Coffee #3
“I know,” Zane responded. “But she’s stronger now. Her mind is stronger. She’s done a lot of work on it these last three years. She’s not the same girl as the one she was when Jax hurt her.”
“But still…” Austin said, and Zane responded with nothing.
“We’re going to have to work together,” Austin continued. “I don’t want her left alone. Especially not after the funeral. We need to make sure one of us is always here.”
“When do you need to be back in Florida?” Zane asked him.
“Whenever the hell she’s okay, Briggs,” Austin muttered. “Come on. It’s Seren we’re talking about here.”
“I know. It’s Seren we’re talking about,” Zane said. “Of course, I’m not going anywhere either. But she won’t like it if she feels like we’re hovering.”
“I don’t give a shit what she likes right now. She’s white as a sheet, Zane. She looks like she’s lost ten pounds and she didn’t have ten pounds to spare in the first place. We have to staff the perimeter. We don’t leave her alone with the walls.”
“Austin.” Zane’s voice dropped low. It fell below the frequency of the kitchen fan, down into a frozen register. “She’s never even processed her grief from her mom. She can’t even say her name. The nurse told her that was Tom’s last word. I saw her face, she…”
He fell silent, like he was trying to chew on his own words.
“Both of her parents died before she got the chance to know either one of them… not the way she should have. I don’t…
I don’t know how long it will take her to come back from this.
I love her more than I thought it would be possible to love someone.
I will stay here and help her as long as it takes, but it might not be as simple as never leaving her alone.
This… is different from last time. Last time we had to protect her from two things.
Jax, and herself. There’s nothing to protect her from. Not this time.”
The kitchen went dead silent. I stood up.
I did not use the handrail. I was not scared of dropping anyone’s memory.
I walked back down the stairs and back into my father’s office, my soles making no contact sound against the runner.
It went into the inventory. Another piece of logistics. A perimeter to be staffed.
At 3:47 AM I got up and walked into the kitchen and sat down on the second stool. I was not going upstairs. The bedroom was a calculation that didn’t resolve, so I leave it empty. The sofa was fine. The office chair was fine. The kitchen stool was fine.
By 4:00 AM, the house has stopped settling.
The silence was absolute, the kind that exists only in the hour before the birds realize the sun is coming.
I sat at the kitchen island, on the second metal stool from the end.
The stool had a slight wobble in the left front leg if my weight shifts more than two inches to the side, so I keep my weight centered.
My father’s phone was three inches away from the edge of my forearm.
It is face-down on the granite. That was why it felt like a waiting room.
He had been dead for three days, and his phone was still sitting right where he left it, flat against the Absolute Black stone.
I hadn’t been able to touch it. I hadn’t been able to look at the screen.
So, we just sat here across from each other, me on the metal stool, the plastic and glass of him on the counter, like two strangers waiting for an appointment neither of us wants to keep.
He was not going to pick it up. I am not going to turn it over. We were just waiting out the clock.
Upstairs, on the bed I am not going to sleep in, the black wool dress was laid out flat.
The fabric was a forty percent synthetic blend, which means it would not wrinkle during the three-hour service.
The sleeves were pinned straight along the seam lines of the duvet.
The hem is perfectly parallel with the bottom edge of the footboard.
The two black leather pumps were placed side by side at the floor line.
The toes face the window. The heels point toward the door.
They were size seven and a half. The room was 71 degrees. The window to the left is open.
None of this mattered. It was all meaningless and I did not care that the shoes were size seven and a half and the dress was made of wool. It did not matter that my dad’s phone is three inches from my arm and it did not matter that the stool wobbles on the left. None of these things mattered.
But I was a ghost. Ghosts do not sleep, and they do not eat.
They do not watch TV and they do not read books.
They haunt. They haunt and they haunt and they haunt.
They can’t even die. They haunt forever, circling the same rooms. Ghosts notice how far the phone sits away from them.
They notice what temperature the room is.
They know what window is open. They have no choice.
They are stuck and they have nothing else left to do besides pick up every single thing and examine them before everyone wakes up in the morning.