Chapter 8
Cormac
Life resumed in earnest after that night, in a way that surprised me with how ordinary it felt after two years of nothing being ordinary at all.
I found myself relearning the shape of a normal week — the garage in the mornings, dinner with Josie most evenings, the particular satisfaction of small chores that had nothing to do with survival.
I fixed the fence out back that had been leaning for two years.
I repainted the mailbox. I did the kind of unremarkable, domestic maintenance that used to bore me before everything, and now felt like a quiet miracle every single time, proof of a life continuing on in ordinary time instead of the suspended, waiting time I'd lived in for so long.
Ivy finished the paperwork within the week — I was, officially, gloriously, bureaucratically alive again, a fact confirmed by a document with a county seal that Ivy framed and presented to me with the ceremony of a woman handing over a diploma.
"You," she announced, "are no longer deceased.
Try to keep it that way, because I am not doing this paperwork twice. "
The town council removed my headstone from its official liability status, which Doreen Henderson took as a personal loss, having apparently grown fond of the drama.
Josie and I moved back into the old house properly, unpacking the boxes she'd never quite finished putting away in the first place, and it started to feel, day by day, less like a haunted museum and more like a home two people were actively, presently living in.
We fell into small rituals — coffee together before the bakery opened, dinner most nights at the clubhouse with the whole loud, chaotic family, quiet evenings on the porch that had become, unofficially, ours.
One of those clubhouse dinners produced the closest thing to a genuine crisis the whole reunion had caused, when Diesel attempted to make a formal toast in my honor and instead knocked over an entire tray of Nadia's tamales, sending them skidding across the floor in a grease-slicked avalanche that took down two folding chairs and very nearly Gabriel, who had, unfortunately, chosen that exact moment to bend down and retrieve a dropped napkin.
"This is why we can't have nice things," Nadia announced, surveying the wreckage with the weary patience of a woman who had fed this club through weddings, funerals, and now, apparently, resurrections.
"I made those with my grandmother's recipe.
Cormac comes back from the dead and my tamales pay the price. Seems unfair, honestly."
"In my defense," Diesel said, still holding the now-empty tray like it might explain itself, "I was very emotional."
"You're always very emotional," Gemma said, from the floor, where she was helping salvage what tamales remained.
"That's not relevant to this specific incident."
"It's extremely relevant to this specific incident."
Josie laughed so hard at the whole spectacle that she had to sit down, wiping tears from her eyes that had nothing to do with grief for the first time in longer than either of us could remember, and I thought, watching her laugh, that this — the ordinary chaos of a family too large and too loud and too clumsy for its own good — was its own small, unglamorous kind of healing.
Not every good moment had to be a milestone.
Some of them just had to be tamales on the floor and Diesel defending himself badly.
I thought the hardest part was behind us. I want to admit that plainly, because I was wrong, and the wrongness of it taught me something I should have already known.
It happened three weeks after we moved back in, on an ordinary Tuesday that gave no warning at all.
I woke around two in the morning to an empty bed and found Josie in the kitchen, sitting at the table in the dark, not crying exactly — past crying, in the flat, hollowed-out way that scared me more than tears would have.
"Josie."
She didn't look up. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
I sat down across from her, careful, not reaching yet, giving her the room to tell me before I touched her. "Talk to me."
"Everything's fine now," she said, voice strange and distant.
"You're alive. You're legally alive. We're back in the house.
Renner's dealt with. Everyone keeps telling me how lucky I am, how it's a miracle, and it is, Cormac, I know it is, and I keep waiting to just feel grateful and instead I feel—" her voice cracked, finally, the flatness breaking open "—I feel furious.
All the time. Underneath everything. I don't understand it.
You're the one who suffered. You're the one who spent two years locked up.
What right do I have to be angry about anything? "
And there it was. The thing neither of us had let surface yet, because there'd been too much else demanding attention — the reunion, the danger, the legal mountain, the careful rebuilding.
Two years of grief she'd swallowed whole to survive, grief she'd had to set aside the second I walked back through her door because there wasn't room for it anymore, not with a resurrection to process and a threat to face and a marriage to rebuild.
It had been waiting. Patient. And now, with everything else finally settled, it was surfacing all at once.
"You have every right," I said, quiet.
"I don't." Her hands were shaking on the table. "You didn't choose to be taken. You chose to protect me. I should just be grateful, Cormac. I have the thing everyone else who's ever lost someone would give anything for. I got him back. I don't get to also be furious about it."
"Says who," I said, and reached across the table now, covering her shaking hands with mine.
I thought about how to say the next part carefully, because I understood, sitting there, that this was one of those moments where the wrong words could do real damage, and I only had one real chance to get it right.
"Josie, look at me," I said. "You buried a man you loved.
You went to a funeral. You wore black. You cried over cherry wood and casket handles for a man who wasn't in the box.
You rebuilt an entire life, brick by brick, alone, grieving something that turned out to be a lie you didn't know was a lie.
That grief was real. It cost you two real years of your actual life, and the fact that I came back doesn't retroactively erase what those two years took from you.
It doesn't owe you gratitude instead of anger. It can owe you both."
"I feel like I should just be happy."
"You're allowed to be angry that you grieved me," I said, my voice rough, everything in me aching to fix this the old way, to smooth it over, to tell her it was fine, don't worry about it, we're past it now — and I made myself not do that, made myself sit in the harder, truer thing instead.
"You're allowed to be wrecked by two years you didn't have to lose.
Being grateful I'm alive and being furious about what it cost you can live in the same body at the same time.
I know they can. I've got both of them living in mine, every single day.
I'm grateful beyond words that I got to come home to you, and I am also, underneath that, so angry at what those two years took from both of us that some nights I can barely sit still with it. "
She looked up at me then, something breaking open in her face. "You feel that too?"
"Every day." I came around the table and knelt in front of her chair, taking both her hands properly now.
"I don't get to just be the miracle, Josie.
I get to be furious too — at the men who did this, at myself for the choice that made it necessary, at every single day I don't get back.
You don't have to pick one feeling and perform it for everyone's comfort.
Not for the town, not for the club, not for me.
Feel all of it. I'm not going anywhere while you do. "
She broke, finally, fully — the sound that came out of her wasn't pretty, wasn't the composed grief of the funeral or the shocked tears of that first doorway night.
It was raw and ugly and complete, two years of held breath finally, fully released, and I held her through all of it, on the kitchen floor where we'd ended up somewhere in the middle of it, her face pressed into my shoulder, my arms wrapped around her shaking frame, not trying to fix it, not trying to hurry it along, just staying. Steady. Present. Not going anywhere.
"I hate that I had to lose two years," she said, finally, into my shoulder, voice wrecked and hoarse. "I hate that it happened. I hate every single day of it, even knowing why, even understanding the choice you made. I'm allowed to hate it."
"You're allowed to hate every single day of it," I said. "For as long as you need to."
"And I'm also so glad you're here I can't breathe around it sometimes."
"Both things," I said. "Same body. I told you."
She laughed, wet and broken and real, and pulled back enough to look at me, mascara long gone, hair a mess, more beautiful in that moment than she'd been in any of the careful, composed versions of the last six weeks, because this was finally, completely honest.
"I think I needed to fall apart properly," she said. "I think I've been holding it together since the doorway because there wasn't room to do anything else. Threat to handle. Paperwork to file. A whole town to reassure. I never actually let myself just feel it."
"You're feeling it now."
"I am." She wiped her face with the back of her hand, something lighter moving into her expression even through the wreckage. "I think that's the real healing. Not the reunion. This. Right here."