Chapter 7
Seven
Alex texted back Saturday while I was on the bus home from Thirteen Candles.
Alex: Got your message. We’ll talk Wednesday. Galentine’s dinner.
That was it. No I forgive you. No I love you too. Just... logistics.
Monday she came home from Nikko’s—worked from his house all day to avoid me, probably—and walked straight to me. Pulled me into the longest hug of my entire life. Her arms tight around me like she was holding me together. My face pressed into her shoulder, that jasmine perfume making my eyes burn.
Neither of us said anything. When she finally let go, she went straight to bed.
Tuesday we kept missing each other at work. Her early meetings. My Marcus crisis. Ships passing in corporate. Or maybe Alex was still deciding if I deserved actual conversation yet.
By Wednesday, my skin felt too tight for my body. Every time my phone buzzed, I grabbed it like a lifeline. Every blonde head in City Hall made my heart stutter.
I missed my bestie. It was that fucking simple.
So here we are. Villa di Roma.
South Philly. Red sauce. Breadsticks that could feed an army. Wine in actual glasses, not those sad plastic cups.
The restaurant smells like garlic and basil and decades of marinara soaked into the walls. Red checkered tablecloths. Frank Sinatra crooning about doing it his way. Families crammed into booths, talking with their hands, laughing too loud.
This year the comfort feels like a lie. Like we’re here for surgery, not celebration.
We’ve demolished half the breadsticks. My carbonara’s almost gone. The wine has made my tongue loose. A box of Beiler’s donuts waits on the chair beside us because Villa di Roma doesn’t do dessert but we do.
I grab my second breadstick. Open my mouth to beg—
“I accept your apology.” Alex points her breadstick at me like a weapon.
My shoulders drop. Actually drop, like someone cut the strings holding them up. The knot in my chest that’s been there for over a week unravels all at once.
“Wait.” I dig in my bag, pull out the tissue-wrapped package. Purple-blue-pink paper, the colors of twilight. “Happy birthday.”
She sets down her breadstick. Takes the gift with both hands, fingers careful on the paper.
“Dylan...”
“Just open it.”
She unwraps it like she’s defusing a bomb. The way she opens everything, preserving even the tape. The dandelion suspended in resin catches the overhead light, throwing tiny rainbows across the red tablecloth.
“Oh, Dylan.” Her eyes go glassy. “It’s perfect.”
“The woman at the shop said—” My throat closes around the words. “She said dandelions grow through impossible places.”
Alex clips it around her neck immediately. The resin pendant settles right at her heart. Not just a necklace. Not just a birthday present.
Proof that I believe now. That a shop woman knew I was coming before I walked through her door. That Alex has been seeing things I’ve spent years calling delusion.
And I’ve been the blind one. Calling my blindness logic.
“Like us,” she says, fingers touching the pendant.
“Like us.” The words scrape past glass in my throat.
She traces the resin edge. Once. Twice. Then those Alex-eyes lock on mine.
“Now tell me why you’re sorry.”
There it is. The hard part.
My stomach clenches. I grab another breadstick. Swirl it through marinara, creating patterns, destroying them.
“Ghosts are hard for me.”
The breadstick keeps moving. Circle after circle. Red sauce bleeding onto the white plate.
“I don’t mean to dismiss you. Your gifts. The things you know.” The breadstick trembles in my grip. “But acknowledging that ghosts are real, that the dead live on, that there’s this whole... veil or whatever—”
Alex’s hand reaches across the table.
“Wait.” I pull back, hands in my lap now. Fists. “I got to get this out.”
“I’m listening.”
“If ghosts are real.” My throat’s closing again. That familiar squeeze. “If there’s this whole world where dead people can reach out and communicate and show up in the middle of the night—”
Wine. I need wine. The glass shakes against my teeth.
“Where’s my dad?”
The question cracks on the way out. Fifteen years I’ve been waiting for him to prove the dead can stay. Fifteen years of silence.
“Why didn’t he visit? Why didn’t he come to me? I was twelve, Alex. I was a kid. And he just... left. No goodbye. No message. Nothing.”
Tears now. In Villa di Roma on Galentine’s Birthday dinner while some family three tables over is celebrating their Nonna’s birthday.
“If dead people can reach out, if they can knock on walls and move things and show up for the people they love—why didn’t he love me enough to try?”
“Oh Dylan.” This time her hand finds mine. Warm. Solid. Real. “It doesn’t always work like that.”
“But why? Why doesn’t it work like that? Don’t I deserve a goodbye?”
“You do. We all deserve that goodbye.” Her thumb makes circles on my palm. “But here’s the thing. None of us truly know all the answers. What I do know is your dad loved you very much and he’d want you to have that closure.”
She pauses. That careful pause when she’s measuring words like ingredients.
“You also have to be open to it. To the world. Not as you see it but as it could be.”
My head moves. Slow nod. My free hand swipes at my face. “I’m trying.”
“I know.” She studies me, thumb still making those circles. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“Losing him that young, that suddenly—it made you shut down the part of you that knows things without proof. Because if you couldn’t sense him leaving, if your intuition didn’t warn you the worst day of your life was coming...” She squeezes. “Why trust it at all?”
She’s right. Twelve-year-old me learned that feelings lie. That the only safe thing is what you can prove. That intuition is just another word for wrong.
The words hit somewhere between my shoulder blades. That place where truth lands when you don’t want it. “Fuck.”
“And that’s why we need to fix your intuition. Tonight. Before we go any deeper with Dahlia.”
“My intuition?” The word feels foreign in my mouth. “What does that have to do with—”
“Everything.” She releases my hand for her wine glass. “You’ve been walking through the world half-blind, Dylan. Ignoring every signal your body sends you. Every warning. Every innate knowing.”
“I don’t—”
“You do.” She cuts me off. “Remember when you met Marcus? Your throat closed. Your body literally told you danger and you just... pushed through it.”
The ring burns against my chest at his name.
And I’m there. Dom’s office. Marcus extending his hand. My throat squeezing shut like invisible fingers wrapped around it. That voice—don’t touch him don’t touch him don’t—and then my professional smile. My hand meeting his anyway. Burying every alarm because anxiety is just anxiety, right?
What if I’d listened? Trusted that first signal and walked out?
Would Dahlia be trying to reach me? Or would she be the last one—the only one—because I’d stopped him first?
“That was just—”
“Your intuition.” Breadstick aimed at me again. “Which is completely broken. We’re going to fix it. Tonight.”
“How?”
“First, we need to talk about Dahlia.” She leans forward, elbows on the table. “I have thoughts.”
“Tell me all of your thoughts.”
“So.” Her eyes get that sparkle—the one when she’s about to blow my mind. “We know it’s Dahlia’s ring. But think about the timing. Nothing happened until you brought it home. Until I gave you a chain to put it on. Right?”
My hand goes to my chest. The metal hot through my shirt. Always hot now.
I pull it out. Let it dangle between us. The overhead light catches the stone, makes it look like fire.
The ring.
Of course.
“She wasn’t trying to reach me at the office. Or in the alley.” I twist the cold chain between my fingers. “She couldn’t. Not until I took her ring home.”
“Exactly.” Alex practically vibrates. “You carried her anchor into our apartment. Where the veil is already thin because of—” She waves at herself. “—all my witchy shit.”
“So she’s not haunting me. She’s haunting the ring.”
“And you’ve been wearing it like a beacon.” She points at my chest. “No wonder she’s getting louder.”
Oh.
The crawling starts at my tailbone. Vertebra by vertebra. That serpent-spine thing when my body knows something my brain hasn’t processed yet.
I haven’t just been carrying evidence. I’ve been wearing a woman. A dead woman. Her last piece of this world pressed against my heart while I slept and showered and sat in Marcus’s office and—
I’ve been carrying her everywhere. Into danger. Into the office of the man who killed her.
And she’s been screaming the whole time. A witness trying to testify and I kept calling her testimony noise.
“Oh.” The word comes out wrong. Broken.
“Finally.” Alex’s eye roll could win awards. “How did it take you weeks to figure this out?”
“There was just so much happening.” The ring disappears back under my shirt, burning like a brand. “I didn’t think it could be her. Not once. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That it was just evidence. A clue. Not... her.”
“I know.” Softer now. “I think she wants to tell us what happened.”
The weight of that sits between us. Heavy as the pasta in my stomach.
A dead woman trying to communicate. And I’ve been too scared of my own ghosts to listen to hers.
“So what do we do?” My fingers find the ring through fabric. “How do we actually talk to her? Do you think we need a psychic?”
“Absolutely not.” She sits back so hard her chair creaks, hand to her chest like I’ve insulted her ancestors. “Why would I ever pay someone else for something I have access to?”
Simple. Like breathing. Like she didn’t just suggest communing with the dead.
“But I don’t have any of that—” My arms wave, trying to encompass her entire magical being. She just raises one perfect eyebrow. “—you-ness.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Another breadstick appears in her hand. “You have intuition. All women do. It’s in our DNA. You just don’t listen to it. Which brings us back to tonight’s lesson.”
“Which is?”
“You’re walking home.”
I stare at her. “Excuse me?”
“After dinner. You’re walking home to Fishtown. Alone. In the dark.”
“That’s like three miles—”
“Exactly.” That grin. The one that means she’s already won. “Three miles to learn how to listen to your body. To feel when something’s wrong. To trust what you know without proof.”
“Alex—”
“I’ll be following you. At a distance in Nikko’s car. You’ll be safe.” She reaches across again. “But Dylan, if we’re going to help Dahlia—if you’re going to survive what’s coming—you need to learn how to feel danger before it arrives. Not after.”
Survive what’s coming.
My stomach drops to the sticky floor.
“You know something.”
“I know a lot of things.” That Alex-thing where she’s mystical and practical simultaneously. “But mostly I know that your body has been trying to protect you your whole life and you keep telling it to shut up.”
She’s right. Fuck, she’s right.
“Fine.” My wine glass empties. My hands won’t stay still. “But you’re carrying the donuts.”
“Deal.” Victory in her eyes. “And Dylan? Actually try. Please. For me.”
The please hooks under my ribs.
“I will.” And this time, it’s true. “I’ll try.”
We end up splitting the check like always—after Alex slides her card over, me sliding it back. The eternal dance. Coats on. Donut box secured.
Outside, the cold is immediate.
South Philly at night. Street lights humming. Someone’s music bleeding from a cracked window. A dog barking. The city breathing around us.
“Alright.” Alex faces me on the sidewalk. “Here’s how this works. You walk. I follow at a distance. Don’t look back for me. Don’t check your phone. Just walk. And feel.”
“Feel what?”
“Everything.” Her fingers find the dandelion at her heart. “The air. The shadows. The spaces between sounds. Your body knows things your brain hasn’t figured out yet. Let it teach you.”
“This is insane.”
“This is necessary.” That intensity that makes you believe she really can see the future. “Now go. And Dylan? Remember—your body knows how to keep you alive. You just have to listen.”
I turn north. Toward Fishtown. Toward home.
Three miles of learning to feel what I’ve spent fifteen years trying to ignore.
Alex’s footsteps fade behind me. Giving me distance.
The ring burns against my chest. Dahlia’s ring. Her last possession.
And maybe she’s trying to teach me the same thing Alex is.
That sometimes the only warning you get is the one your body gives you.
And sometimes that warning comes too late.
I walk.
One foot. Then the other. The cold finding every gap in my coat. Hands buried in pockets.
Behind me—somewhere—Alex follows. Making sure I’m safe while teaching me what unsafe feels like.
The ring burns. Dahlia walks with me. A dead woman I couldn’t save, teaching me how to save myself.
Three miles ahead, our apartment waits. Where a ghost needs me to listen. Where everything I’ve been running from lives.
Where I’ll have to become someone who trusts what her body knows.
Even when what it knows might kill me.