Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Lennon
“We should do our nails later.”
Tessa’s arm is hooked through mine as we walk the path between the rose beds outside our restaurant. The gravel crunches under our feet, and the afternoon light is doing something golden through the leaves overhead.
The air smells like roses and fresh bread, which makes absolutely no sense because there is no bread out here, but the scent wraps around me warm anyway, buttery and soft like someone opened an oven nearby.
It smells like comfort.
Somewhere behind us, my parents are sitting on a bench, and I can hear my mother laughing.
“Do our nails,” I repeat. “You mean I should do your nails.”
She laughs. “That’s what I said.”
“It’s really not.”
“It is.” She bumps my shoulder.
“Fine.” I sigh deeply. “What do you want?”
“French.”
“Really?”
“It’s classic.”
“It’s boring.”
“It’s elegant.”
“Those aren’t synonyms.”
“They are when you’re wearing a silk blouse.” She glances down at my hands. “You can do your rainbows, glitter, and whatever. My elegance will make yours look better by contrast.”
I follow her gaze and look down at my nails.
Peach.
“It’s bland. It doesn’t suit you.”
A dry male voice echoes in my head, making me stop walking.
“Lenny?” Tessa turns. “You okay?”
I look around at the garden, the roses, the gravel path winding ahead of us, and the bench where my parents are sitting, my father mid-gesture in whatever story he’s telling, my mother’s head tilted back.
Everything is exactly as it should be. The light hasn’t changed in hours, and the air has been the same temperature since we came out here. Not warm, not cold, simply perfect.
I’m tired. That’s all. You hear things when you’re tired.
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s do our nails later.”
Tessa makes a sound of agreement, and we fall back into step.
We’ve been walking for a while when we pass the same white rosebush for the third time. I know it’s the same one because one bloom near the bottom is bent backward at a strange angle, like someone hooked a finger into it too hard.
The third time we pass it, the flower is fixed.
The bench where my parents were sitting is farther back now, the sound of my mother’s laugh barely reaching us. I can still hear it, though.
However far we walk, I can still hear it.
The birds are chirping something in the trees above us.
“Lennon. Darling.”
This time, the voice is not inside my head.
It’s beside me, like someone standing close, speaking quietly, as if they don’t want to startle me. But there’s no one beside me except Tessa, and Tessa’s mouth is closed, and the voice is…
“I found you once. I will find you again.”
I turn around.
Garden. Roses, the long gravel path curving back toward the bench where my parents are sitting. Tessa is beside me watching me with her head tilted.
Nothing else.
“Come back to me, sweetheart.”
A different voice. Rougher at the edges.
“Wake up, Lemon.”
My chest aches so suddenly that I press a hand against it, right on top of my crystal.
Homesick.
The feeling hits me so hard and fast it almost knocks the breath out of me, except I don’t know what I’m homesick for.
“Can you hear that?” I whisper as the crystal warms against my chest.
Tessa frowns. “Hear what?”
The crystal turns hot, like it’s trying to get my attention. I look down at it. It’s the same as always—milky white with black specks threading through it and a blue sheen rippling across the surface.
“Those voices. There were…” I gesture at the air around us, which is garden, birds, the distant sounds of my parents, and nothing else. “Three of them. Can you hear them?”
“I can’t hear anything.” She’s watching me with her eyebrows slightly drawn. “What did they sound like?”
“Wake up for me, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“That.” I gasp and point as the last one comes again, sounding desperate. “Did you hear that?”
She looks at where I’m pointing, which is nothing, in the middle of the gravel path, the rosebushes, and the perfect afternoon.
“Lenny.” She steps toward me. “I can’t hear anything. Are you…”
“Ladies.”
He appears from the path ahead of us, not walking toward us so much as simply being where he wasn’t a moment ago. Two red roses in hand, freshly cut, the stems still beading. He holds one out to Tessa.
She takes it with a smile, tilts up her chin, and presses a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you.”
He holds the other out to me. Deep red, vivid, and almost too perfect, the way everything here is almost too perfect.
“It’s not your color, is it?” he asks with a smirk.
The red deepens, then bleeds through the petals, until a lighter color blooms outward from the center.
A downward smile.
Dark eyes behind glasses.
A jaw I know from somewhere.
I gasp at the now yellow rose before I look up at him. He’s watching me with his green eyes and his patient, curious expression.
“Are you all right, Lenny?” Tessa touches my arm.
“I…” I swallow. “Yes, sorry.”
He offers me the rose again, and I take it, because refusing feels like more of a statement than I’m ready to make.
“I was thinking we might take a walk. You and I.” He tilts his head at the garden ahead of us, the section we haven’t reached.
I shoot Tessa a look, but she smiles at me and gives a small nod, easy, like this is the obvious next thing.
He turns to the nearest white rosebush, draws a small pair of scissors from somewhere, cuts a stem at exactly the right angle, then holds it out to her. “Would you mind bringing this to Lennon’s mother? I believe she’d appreciate it.”
“Of course.” Tessa takes it, squeezes my arm once, and turns back down the path toward my parents.
I watch her go, standing there with the yellow rose in my hand and the crystal burning against my chest. Something is forming at the edge of my thinking, some thought that keeps almost finishing and then doesn’t.
“Shall we?” he asks.
I look down at my fingers.
Normal.
“You still haven’t told me your name,” I murmur. “That’s a little awkward, don’t you think?”
Amusement flickers across his expression when I look back up at him.
“Lucien,” he says softly.
“Nice to meet you, Lucien.” I’m walking and turning the rose stem as a thorn catches my index finger, and a small bead of blood wells at the tip.
I stare at it.
It doesn’t hurt.
But it should hurt. Not badly, but enough. A sting or a pulse.
I press the finger to my thumb, watching the blood move, and it’s there, it’s real, but the pain that should have accompanied it isn’t.
Lucien stops beside me and takes my hand before I’ve offered it, turning it over gently to examine the small wound. His expression does something, a brief, almost invisible frown, then he blows across my finger, very gently, and the blood is gone.
Not cleaned away or wiped, but gone, the skin smooth and unbroken as if the thorn never found it.
“Looks like you don’t like roses?” He chuckles, raising a brow at my expression, which is probably doing something complicated.
“No, I… yeah. Of course.” I tuck the wrongness of the last thirty seconds somewhere and find a normal thing to say. “Who doesn’t like roses?”
“Most people like them in theory.” He starts walking again, and I fall into step. “What I love about them is the growing and tending to them. You put so much care into something until it becomes exactly what you wanted. The patience of it. The sustained attention.”
A weird feeling spreads in my chest, but I can’t quite place it.
“It’s similar to cooking, isn’t it?” He glances at me. “Putting knowledge and care into something until it becomes what you want it to be. Until the outcome is exactly right.”
“Yeah,” I murmur. “Maybe it is.”
“It is. Skill and patience. The same principles. Not everyone can do it.”
“I mean, anyone can cook. Anyone can grow roses. It’s a skill you can learn, not a talent.”
Lucien makes a small disapproving sound. “I disagree.”
“Why?”
“Because without the care and the love that goes into it, a rose is just a rose, and a meal is just a meal.” He pauses to look at a bloom that has opened wider than the others and reaches out to slide a finger over it.
“Give it that, and it becomes something else. Something that could not have been made by someone else, in that exact way, on that exact day. You cannot force it. Plants don’t grow because you yell at them to grow.
A meal made with love tastes different from one that wasn’t. ”
“I guess that’s true.”
“You should try it.” He gestures at the beds around us. “The gardening. I would love to teach you, Lenny. I think you’d be good at it.”
The Lenny lands the same way it always does from him, natural, yet still wrong.
“Thank you,” I say because what else do you say? “And you should come by the kitchen sometime. I’d love to teach you how to make a proper casserole.”
He laughs, a real one, and the warmth of it is completely genuine, like a person caught off guard by delight.
“You have to promise me that.” He smiles at me, and it is, objectively, a devastating smile. His whole face does something different with it.
Goose bumps run down my neck, but not the good kind.
The path has brought us back around to my parents’ bench.
“Lenny, did you have a nice walk?” My mother is looking up at us with her warm smile, except the warmth in her eyes arrives a fraction of a second after the smile reaches her mouth again.
That’s so weird.
My father’s posture is wrong somehow too. Close enough that I couldn’t explain it if someone asked. But my dad always slouched a little, one arm hooked over the back like he couldn’t fully relax unless he was taking up too much space.
Right now, he sits perfectly straight.
“Lenny-honey.” He looks up at me. “How are you doing?”
The words are still in the air when everything in me goes absolutely still.
Lenny-honey?
I drop the yellow rose to the ground.
He never called me that.
Not once. Not when I was small, not when I was grown. He called me Lenny-girl from the time I could walk until the last conversation we had before his heart stopped.
Lenny-girl, how’s my girl? Come here, Lenny-girl.
Never honey. Never once, honey.
And suddenly all the strange little things lately shift sideways in my head, and I realize this feels like a movie about my life made by someone who only studied me from far away.
This place smells right.
Looks right.
The roses are soft under my fingertips, the breeze is warm, and the birds sound real, but underneath it all is something hollow and stretched too tight. Like the world is holding its breath, waiting for me to notice.
My dad is dead.
My mom is dead.
Dead people don’t learn new nicknames or reinvent their smiles.
This place made a copy of them.
And it got them all wrong.
I grab Tessa’s arm and pull her a few steps away.
“Lenny, what is going on with you today?” She frowns down at me.
“We’re in 5D, Tessa,” I whisper-shout at her. “We’re in elsewhere.”
“I know, silly.”
“We have to…” Wait. “What?”
“We made it,” she says softly, like she’s reminding me of something obvious.
As if I’m the one being difficult.
“We’re here.” She takes my hand and covers it with both of hers. “We have everything we ever wanted.”
“But it is fake.” I look at the bench, at the man wearing my father’s face who just called me honey. “My parents aren’t real. The restaurant isn’t…”
“I’m real.” Her hands tighten on mine. “You’re real.” She tilts her head slightly toward Lucien, standing a few feet back. “He’s real.”
“Tessa.”
“Everything you wanted is here. The things you couldn’t have in waking life, you can have here. That’s the point.”
For one horrible second, I understand.
Because my mother is laughing.
Because my father is breathing.
Because nobody leaves.
I could stay here.
I could sit on that bench and listen to my dad call me “Lenny-honey” forever. I could open our restaurant every evening, complain about customers, burn garlic bread, and listen to my mother hum while she folds napkins with my best friend.
No hospitals.
No funerals.
No watching people disappear, one piece at a time, while you stand there, useless and smiling, because they need you to be brave about it.
My chest hurts so badly I almost fold in half with it.
But it still isn’t real.
I look at Tessa, then at the freckles across her nose. The tiny scar near her eyebrow from when we were twenty and she tried to jump a fence after two wine coolers and immediately ate shit into somebody’s hydrangeas.
The girl who used to scream-sing in my car with the windows down.
The girl whose body is lying in a bed connected to a machine.
“I came here to get you out. Not to lose you here too.”
“To go back to what?” she asks quietly.
And there it is. Not anger. Exhaustion.
“There’s nothing left for us there, Lenny.”
“Maybe not for me.” My voice breaks around the words. “But there’s still so much waiting for you.”
I squeeze her hands back harder.
“Derek still loves you. He told me. And your mom still talks to you every day. She sits beside you and tells you about the weather, what she made for dinner, and what stupid thing the neighbor’s dog did because she believes you can still hear her.
” Tears blur my vision so badly the whole garden smears gold and green around the edges.
“She believes you’re still in there, Tess.
She believes it enough for both of you. And when we wake up, we’re awake together. You and me.”
I see the real her underneath all this perfect calm, terrified, grieving, and tired.
Then it seals shut again.
“This is our dream, Lenny.”
“No.” I shake my head hard enough to make myself dizzy. “No, it’s a trap wearing our favorite things. This is not real.”
Her expression softens with something almost like pity. “Maybe,” she says quietly, glancing back toward the bench where my parents are still sitting in the afternoon sunlight. “But it’s the only way you can keep them.”
The words hit me like a fist to the chest.
Keep them.
As if grief is something you can bargain with.
“I don’t want this.” My voice cracks. “I don’t want copies, Tessa. I don’t want a perfect little dream version of my life. I want you. I need you to wake up.”
Her fingers tighten painfully around mine.
“I couldn’t,” she whispers.
Her eyes flick toward Lucien standing among the roses.
“Even if I wanted to.”