Chapter Twenty-Nine #3
“Ok,” I said brightly, sliding my tote onto the chair before heading for the fridge. “If this is about the intake draft, I can explain my notes on trauma-informed language, but I’m not apologizing—”
“Holly,” Mom said.
She didn’t say my name like that. It was soft and careful, like the word itself had edges. The part of me that grew up reading rooms went very still.
Hannah didn’t stand. Hannah always stood. She kept her palms flat on the table, tendons tight, like she was keeping something from sliding off the edge. The manila folder lay between them.
I pulled a smile on like armor. “If you tell me the city denied our permit, I’m going to—”
“Sit down, baby,” Hannah said.
I sat.
Maria came in, but she didn’t have Jewel.
My mind started to race to a place I had brought it back from years ago and nearly forgotten.
I looked over at my best friend, and her lip trembled like she was fighting to keep it steady.
Hannah’s eyes looked like something had ripped her open from the inside and left her hollow.
The kind of look no one ever came back from.
My throat closed up. “What—what’s going on? Is everything ok?”
Maria’s hand fluttered toward me, then pulled back like touching me might break something.
Hannah swallowed hard. Her voice cracked. “Holly…”
She told me then. A crash. An abandoned search. A soldier who would never come home.
I didn’t even hear the words. Just the weight of them. Heavy. Final. Crushing. My head shook before I even realized it. “No.”
Maria’s eyes blurred with tears.
“No.” My voice cracked, raw. I stood, and my mom reached for me as I backed away from them, from their faces, from the truth pressing in around me. “Don’t you—don’t you dare. Don’t you say it.”
But I already knew.
I knew because he hadn’t written. I knew because they were standing here instead of him. I knew because the world had a way of taking everything good from me, and this time it had taken him.
The walls tilted. My chest shattered. My hands fisted in my hair as if I could hold myself together by sheer force, but the sob tore out anyway—jagged, violent, unstoppable.
Mom caught me before I hit the floor. She was whispering in my ear, but I couldn’t make out the words.
Maria’s arms wrapped around me, strong and desperate, even as her own body shook with grief.
I could feel their tears on my skin, could hear their voices whispering my name, telling me they had me, they weren’t going to let me go.
Hannah knelt on the ground, unable to hug me.
That space was taken by the two women already trying to keep me together.
So she just wrapped a hand around my ankle and held on.
She too whispered words I couldn’t hear.
But the one voice I needed—the only one that mattered—was gone.
And my world broke clean in half.
When the day came, it came like thunder.
Momma Laverne closed the restaurant down.
The high school held a memorial. And on a too-beautiful Saturday, the Saints lined the lane, leather and chrome catching the pale light.
Bikes rolled in nose-to-tail until engines idled low, a heartbeat you could feel through the soles of your boots in an otherwise quiet cemetery.
When they killed the motors, the silence hurt my ears.
Across from us, Marines formed a rigid line, dress blues so sharp the brass flashed like broken stars. The air smelled like cut grass and the faint metallic tang of rain that hadn’t yet decided to fall. It smelled like everything I’d been trying not to breathe for weeks.
I wore black because that’s what people put on for funerals.
My dress felt too big, a costume for a grief I didn’t recognize.
Maria stood on my left, fingers crushing mine; the mask she’d worn for weeks was fraying at the edges.
My mother sat on my right, hands folded in her lap, eyes rimmed red from holding herself together for show.
Dad sat next to her, and every now and then he would place a loving hand on her knee.
Hannah was a wall at my back; August a steady post at her shoulder.
Dalton and Mac and Diego hovered like shadows, anchors in leather.
The ritual moved like we were all actors in someone else’s play. A bugler stepped forward. The rifle party took position. The chaplain’s words floated like ash—honor, service, sacrifice—and should have landed like balm. They sounded far away, like I was underwater.
There was no casket. There was a photograph on an easel, a small table with his name, and—because the Saints insisted—boots and helmet on a rifle stand, the battlefield cross set just off to the side, and his bike parked next to it all. It felt obscene and precise all at once.
They folded the flag with machine attention—hand to hand, crease to crease—until those white stars disappeared and the blue became a tight, perfect wedge that could fit in two hands. The presenting officer stepped forward.
Julia was led down the line. She moved like someone walking in a dream.
For a beat I thought she wouldn’t take it.
Then her trembling hands reached. He placed the triangle in her arms and said the sentence that unthreaded people: “On behalf of the President of the United States, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and a grateful Nation…” She clutched the flag to her chest as if fabric alone could keep him safe.
Hannah stepped to her—not to claim anything, just to hold what could be held. One hand on Julia’s elbow. The mother who’d given him life and the woman who had raised him stood raw beside each other. Julia’s eyes went glassy, then wet; the first sound she made was small and broken.
I watched them through a face scraped smooth. I had cried until I had nothing left. My chest felt as if someone had removed the part that held breath. Tears were coins I’d already spent weeks ago. When Julia sobbed, it should have opened something in me—some crack where two people met and mended.
I stared instead.
How could she finally sob now, after all the missed chances? She hadn’t even noticed he was gone.
The rifle party fired. Three volleys split the sky like hammers.
The first ripped through my ribs. At the second I whimpered, a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
At the third, time slowed. The blaze in my ears, the ache in my jaw, the way that flag looked impossibly small in hands that had not been there the way Hannah’s had.
Taps followed. The notes crawled under my skin and burned a map I didn’t want.
Then the living did the small mechanical kindnesses we do when we can’t do anything real. Heads bowed, leather creaked, uniforms rustled. Saints filed past with palms folded—prayer or oath, I couldn’t tell. Marines posted crisp salutes. People touched shoulders. I’m sorry. Tissues. Nods.
I should have moved with them. I should have let my knees bend and go with the stream, let people close around me like a net.
I didn’t.
The photo, the folded flag, the battlefield cross—the choreography of it—was too final, too neat. I stood frozen, a statue in a ritual I rejected.
Dalton eased an arm around my shoulders and tried to steer me. “C’mon, blondie,” he said, voice low and wrecked. “We gotta go.”
I pulled back. “I’m not leaving.” My voice was small but iron. My knees shook; I planted them anyway.
“Holly—” He tried soft.
“No.” The word came out raw. “I’m not leaving him.”
He tried reason—sleep, home, not falling apart in public. I didn’t hear a word. My hands were fists. My throat was rope.
The sound bubbled up—anger, grief, animal and human and infinite—and I let it.
It scraped out of me and then tore free, a scream that split the afternoon.
I said his name like I could pull him back through the air.
I said it because naming him felt like holding him for one more heartbeat.
I turned and hit Dalton’s chest with both fists.
Why are you making me leave?
Why don’t you understand?
He promised.
He wouldn’t just break that promise.
People turned. Momma Laverne held onto Maria who held onto her daughter, and I saw the way Diego angled his body around theirs. Mothers set hands on small shoulders. Mac’s voice came from behind, stern and impossible and kind. August’s face went heavy and furious and, somehow, tender.
Dalton’s hand tightened on my elbow. He tried to walk me. I wrenched free. “I am not leaving,” I sobbed. “I am not leaving him. I will not leave what’s left.”
My legs quit, and I fell into Hannah. She caught me without thinking, one arm around my waist, the other smoothing my hair like I was a child.
My father slid in at my side; my mother flanked me.
August took the flag from Julia—no, not took, lifted, reverent as a relic—and carried it to the car like a second procession inside the first.
And I thought, wild and useless: I will never get to tell him just how strong it is. How strong I am because of it. My love for him.
Saints started their engines then, a low, guttural choir that filled the place with sound—a howled acknowledgment, not celebration. With every rev they told the world Jackson Morgan had been theirs too.
I didn’t move. My face stayed in Hannah’s shoulder, stealing her warmth and steel because there was nowhere else to land. The bugle faded. The bikes bled into the road. People left in small clusters, their condolences shaped like kind lies.
When the taillights finally blinked away and the silence settled, it was loud enough to hear my own blood. The flag would be placed. The papers would run. Letters would be written. Rituals would stitch themselves to the calendar.
On that damp grass, under a sky that hadn’t decided whether to cry, I mourned everything that could’ve been.