Chapter 34
CINDY
We bury Crystal on a bright weekday morning, under a sky so blue it feels like an insult.
Everyone came. The day shift, the night shift, dancers I haven’t seen in years, bartenders, the cook, even Dale, sweating through his one suit at the back, crying harder than anyone, which I will never tease him about, which I will also never forget.
Sevastian made it happen the way he said he would, which is to say it’s nothing like the cheap, lonely thing a dancer with no family usually gets.
There’s a real plot, a real stone, a spread of white flowers that would have made her shriek with delight at the expense of it all.
The stone carries both her names, the real one, the one we knew.
Under them, because I asked, one line. She never met a stranger.
And there are her people. My people. The whole Wet Sunset crew in their one good black dress each, Lacey already a wreck before the first word, Promise standing straight-backed and stony at the front, holding the rest of us up the way she always has.
I asked for it to be ours. No priest who never met her, no stranger reciting verses.
The funeral home tried to hand us a script.
Promise folded it in half without reading it, handed it back.
The man took one look at her face and found something else to do.
Just the women who raised each other in dressing rooms and parking lots, saying goodbye to one of our own in our own words.
Nobody’s mascara survives. Nobody pretends it should.
Waterproof, Lacey says later, blotting, is for women with something to hide, and today we’ve got nothing.
So we tell stories. Lacey tells the one about Crystal talking her way backstage at a sold-out show with nothing but a clipboard and pure nerve. Stevie tries to tell the ice-bucket story, Crystal appointing herself minister of everybody’s love lives, and gets one sentence in before she can’t.
Joss finishes it for her, holding her hand, doing both their voices.
Promise tells about the time Crystal gave a new girl her own rent money because the girl’s kid needed shoes, then bounced checks for a month and never once complained.
I tell about the desert trips, the cheap wine, the marshmallows nobody ever roasted right, the way she organized all of it every single time because she could not stand the thought of any of us being alone on a weekend.
I tell them about Chardonn-Yay. The whole graveside says it back to me in unison, Chardonn-Yay, like a congregation, and that’s the moment the laughing-crying stops being two separate things.
We laugh. We sob. We do what women like us have always done, which is hold each other up over a hole in the ground and refuse to let the world see us broken in front of it.
There’s an empty chair at the front. I put it there. Nobody asked why. They all know. It’s hers, the seat she’d be in if the world were fair, and we leave it empty through the whole thing, a Crystal-shaped space none of us will ever fill.
Yelena comes. I don’t expect that, and it breaks something loose in me.
The pakhan’s grandmother, the iron-spined old woman who runs an empire’s household, stands at the back in black through the whole service for a dancer she met exactly once.
Afterward she takes Lacey’s hands, then Promise’s, and says something low to each of them in her accented English that makes them both cry harder.
She didn’t have to come. Crystal was nothing to her world, a bubbly girl with cheap champagne.
But she came, because Crystal was something to me, and I am something to her now, the way a family works, the kind you don’t get to choose.
Crystal taught me that. It’s almost unbearable that she’s not here to see it for herself.
She’d have cried at her own funeral, that’s the joke I can’t make to anyone today. She’d have loved it that much. She’d have taken the guest list as a personal report card, and aced it.
And the whole time, under the grief, I’m carrying the other thing. The choice.
Because here’s what nobody at this funeral knows. I have an out. I’ve had it the whole time, the thing I built before I ever loved any of these people, the escape hatch I sewed into the lining of my own life years ago. A bag I can pack in ten minutes. An ID that isn’t quite mine.
Enough cash to disappear into some town too small for a dot on the map and raise this baby a thousand miles from anyone who owns a gun.
That was always the plan. That was the whole reason I hid the pregnancy in the first place, to keep the exit clear, to make sure that when the time came I could vanish clean and free, the way I’ve promised myself I would since I was nineteen, since I learned that the only person who’d ever save me was me.
The war is over now. Nobody’s watching the gate to keep me in anymore. I could go. For the first time since the desert, I could actually, truly go. No one would chase me, and I’d be free.
And the pull of it is real. I want to be honest about that, because it would be a lie to pretend the choice was easy.
There’s a version of me that wants the small quiet town so badly I can taste it.
A version that wants to raise this kid somewhere no one carries a gun, somewhere the worst thing that happens on a given day is a flat tire, somewhere my daughter or my son never learns what their father does for a living or what the desert can hand back to you in pieces.
That version is sane. That version watched her best friend get murdered for proximity to this world and concluded, correctly, that the only safe move is the door.
If I were advising another woman, a woman I loved, a woman like Crystal, I know exactly what I’d tell her to do.
I’d tell her to run, never look back, not feel guilty about it for one second.
So this isn’t me failing to see the exit. I see it. I see it clearly, and part of me will always want it.
And standing over my best friend’s grave, I finally understand what that freedom was always going to cost.
Crystal told me to save myself. Those were almost her last words to me, sobbing down a phone line with men in the room who were about to take her apart.
Save yourself. I have carried that like a stone in my mouth ever since, and I thought I knew what it meant.
Run. Take the baby, the bag, the fake ID, run, the way I always meant to, because saving yourself means getting out.
Standing here, I finally hear what she actually meant.
Crystal never ran from anything in her life.
Crystal ran toward people. She built a family out of broke dancers because she could not stand to be alone.
She loved everyone too loud, too fast, too much, gave away rent money, kept everyone’s birthdays, and died because her heart had no doors on it.
If Crystal had ever had what I have, a man who’d burn the world for her, a house full of people who’d die for her, a child coming, she would not have packed a bag.
She would have grabbed all of it with both hands and never once looked back, because Crystal understood the thing I’ve spent seven years too scared to learn. That a life spent keeping the exit clear was never freedom, just a longer way of being alone.
Save yourself didn’t mean run, Crystal. I get it now. It meant live. It meant don’t you dare let what happened to me wall you off from everything good. It meant take the thing you’re terrified to want.
I think about the bag in the lining of my old life, and for the first time in seven years, I don’t want it.
That’s the thing that undoes me, right there at the graveside. It isn’t fear, or duty, or even the baby trapping me, though God knows the irony isn’t lost on me, that the secret I kept to stay free is the exact thing rooting me here now.
It’s that when I picture the bag, the bus, the small town, the clean quiet anonymous life a thousand miles from here, I picture being alone again, and I don’t want it anymore. I picture the ranch instead. Yelena correcting my Russian. Tasha laughing. Roma deadpanning into his coffee.
Kir’s red ears. Petya losing at cards. The horses. The garage at two in the morning, the work light, the smell of wax. A man who went to his knees, pressed his mouth to my belly, said my life in a language I don’t speak.
And I want that. Not need it. Not take it as a consolation prize because I’m pregnant, scared, out of options. I want it, clear-eyed, with the exit standing wide open behind me, my own two feet free to walk through it.
I forgive myself, too. Standing there. For the secret, for the fear, for all seven years of keeping a packed bag where my heart should have been. Crystal would not want me carrying that. Crystal forgave people their whole messy selves for a living. The least I can do is finally do the same for me.
We lower her into the ground. I throw the first handful of dirt.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Promise’s hand finds my shoulder.
Lacey grips my other side. We stand there, the surviving women of a chosen family, and we let her go together.
The dirt is the same pale dust as everywhere out here.
Of course it is. She loved this stupid desert.
She organized it like a cruise director, dragged us all into it with marshmallows and bad wine.
It’s hers now, all of it, every grain, forever.
Afterward, the crew comes back to the ranch, because I asked, and because Sevastian said yes before I finished the question.
And the strangest, most healing thing happens.
My two worlds, the dancers and the Bratva, the family I made beside the one I fell into, sit in the same kitchen, eat the same food, tell the same stories.
Yelena pours Lacey more wine and pats her hand like she’s known her for years. Kir teaches Stevie a card game and loses immediately, gloriously, on purpose, the way the men of this house have learned to lose to grieving women. Roma mans the grill with the gravity of a state funeral.
By dark the kitchen sounds almost like a kitchen again.
For a few hours the house is loud, full, alive in a way grief makes sharper instead of dimmer.
Sevastian moves through it all evening with a bottle and a towel over his arm, refilling glasses, listening, getting Lacey’s whole life story whether he wants it or not.
At one point I catch him laughing, real, head back, at something Promise says, and Promise looks like she’s won a prize she intends to keep. Crystal would have loved it. Crystal would have been in the middle of it, organizing everyone. The empty chair sits at that table too. We keep it for her.
I find Sevastian later on the back terrace, alone, giving the crew their space, watching the desert go gold the way it does at the end of the day.
He doesn’t ask me anything. He’s good at that now, the not-pushing.
He just makes room beside him at the railing.
We watch the light go long over the lakebed.
Inside, somebody laughs, then catches themselves, then, after a pause, laughs anyway, which is the whole future in one sound.
I could tell him about the bag. The exit. The plan I’ve carried the whole time. Maybe someday I will. But standing next to him in the last light, what I say instead is the only thing that matters.
“I’m staying.”
He goes still. He doesn’t grab it, doesn’t crush me to him, doesn’t do anything that would make it about him instead of me. He just turns and looks at me, a question in it, because he’s careful with this now, careful in a way the old him never was.
“Not because of the baby,” I tell him, before he can wonder. “Not because I’m trapped, or scared, or out of road. I had a way out. I’ve had it the whole time. A real one. I could walk off this ranch tonight, disappear where you’d never find me, and a month ago that’s exactly what I’d have done.”
I take a breath. “I’m not doing it. Not because I can’t. Because I don’t want to. I looked at the clean empty free life I always swore I wanted. Then I looked at this, all of it, the danger, the grief, you. And I picked this. Eyes open. On purpose. Mine.”
Something moves across his face that I’ve never seen there, not in all these months. Like I’ve handed him a thing he never let himself pray for.
“You chose,” he says, low.
“I chose.” And it’s the first time since I was nineteen years old that those two words have belonged entirely to me, that I’ve reached for the thing I wanted instead of bracing for the punishment.
“Crystal told me to save myself. I finally figured out what she meant. This is me, saving myself. By staying. By wanting something out loud for once in my life and not running from it.”
He reaches for my hand, slow, giving me every chance to pull it back.
I don’t. I lace my fingers through his. We stand at the railing while the Mojave burns gold, then red, then soft violet, the same desert that started all of this in blood, and for the first time it doesn’t feel like a place where things end.
It feels like a place where I get to begin.
I’m not the woman who got pulled into this in the desert anymore, the witness, the asset, the rescued thing. I walked back to him on my own two feet, with the door wide open behind me, and I chose. The power was finally mine, and I spent it on this.
Somewhere, I think, Crystal is shrieking with delight, telling me it’s about damn time.