break with my own fear.
“She’s right,” I say.
“Does sadness lie to you, Dad?”
I look at Lila’s name carved into stone.
“Yes. Sometimes it does.”
“What does it say?”
I take a slow breath. “It tells me that if I’m happy, I’m forgetting your mom.”
Sylas frowns. “That’s not true, right?”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
He leans his head against my arm. “You remember her.”
“I do.”
“And I remember her because you tell me about her.”
I press my mouth to the top of his head and let my eyes close. “You do,” I reply.
He looks back at the flowers. “Can we tell her about LA?”
My heart twists.
“About Tiana going?”
He nods.
“You can.”
Sylas shifts closer to the stone. “TJ is going to Los Angeles for work. She said she’ll come back. She promised on her snack drawer, so that means serious.”
A laugh catches in my throat. I wipe a hand over my mouth and look away as he keeps telling his mom about Tiana.
After a while, Sylas grows quiet beside me. I sit with him until the cold starts pinking his cheeks, then stand and brush damp grass from my knee.
“Why don’t you go wait in the car?” I say, pulling the keys from my pocket and unlocking it. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Can I listen to music?”
“Yes.”
He grabs the keys and runs back along the path, jacket flapping behind him. I watch until he climbs into the car and shuts the door, then I turn back to the grave.
The silence changes once I am alone.
For years, I have come here with things I could not say anywhere else. Apologies. Updates. Pieces of our son. The things he learned, the teeth he lost, the first time he wrote his name backward and got furious about it.
I have talked to Lila about everything.
Except this.
I lower myself onto the bench across from her grave, elbows on my knees, hands clasped together because I need something to hold.
“Hey, Lila.”
The words come out rough.
The wind moves through the trees behind me.
“I don’t really know how to do this part,” I admit, staring at the tulips Sylas placed at the base of the stone. “Which is probably not surprising. You always said I acted like feelings were faulty wiring I couldn’t fix.” My mouth twitches, but the smile hurts. “I’ve made a mess of things.”
That feels like an understatement so large it is almost insulting.
I rub my palms together, looking down at the faint lines across my skin.
“There’s someone,” I say, the words hanging.
“Tiana. You’d like her.” My throat tightens.
“Actually, you’d probably love her. She’s impossible, in the way you appreciated.
Loud when she’s excited. Too clever for her own good.
Dramatic about small things and brave about the big ones.
She treats Sylas like she was born knowing exactly how to make him feel seen.
” Lila would have seen what I saw in the backyard, the way Tiana held Sylas’s fear without trying to own a place that wasn’t hers.
She would have understood that love is not a single room with one locked door.
I breathe out, staring at the flowers. “He loves her.”
The truth settles between me and the headstone.
“So do I.”
For a second, I can’t say anything else. My chest aches, but it is not the same ache I am used to.
“I tried not to,” I confess. “I told myself it was inappropriate, complicated, and selfish. I told myself wanting her meant I was taking something from you. From what we had. From the life we built before everything went wrong.”
The wind stirs again, lifting the edges of the tulip petals.
“But that wasn’t fair to myself. And it sure as hell wasn’t fair to her.”
I press my thumb into my palm.
“I’ve been using grief as proof that I loved you enough.
Like if I stayed lonely and kept the house exactly the way it was…
If I never let anyone matter too much, then somehow that meant I was still loyal to you.
” My voice roughens. “But I don’t think you would want that for me.
I don’t think you would want that for Sylas. ”
I look toward the car, where my son is probably pressing every button on the console despite knowing better.
“Tiana’s good with him. Not because she’s trying to replace you. She doesn’t. She wouldn’t. She talks about you with care, even when you’re not there to hear it. She makes space for him to miss you and still love her. I didn’t know someone could do that until I watched her.”
My eyes burn.
“And I want her,” I say. “Not instead of you. Not because I stopped loving you. I don’t think love works that way, even though I’ve been acting like it does.
” The confession loosens something in my chest. “I will always love you. You were my wife. You are Sylas’s mother.
Nothing changes that. Nothing ever could. ”
A tear slips free, and I wipe it away with a rough hand.
“But Tiana is here.” My voice breaks. “And I love her. I love her in this life I’m still living. I love the way she fills the rooms I thought had to stay empty. I love how she makes Sylas laugh. I love how she makes me feel like there might be something on the other side of surviving.”
I lean forward, elbows digging into my thighs.
“I want to move on,” I say, barely above a whisper. “Not from you. With you, somehow. With what you gave me. With our son and the parts of me that still know how to love because you taught them first.”
The silence that follows doesn’t feel empty. It feels like the permission I’m finally brave enough to give myself.
“I hope you understand. I hope, wherever you are, you know this doesn’t mean I loved you less.” My breath shudders out of me. “And I hope you’d approve of her, because Sylas does. And apparently, he has better sense than I do.”
A small laugh breaks through the ache.
I stand slowly, brushing my hands down the front of my coat. For a moment, I just look at her name, at the flowers, at the stone that has held too much of my life for too long.
Then I touch two fingers to the top of the headstone. I just stand there, my hand resting against the cool stone, my chest tight, breath caught somewhere between grief and release, and I feel the weight on my left hand like I haven’t felt it in years.
The ring.
I look down at it. My thumb brushes over the band.
For years, I wore it because I loved Lila. Then I wore it because taking it off felt like a betrayal. And somewhere along the way, I think I started wearing it because I was afraid of what my hand would look like without it. What my life would look like without it.
I twist the ring once. It resists at first, caught against skin and memories, and the ache that moves through me is so sharp I almost stop. Instinct rises hard and fast, telling me to leave it where it is, to keep this one last visible proof that I was hers and she was mine.
But I don’t need the ring to know that. I don’t need to keep wearing a vow to prove I meant it.
I close my eyes and slide the ring over my knuckle. By the time it comes free, my hand is trembling.
The absence is immediate.
I curl my fingers around the band and hold it in my palm for a long moment, letting the edge press into my skin one last time.
Then I crouch beside her grave.
I set the ring carefully beside the tulips, and my breath shakes as I rest my hand over the empty spot on my finger. “I’ll always love you, Lila,” I say, voice breaking around the words. “But I can’t keep wearing this like a wall.”
The wind moves softly through the trees.
“I need to be a man Sylas can see living, not just surviving. And I need to stop making Tiana feel like loving her is something I have to apologize for.”
I press two fingers to the headstone one last time, then I stand.
My left hand feels bare at my side as I turn toward the car, but for the first time since Lila died, the emptiness feels like peace.
And maybe, when I’m brave enough to earn it, something new can grow there.