Chapter 26
AMELIA
I hated how much I remembered, hated that my body responded with the dull ache of nostalgia for a place that had never loved me back.
It felt wrong, seeing it all exactly as I remembered, like a crime scene left untouched, the tape still fluttering in the wind. The town looked smaller, almost shrunken in the cold gray light, but the secrets it held had only grown heavier.
We passed the high school, the parking lot empty except for a broken-down pickup and a girl in a red jacket sitting on the curb, head bent over her phone.
I stared at her a long time, trying to imagine what it would be like to step out onto that parking lot with unbroken skin and the soft certainty that nothing would ever touch me. I couldn’t remember ever feeling that safe, but I wanted it for her so badly my teeth hurt.
When I finally looked away, Caiden was side-eyeing me, his eyes so dark they swallowed the light. “You think it’s still the same?” he asked, voice hoarse with the effort of speaking and not screaming.
“You mean the building or us?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
A beat of silence filled the car.
We both knew nothing here ever changed. The town devoured anything that tried.
I let the silence stretch, pulling tight over my sternum. Here it was: the same old game, pretending neither of us remembered that year when he made it his job to make me hate myself.
I tried to focus on the brown slush streaking up from the tires, but my mind kept circling the memory of sophomore year, the way he would catch my eye in the cafeteria and mouth the word worthless with a venomous clarity before melting back into his pack of wolves.
But he was the one who found me in the woods, after my breakdown days ago. He’d picked me up off the forest floor, cradled my worn body to his chest, and whispered “it’s okay” so many times it almost made it true.
I keep wondering which version of him was the real one.
I didn’t want to think about that year, but as soon as the high school disappeared in the rearview, the old memories spilled in, dark and vague. I remembered the day I’d gotten my period in the middle of third period and didn’t know until the end of class.
He’d been the first to notice, or at least the first to call it out.
His voice carried over the din, a lazy drawl that made mockery sound like kindness.
“Somebody get Langston a mop,” he’d said, and the laughter had been instantaneous, mean-spirited, and echoing even as I ran for the nurse’s office.
He’d found me in the hallway afterward, eyes colder than the sky outside, and handed me a wad of folded paper towels with a look so blank it made me want to scratch my own eyes out.
I never knew if it was meant as pity or if he just liked watching me squirm.
There were worse memories, of course. The time he’d cornered me in the stairwell and called me a parasite.
Or the time he’d pinned me against my locker, not hard, just enough, and whispered, “You’re not even worth the bruises.”
Looking back, I didn’t know why none of the teachers ever stepped in, why I never tried to break the cycle.
I tried to believe I was past it, but the evidence was everywhere. Even now, in the passenger seat, I could feel the hunger of that sorrow gnawing through me.
My own memories were a clattering of snapshots.
The time Caiden called me a waste of space in front of half the science class, and how his lips curled up like he was swallowing a joke.
The time he tripped me in front of the auditorium, and lost half my dignity in front of everyone.
The time he waited for me after detention, hands tucked in his jacket, voice quiet and almost gentle when he told me I didn’t have to go home if I didn’t want to.
He said it so simply I almost believed him.
The worst? The time he stuck up for me. That was the day everything went sideways, when I realized that cruelty and kindness could come out of the same mouth and taste exactly alike.
I’d been cornered behind the gym by a cluster of upperclassmen, hands grubbing at my backpack, voices in my ear like static. I knew how to take it, had learned to go limp and wait for the moment to pass.
Then Caiden appeared, a shadow falling over the mess of limbs, and the world stilled. He looked at me, then at them, a dark look falling over his face, and the boys scattered like bugs.
He didn’t say anything. Just picked up my bag and slung it over his own shoulder, then walked me to the edge of the faculty lot, where the teachers couldn’t see.
He never mentioned it again. I hated him for it.
The car bumped over a pothole, shaking me back into reality.
I wondered if he remembered the same things I did. If he heard the echo of that old cruelty in his own voice, or if he’d ever learned how to swallow it down and pretend it wasn’t a part of him.
Caiden pulled into the lot of the Pathosbury Inn, which looked like it hadn’t been updated since the nineties.
I wanted to laugh at the inertia of it, the way nothing here ever really changed, just gathered more layers of dust and decay.
He cut the engine, but neither of us moved.
“Should we check in first?” Caiden asked, not looking at me.
“I guess.” My voice came out foreign, like I’d left it behind and was only now trying to wear it again.
Neither of us made a move for the door. We sat, shoulders hunched, breathing the same recycled air, letting the heat fog the windows.
For a moment, I wanted to lean my forehead against the glass and press until it rattled. Instead, I watched our reflections in the rearview: two ghosts, pallid and unfinished.
“We can just sit here if you want,” Caiden said, voice low and rough. “We don’t have to go in yet.”
I shook my head. “If we don’t move now, we’ll never get out.”
He seemed to weigh that, then nodded, and we both stepped out into the cold that bit through my jeans and straight into bone.
The Pathosbury Inn’s front desk was manned by a teenager who looked twelve, bored out of his mind. He didn’t even glance up when we entered, just twirled a pen between stubby fingers and scrolled on his phone.
“Checking in?” the kid asked, monotone.
Caiden did the talking. “Baxter. Reservation for two.”
The kid clicked at his monitor, chewed his lip. “Queen bed, or two singles?”
My lungs squeezed. Caiden didn’t look at me. “One’s fine,” he said, flat.
“Room 205.” The kid handed us a key card, still not meeting our eyes.
We walked back outside to the designated door.
Inside, the room was a relic. Floral bedspread, battered TV, a single brittle bar of soap on the bathroom sink. I dropped my bag and sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the springs groan under my weight. Caiden didn’t sit. He stood at the window, staring outwards.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t even tug the curtain aside, just hovered as if, by will alone, he could keep the outside from leaking in. I watched his shoulders, broad and rigid, and wondered if I’d ever seen him relax.
After a minute, he turned. “You want to shower first?”
I almost laughed. Like this was a vacation. Like hygiene was something that mattered. “No. I just want to get it over with.”
He nodded, jaw working, then sat down next to me with a slow and careful precision, as if he thought I might shatter from the motion. He didn’t touch me, but his elbow brushed my arm, and I was startled by the heat of him. I’d forgotten that other people could be warm.
“Do you remember where it is?” I asked.
He made a noise. “Corner of Fifth and Foster. Near the Dairy Queen. Used to skip class to get Blizzards.”
I stared at the peeling wallpaper, the line of decay under the window ledge. “I haven’t called them. Does it work like a regular appointment?”
He shrugged. “They’re probably expecting you. Small town. News travels.”
Judy Langston, gone. No surprise, but still. Another one in the dirt.
I jammed my fists into my thigh.
We left our bags in the room. The walk back to the car was silent, except for the wind scraping old salt off the asphalt and the crows perched on the power lines, black ticks against the film of morning.
My mother had hated crows. She claimed they could smell death and would follow it for miles, feasting on roadkill and the souls of the unlucky. I imagined her now, somewhere between this world and the next, a flock of them waiting at the end of her street.
Caiden drove. The heater blasted stale air.
I watched the town unspool outside the window, all the landmarks shriveled and small.
The funeral home was a low-slung ranch house with a smile of black-tinted windows. The sign out front, PATHOSBURY MEMORIAL, was flanked by a pair of ceramic angels, their faces smudged by decades of pollen and smog.
I hesitated at the door, expecting it to resist, but it swung open with a sigh, like it was glad to see me.
A receptionist greeted us, her smile just wide enough to be mistaken for sympathy. I spoke first.
“Hi. I’m Amelia Langston. Here for my mother’s death, Judy Langston.”
The receptionist’s smile faltered at my words. She gestured to a pair of chairs in the corner, draped in funereal mauve. “Please have a seat, Ms. Langston. I’ll let them know you’re here.”
She vanished down a narrow hallway, and Caiden and I sat in the hush.
The waiting room was decorated in a way that made me want to die all over again: doilies on every surface, watercolors of tranquil lakes, and a faint hint of lemon disinfectant drifting through the vent.
There was a bookshelf stocked with pamphlets.
I kept my hands jammed in my jacket pockets, but Caiden reached for one called “Grief and You: What to Expect.”
I didn’t want to be told how to grieve. I wanted to be done with it.
A minute later, a middle-aged woman appeared, small and birdlike, with restless hands and a face that looked pained by nature. She wore a blazer the color of rainwater.
“Amelia? I’m Sandra. I’m so sorry for your loss.” She said it like she meant it, but I knew from the way her smile resealed afterward that she’d said it a thousand times before.