11. Grim
GRIM
The moment I see Lavinia through the flower shop window—bent over the worktable, her hands moving through a loose pile of stems with the unhurried certainty of someone who has done this ten thousand times—I feel something inside me change.
Not change, precisely. It is the wrong word.
A change suggests motion. This feels more like a severing, a thread drawn impossibly taut until it begins to split.
Before I can even reason with myself, I am already moving, my breath fogging in front of my face as I cut through the side gate and into Belladonna Blooms.
The shop is full of cut narcissus. They look ridiculous this time of year, little suns blazing from every surface.
The smell is narcotic, if you are mortal.
To me, it is only a memory, the ghost of a scent already beginning to recede.
Lavinia looks up at the jangle of the bell and gives me the softest of smiles.
“There you are,” she says, dusting flour from the crook of her nose. “I was wondering when you’d appear.”
I want to answer her with a smile, to play the role for just a little longer, but there is a pressure behind my eyes like a thousand-year-old iceberg ready to calve.
“I needed to see you,” I manage. “Are you all right?”
She leans her shoulder against the back counter as though bracing herself against the winter air I have let inside. Her blue eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. She sees through me like glass.
“I’m fine. Just needed to get the morning orders done before Mrs. Garcia comes to pick them up. Are you okay?”
I do not know what to say. I, who converse with the dying and the doomed and the never-born, who have listened to the last confessions of popes and despots and children, find myself unable to form a simple lie.
“I felt something was wrong.”
Lavinia’s smile does not quite falter, but I know a defensive maneuver when I see one.
“Wrong like we’re running low on cash, or wrong like you had another one of your nightmares?”
I step closer. I can see the list she has written: six centerpieces for the bakery, twenty stalks for the hospital, an order for the funeral home with one name circled three times—EMILIO. Lavinia does not flinch as I stop a foot away.
I search her face for proof that I am mistaken.
She looks a little pale, perhaps a little more tired than yesterday, with shadows beneath her eyes I don't remember seeing before.
None of those things should matter. Humans wake tired every day.
They bruise. They cough. They heal. Yet the dread climbing through me refuses to loosen its grip.
“Wrong like…” My voice catches. “Something’s changed in you. Your thread. Your—”
She cuts me off.
“My thread?”
I do not know how to soften it.
“Your life.” The words feel heavy in my mouth. “It’s… shortened.”
For a moment, all the warmth drains from the room.
I feel the draft between us, the razor wind that runs through every mortuary and sickroom when the hour draws close.
The world narrows to the lines of Lavinia’s hands, the faint scar crossing her thumb, and the way her lips press together with the weary resignation of someone who has been carrying this knowledge alone.
“How long?”
I swallow.
“Three days, eleven hours, and some change.”
She lets out a quiet sigh.
“Well.” A sad little smile touches her mouth. “That’s less than what Doc Halvorsen gave me.”
She sets the order list aside and laughs, though it sounds more like something breaking.
“Is that why you did this? Is that why you befriended me?”
I blink.
“What do you mean?”
She gestures around the shop.
“The collecting. The hovering. You knew this was coming, and you wanted to make it… what? Gentler?”
I shake my head, appalled.
“No. I didn’t know. Not until this morning.
Last night, you felt as alive as anyone.
” My mind betrays me with the memory of her asleep beside me, the steady pulse beneath her jaw where I rested my fingers, the quiet little sound she makes when she turns toward me in her sleep, all warm curves and tangled hair. “I don’t want this.”
Lavinia lays both hands flat against the counter. I can see the faint tremor running through them.
“Seems a little late to protest.”
“What did the doctor say?”
She shrugs, rolling up her sleeves as though preparing for a fight.
“There’s a mass in my chest. The kind that doesn’t listen to reason. They want more tests, but I saved them the trouble. I could tell from the look on Halvorsen’s face.”
“You should have told me.”
The words escape before I can stop them, and I regret them immediately. I am not entitled to her fears. I am not entitled to her confessions. I am not even entitled to her time.
But Lavinia, with her infinite patience for the lost and the inarticulate, simply tilts her head.
“And what would you have done?”
I stare at the frost gathering in the corners of the glass.
“Begged you to let me stay.”
She sighs.
“I kept hoping it would just… go away. People beat these things all the time.”
Her smile is heartbreakingly small.
“But I guess I’m not people, am I?”
“You’re the only person who’s ever truly mattered to me.”
I do not realize I have spoken until the words are hanging between us like a shroud.
Lavinia walks around the counter and comes to stand in front of me. She doesn't bother with comforting words or careful gestures. She simply places her palm against my chest.
Her hand is very small.
Very warm.
“You don’t have to do this,” she says quietly. “You don’t have to pretend for my sake.”
“I am not pretending.”
Her lips twist into a sad little smile.
“I mean you don’t have to stay. I only want you here if you want to be.”
Something inside me gives way.
“How can you say that?” The anger surprises even me. “You know what I am. I have waited millennia to feel what I feel for you.” My voice breaks despite every effort to steady it. “I will not walk away.”
She leans into me, resting her head against my chest, and I wrap my arms around her.
She smells of flour and narcissus and the faint trace of almond lotion she keeps beside the sink.
For one impossible moment, I allow myself to pretend we are ordinary—a woman and a man with his heart breaking quietly in two.
Finally, she says, “Would you stay with me until it happens?”
“I will not leave your side.”
Every promise I have ever made has been kept.
This one will be no different.
She nods, closes her eyes for a moment, and says, “Then let’s make it count, hmm?”
The next hours blur together. We fill the shop with impossible color—tulips, ranunculus, blue hyacinths, every out-of-season bloom she has been hiding in the walk-in cooler for what she laughingly calls her therapy arrangements.
Lavinia insists we deliver Emilio’s funeral flowers ourselves, and I carry the enormous lattice of lilies through the slush because she says she likes walking beside me.
She asks about my past, and I answer with half-truths.
I tell her I have traveled, that I have worn many names, that I have been a collector, a grifter, a changeling.
Today she does not ask about death. She wants stories instead.
Gossip. Ridiculous moments from centuries gone by that prove people have always been foolish in wonderfully predictable ways.
I give her everything I can remember that might still make her laugh.
She does.
Until the cough catches her.
It bends her forward for only a moment before she waves it away with an embarrassed smile, but I cannot dismiss it so easily. The sound settles somewhere deep inside me, feeding a panic that has been growing since I walked through the shop door.
By evening, we are eating soup in the cracked-front parlor of her house.
She slips her stocking feet into my lap while we watch a ridiculous British detective solve murders with an endless supply of tea cakes and impossible accents.
I barely follow the plot. Instead, I study her face, the curve of her eyelashes against her cheek, the tiny scar through her left eyebrow, the shape of her hands around her mug.
I repeat each detail silently to myself, foolishly hoping that if I remember enough, I can somehow persuade time to do the same.
When she falls asleep, I carry her to bed. My arms are trembling in a way they never have before. I settle her beneath the quilt, then stand at the window, watching the first gray light gather over Blackthorn Bay.
I do not know how to pray. I never had reason to learn. But for the first time since my creation, I try anyway.
I wish for one impossible thing.
I wish for her.
Morning answers me with silence.
Two days.
It is always worse than you think, the waiting. Lavinia does not seem to weaken, not in any obvious way, but I see it anyway. The way she moves a little slower than before, the way her gaze, even when fixed on me, sometimes goes distant, as though she is listening to a frequency I cannot hear.
It happens midway through the afternoon. She is arranging violets and forget-me-nots for an order marked RECONCILIATION, while I pretend to check the register for loose bills, counting the same handful of notes over and over because it gives my hands something to do besides shake.
She says, without looking up, “Will it hurt?”
I do not lie.
“I won’t let it.”
She pauses, the ribbon still threaded between her fingers, before lifting her eyes to mine.
“Is that a promise?”
“It is,” I answer without hesitation. “Not even for a moment.” It is one promise I know I can keep. No one escapes death, but I have always believed they deserve kindness when they meet it.
She nods slowly, as though something terrible has finally settled into place.
“Thank you.”
Then she studies me for a long moment before asking, “Is it selfish that I’m only scared because I don’t want to leave you alone?”
No one has ever worried about Death being lonely.
“I would rather bear it,” I tell her quietly, “than leave you wanting.”
She cups my face, her thumb brushing my cheek with heartbreaking tenderness.