Fate
Austin let himself in around noon the next day, the way he always did, no knock, just the front door opening and his voice announcing him before his body caught up.
“Seren?”
“Kitchen,” I called back. I was always in the kitchen. I was stuck here.
He found me where I had been most of the morning, at the island, the letter still sitting on the counter where it had spent the night, where it had decided it lived now.
It had replaced the phones and the granola bar and the envelope.
Zane had gone back to his parents to shower and change, promising to be back by evening, and the house had that quiet it got when it was just me and whatever I was supposed to be doing with myself.
Austin took one look at my face and pulled out the stool across from me without asking. “You look like you slept on the kitchen floor,” he said.
“I did.”
“With Briggs?”
“With Zane.”
He nodded, like that explained everything it needed to. He reached over and stole a piece of toast off my plate, the way he always did, and ate half of it before he spoke again.
“Okay,” Austin said. “Talk to me.”
“Zane found something,” I said. “Last night.”
“Found what?”
“A letter. From Henry’s parents. He has had it for years and never opened it.” I watched Austin’s eyebrows pull together. “He opened it last night.”
“Okay,” Austin said slowly. “And?”
I did not know how to start this in the right order, so I just started.
While I was talking, I knew it would not make sense to Austin, I was laying down pieces of a puzzle that he did not know the final image of.
He did not know how many pieces were needed, and he did not know what the corner pieces were.
I knew that and I laid it down anyway, because I was able to do that with Austin.
I could give him the shadows of things, and he would sit through it until I finally gave him enough light to see what was standing in my mind that was casting those shadows.
I could forecast the storm, and he did not need the numbers and science.
I only needed to explain the way my knee was hurting and there was pressure in my eyes, and the sky held a specific shade of red, and he saw the same storm as I could.
Me and Austin speak the same language. We both know weather that wants to spin you around and soak your skin.
“There was a dream,” I said. “Zane had it. Years ago. After Henry died. Henry told him not to let someone fall. No name. Just a girl.”
Austin’s jaw shifted, the smallest amount. “Okay. A dream. When?”
“Before any of it. And then Zane went to visit Henry’s grave.
The first time after the funeral. And he saw me there.
At my mom’s grave.” I watched that land on Austin’s face, the pieces starting to assemble themselves before I had even finished giving them to him.
“He didn’t know me yet. Not really. Or maybe he did, but I did not know him.
He just saw a girl crying at an angel and he thought about the dream. ”
“Seren.” Austin’s voice had gone careful. “What does this have to do with the letter? What kind of letter?”
“Henry knew me,” I said. “I knew Henry.”
That stopped Austin’s cautious look cold. Austin knew the architecture of Zane and Henry. He knew the architecture of my solid understanding that Henry was Zane’s ghost, not mine.
“No, you didn’t,” Austin said quickly. “What are you talking about?”
“I did,” I breathed like a sigh. “I did.”
“How?”
“Before Jax. Sophomore year. I used to walk to the graveyard at night before it got really bad. I was just lonely, or I don’t know.
I was just fucking sad. I couldn’t sleep, so I would go sit at my mom’s grave.
One night, there was a boy there. I’m not sure why, but I asked him a question.
He sat with me for three nights. He told me his name was Alex.
” I watched Austin’s face change in real time. “It wasn’t Alex.”
Austin went very still. “Seren.”
“It was Henry,” I said. “I sat with Zane’s best friend for three nights in a graveyard when I was sixteen and I never knew his real name. And then he died. And I never knew that either. I thought he just stopped coming. I thought he moved on.”
“Jesus Christ,” Austin said quietly. “What was the question? You said you asked him a question. What was it?”
I chewed my lip, looking down at my fingernails.
It was not that I did not remember. It was that the question felt like a secret I was keeping.
Not a secret for myself, but a secret between me and Henry.
We never said it, we never verbalized it, but I always felt like the graveyard held an oath that we agreed to.
What we said there was not to be repeated.
“Tell me,” Austin urged, clearly seeing my hesitation.
“I asked him if he ever felt like giving up,” I said quietly.
Then I looked up at Austin, with a feeling of guilt launching in my stomach. My eyes watered as I locked my eyes with his. “I asked him if he ever felt like giving up, Austin. I… I didn’t know he had already decided.”
“Oh, love,” Austin took my hand, shaking his head. “It’s not your fault. Like you said, he had already decided.”
“He wrote about it,” I said. “In the letter. To everyone. There’s a part about me.”
“Wait,” Austin tilted his head. “You said it was a letter from his parents. What you’re really saying… Seren, you are saying Zane found Henry’s note. His suicide note.”
“Yes,” I cemented it for him, and for myself. “Zane found his goodbye.”
“What does it say? About you?”
“That I saw him,” I said. “That I was drowning too. That I was—” My voice caught on the word, even now, even saying it again. “He called me his mercy. Morphine before the cancer won. He wrote you won’t fall Seren, I’ll make sure of it.”
Austin’s hand had gone flat against the counter. “Okay.”
“And Zane read it,” I said. “And he thought it meant something it didn’t.
He thought Henry was in love with me. He thought maybe I’d loved Henry back.
And then he told me about the dream, and I understood that the whole reason Zane ever found me, ever noticed me, might have started because a dying boy told him to. ”
“Austin,” I caught his gaze again. “The last conversation that Henry and Zane had… it was about me. Henry told Zane about me. And Henry told me about Zane. Not by name, oh I wish he had said names. We would have known, we could have figured it out. He…”
I trailed off, not wanting to finish my thought because I did not know what the shape of my thought truly was. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like this was script, a play written by Henry and we had just followed it.
“You called me Alex once,” he told me. “I thought you were just high.”
I did not remember that. He was right, I was just high. But he was also right because I knew now that it was not the only reason I called him that. It had slipped from my tongue from habit, not mistake.
Austin did not say anything for a long moment. His muscles worked, the way it did when something was costing him.
“So, you’ve been sitting here,” he said slowly, “wondering if your whole relationship is built on a dead person giving orders.”
I flinched, but he was right. This was the haunting of Henry. “Something like that.”
“That’s insane,” Austin said, but there was no heat in it, just the gentleness he saved for when his guard dropped.
“Seren. That’s insane and I love you and I need you to hear me say that.
And I need you to hear me when I tell you that you can’t rewrite the last five years because of this.
Zane loves you. I love you. Blair loves you. Cassidy loves you. You.”
“I know it sounds—”
“Can I see it?” He interrupted me. “The letter.”
I slid it across the counter. It had replaced my dad’s phone.
The thing that said too much and deserved a place in the open to remind everyone it said too much.
He read it slowly, like he knew every word mattered, his eyes moving down the page with a kind of careful attention I did not often get to watch from him.
I saw the moment he hit the Blair section.
His whole body went still, the half-eaten toast forgotten in his hand.
“Fate had other plans,” he read aloud, quiet, to himself. He set the letter down. He didn’t say anything for a while.
“She doesn’t know,” he said finally. “Blair. She doesn’t know this exists.”
“No.”
“He wrote about her.” Austin’s voice had gone rough.
“He wrote about her in his last letter and she has been walking around for five years not knowing he thought about her at the end. She thinks about him a lot. He… he plays a role in the way she thinks. The way she got better. The way she fell in love with me.”
“I know.” And I thought, join the club. Henry shaped a lot of things. His memory changed the future. It shaped people’s actions. He was not in the past, he was everywhere. He was a version of time that was kinder than the real thing.
A memory from the graveyard pulled through, one I had not examined yet.
The dark, wet graveyard, the stone against my back, Henry sitting beside me.
His words came back to me. I don’t want to just come and go.
I want to leave something behind. Something that doesn’t disappear the second I do.
Something permanent. Another sigh escaped me.
I felt stupid. I was hearing his words and applying them to my own thoughts.
I thought he was talking about leaving something behind in life.
Something that was not attached to him, something that stayed when he changed rooms and when people moved apart, like life forces them to.
He was talking about leaving something behind in death. So clearly, and I did not consider it.
“She needs to see this.” Austin was already reaching for his phone. “Not over text. Not me reading it to her.” He looked at me. “She needs to see that he thought about her the same way she thinks about him.”
I did not argue. While we waited for her, I picked at what was left of the toast.