Love Story
Cassidy was the one who found me in the morning. I was not sure how she got in, if she had a key, or if the door had simply been left unlocked the entire time, I was sitting here with my spinning mind.
She had that calm look on her face as she approached me, the one I used to see when she carefully watched Zane’s grief. It was the same look, just directed at me this time.
“Hey,” she said, her voice was soft and it seemed motherly in a strange way, not in the way of being older, not with maturity, but the nurture that it held.
I sighed, peeling my face from where it had pressed against the cool tile. “Hi.”
She sat down beside me, barely leaving any space between her body and mine. She didn’t say anything else right away, it felt like she was taking in the atmosphere of this room, gauging the emotional temperature.
“I heard,” she eventually said. She did not have to explain. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I’m trying to understand it all. I’m thinking about Zane. I don’t… he thinks…”
“I know,” Cassidy saved me from running in circles. “It wasn’t what I expected.”
“Did you read it?” I asked her.
“I did,” she nodded, her lips twisting just slightly. “And Zane told me a little bit.”
“He’s mad.”
“No,” Cassidy shook her head, disagreeing with my assessment quickly. “He’s confused. He’s holding on to the script of grief he has in his head. The one he’s spent years writing and memorizing. This broke that script.”
“It didn’t just break the script,” I said, “it changes everything.”
Cassidy fell silent again, letting the weight of my words hit the ground with its full gravity. “Does it?” she asked me after a moment. “Does it change everything?”
“Yes.”
“What does it change?” she asked me, and I did not really know how to answer her.
So, I didn’t. I sat in the question, and it was that moment of not being able to verbalize a feeling that felt so strong inside your mind but fell short of logic when put into words.
“You knew Henry. Henry knew you. But you know Zane and Zane also knows you. And Henry doesn’t change that.” Cassidy’s words sounded like a riddle I did not particularly want to solve right now.
“You’ve been through a lot,” she continued. “Your dad just died. Now, you found out that your friend died, too. Even if it happened a long time ago. You didn’t know, and now you do. This hurts Zane, I know. It also hurts you. I know that, too. But I want you to remember it. Don’t push it away.”
I looked up at her, my vision blurring slightly as the exhaustion of the night finally caught up to me. “Remember what, Cass? The fact that my life feels like it’s built on a foundation of shifting sand?”
Cassidy reached out, her hand resting warm and solid against my forearm. “Remember that your grief deserves room. You are allowed to mourn Henry. You are allowed to be angry about your dad, and you are allowed to feel completely lost right now.”
She leaned her head back staring up at the ceiling.
“When Zane lost Henry, he built a wall around that pain,” she said softly.
“He made it his entire identity. Then, he met you, and he let that identity go. You talk about how Zane saved you; I don’t think you understand that you saved him, too.
In a way, you are the reason he was able to let what happened go.
Henry was his past and you became his future.
Now, finding out that Henry had this whole other connection, his past colliding with his future, well, maybe right now the past and the future are blending for him.
They aren’t as separate as he thought. But…
that’s life. And he will remember where the boundary lines are.
He just has to work through it. Let him. ”
I let out a shaky breath, the cool tile beneath my legs the only thing keeping me grounded. “He looked at me like I was the one who hid it from him. Like I’m guilty by association.”
“Because it’s easier to be mad at the person standing in front of you than it is to face a ghost,” Cassidy replied, her voice dropping to a fierce, protective hush.
“But you didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did Zane.
And neither did Henry. No one needs to confess their sins and ask for forgiveness. It just needs some recalibration.”
She turned her head to look at me, her eyes steady and clear. “The script is broken, yeah. But maybe the old script was a tragedy anyway. What does it change? It changes the past, sure. But it does not change who you are to Zane, or who he is to you. Unless you let it.”
Zane did not knock this time.
The front door opened, and I heard it from the kitchen floor, where I had not seemed to move from, and I already knew.
Not because of the sound. Because of the way the air changed, the way a room rearranges itself around one specific person.
He had been doing that to rooms since we met.
Walking into them and quietly shifting everything two degrees toward somewhere safer.
“Hey Cass,” Zane said, noticing her presence beside me. He didn’t seem surprised to see her here.
Cassidy stood up before Zane even made it to us. “Be easy on yourself, Seren. We all love you, and we are all here for you.”
She turned to leave, her eyes met Zane’s as he crossed into the kitchen. They did not say anything, but I knew they passed meaning through their eyes by the way their movements slowed as they passed each other.
I was still on the floor when he came to stand in the kitchen doorway. The letter was still there, sitting between us the same way it had been when he left, except nothing between us was the same as when he left.
He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything for a long moment.
Then he walked in and sat down on the floor across from me.
Same kitchen. Same cold tile. Same letter.
Both of us on the ground now, which felt right in the way things feel right when they have stopped pretending to be anything other than what they are.
“It wasn’t what you think,” I said.
“I know,” he said. But his voice said he did not quite know, not yet. “Well, I guess I don’t. I think I don’t know the difference between what actually happened and what’s in my head.”
“I didn’t love him.” The words came out steady.
They were not defensive or rewriting the past to the way I wanted the narrative to be.
“I didn’t even know him, not really. I knew him for three nights in a graveyard when I was sixteen, and he told me his name was Alex, and we just… sat there. That’s all it was.”
Zane’s jaw stretched tight. “I don’t think that’s all it was, Seren. It meant something to him. Even if it didn’t mean anything to you. Maybe you didn’t love him…”
“I didn’t say it didn’t mean anything to me.
I just meant… I meant it wasn’t romantic,” I said.
“It wasn’t even close. He was just someone who sat beside me in the dark without asking me to explain it.
Without asking me to be anything other than exactly as wrecked as I already was.
” I looked at the letter. “I think he needed the same thing from me. I think that’s all it was.
Two people who recognized each other’s pain. ”
The silence held. He did not believe me. I knew why. The romance thing… that was the truth. The rest of it… well, it was not really the truth. There was more to our nights in the graveyard than that. Things I had not fully let myself admit.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Zane said finally. “He told me he met a beautiful girl and… well, I have spent the last five years playing that memory in my head. He made it sound like you meant something to him. He said… he said you were carrying so much. He cared for you.”
“He did,” I said. “I think he really did. Just not in the way you think.”
I sat with that for a moment. I looked at the letter still lying between us and I thought about a seventeen-year-old boy sitting in a graveyard in the middle of the night, and what a person is doing in a graveyard in the middle of the night when they’re a teenager and not sleeping and the world has gone the color of nothing.
I knew what he was doing. I had been doing the same thing.
“He framed it the way he did,” I said slowly, “because he couldn’t tell you what we were actually talking about.
” I stopped. Started again. “We weren’t talking about much.
That was kind of the point. We weren’t talking about anything important on the surface.
But underneath.” I pressed my hand flat against my sternum without meaning to.
“Zane. We were both in the graveyard at two in the morning because we needed somewhere to put the weight down for a little while. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Zane went very still.
“I didn’t understand,” I said. “I should have. Looking back now, I should have known. But I was so far inside my own thing that I just thought… I thought he was like me. I thought he was someone who was hurting but holding on. Hurting but holding on.” My voice caught on the repetition.
“I thought he was going to keep holding on. He told me he was holding on.”
The silence in the kitchen was the specific, airless kind that fills the space where there is nothing adequate to say.
“He framed it as a love story because the truth was too heavy to hand you,” I said.
“If he had told you he’d spent three nights sitting with a girl who was also struggling to stay, you would have known.
And he did not want you to know, because he loved you, and he was already protecting you from it the only way he knew how.
” My throat tightened. “He turned it into something beautiful because he knew that’s what would be safe to leave you with.
Something that could exist in your memory without destroying you. ”
Zane’s hand was over his eyes. Just resting there, his elbow on his knee, his palm covering his face the way people do when they need a second to exist somewhere private. He lowered his hand. He looked at me.