Haunting #3
The word landed wrong. I could see it on his face. “Three nights,” he repeated.
“In the graveyard. Sophomore year. Before Jax, before any of it. I couldn’t sleep; I used to walk there. He was just there one night. We talked.” I was watching his jaw tighten in increments. “Zane, it wasn’t—”
“He said it was like looking in a mirror.” His voice came out low and deliberate, like he was reading from something. He was. He had memorized whatever memory he was reciting from. “He told me about her that night. The last night. He told me about you. The night he died.”
His eyes came up to mine. “The girl in the graveyard who got it. Her mother died. She was beautiful, but her beauty was a mask. The girl he had been talking to. He said she understood him. He said she made him feel less alone.” A breath.
“That was the last conversation I had with him. And he spent it talking about you.”
His words were sharp, and I knew he intended them to be.
They stabbed at me successfully, and I tried not to think too much about them, because I could not fully process them.
I could not think too much about Zane’s last conversation with Henry being about me.
Because… that did not seem like something we just moved past. That felt like something that changed Zane and I, us together, forever.
“He didn’t even know my last name,” I said. “I didn’t even know his real name. We didn’t even really know each other, Zane. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know he was your Henry.”
“But you knew him.” The word knew arrived like he was still deciding what it meant. “You sat with him for three nights. He wrote about you in the last letter he ever wrote. He said you were his mercy.”
His voice caught, just slightly, and he pushed through it. “He didn’t say that about me. He said you saw him in a way that no one else ever did. He said I tried. He said I saw the cracks. But you—” He stopped. “He said you actually helped him.”
I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would land correctly right now.
Everything I could offer would sound like a defense, and Zane was not asking me to defend myself.
He was in a room I had never been let into, standing over something he had kept sealed for years, and I had somehow been inside it the whole time without knowing.
“I didn’t know,” I said again. “I promise you I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t know.” He said it fast, like he wanted to believe it and couldn’t quite get there.
“I know you didn’t know who he was. But you knew him.
You knew something about him that I didn’t.
And he’s been dead for five years, and I have been sitting across from you for four, and the whole time—” He pressed his hands flat against the kitchen island.
“The whole time he was already between us and neither of us knew it.”
“You were his right person, wrong time. He was in love with you. And then he died. And then you were my right person, wrong time, and I fell in love with you. Until it was the right time, and you fell in love with me, too.” Zane was looking at the ground as he spoke, not even letting me see his face.
“You let him close enough to love you,” he said suddenly, then he looked up at me.
There was such a storm in his eyes I was suddenly afraid of lightning.
“He knew about you. About your mom, about your pain. You told him all of that in three days? It took years for you to open up to me. Did… did you love him, too?”
“Zane—” I started, wanting to walk his thoughts down from the spiral they formed, but he did not let me.
“No,” he shook his head, interrupting me. “I don’t… I don’t know if I want to hear it. Not yet.”
“Listen to me,” I tried again.
“No,” Zane said sharply. Then he looked at me with a look in his eyes that I remembered from high school. He was pleading with me. “Not yet. Please.”
The silence that followed had a pressure in it. It was the pressure of understanding the life you thought you had built yourself was built for you, instead.
“I’m not angry at you,” he said, and I was not sure he believed that completely. “I’m not. I just need—” He picked up the envelope. He looked at it. He set it back down. “I need to go. I need to think.”
“Zane—”
“I’m not leaving leaving.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were the eyes of someone trying to be fair to me while also being completely undone. “I just need air. I need to not be in this kitchen right now with his letter on the floor and the way you just said three nights.”
He walked past me. The front door opened. It did not slam. That was worse somehow than if it had.
I stayed on the kitchen floor. The letter was still there. The feeder was still on the porch in the dark. Everything was exactly where it had been an hour ago, but everything was completely different.
I did not know what we were on the other side of this. I was not sure there was a word for it yet.
How do you come back from the forceful understanding that your love story might not have just been a love story, but a haunting?