Fate #3
The kitchen was quiet except for the low hum of the refrigerator and somewhere outside, faint, the rustle of wind through the hydrangeas.
“Seren,” Blair said eventually, setting the letter down with a careful, deliberate motion, like she was putting something fragile back exactly where it belonged.
“Austin told me a little in his texts. About the dream. About the graveyard.” She looked at me steadily.
“You’re scared this means Zane didn’t choose you. That Henry chose you for him.”
I didn’t say anything, which was its own answer.
“I used to be obsessed with fate,” Blair said.
“Really, obsessed. I used to think everything that happened to me was supposed to happen, that there was a plan, that the universe had already decided how my story went and all I had to do was follow the breadcrumbs.” She smiled, small and a little rueful.
“I met Austin and I built this whole theory in my head. That fate put him in the room where Cherry overdosed so I could be the one to save her. That fate had decided we were meant to find each other.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“Austin told me fate was bullshit,” she said, and laughed, soft and surprised, like the memory still caught her off guard.
“Right to my face. He said fate didn’t bring us together, we did.
We chose this. And it broke something in me, hearing that, because if fate wasn’t real, then what was I supposed to hold onto when things went wrong? ”
I watched her think it through, the same way she must have thought it through the first time, years ago.
“But here’s what I figured out,” she said.
“I didn’t need it to be fate. I just needed something to trust. And it turns out the thing worth trusting was never some cosmic plan.
It was just him. Showing up. Every single day, whether some bigger force was orchestrating it or not.
” She looked at me. “Fate might have put Henry in a graveyard at the same time as you. Fate might have put a dream in Zane’s head.
I don’t know. Maybe it did. I still believe in some of that, more than Austin does, probably more than I should.
” She shrugged, light. “But fate did not make Zane stay for four years. Fate did not make him keep choosing you after Jax died. Fate does not keep choosing you on a random Tuesday when nothing is forcing his hand.”
I mulled her words over in my mind. She was right. Zane stayed when he did not know how close I was to the edge. He stayed when I was about to jump. But he also stayed when I had walked away from the cliff completely. When there was not any more danger of falling.
“He chose me at seventeen,” I said quietly. “He chooses me now.”
“There you go,” Blair said. “That’s not Henry’s choice. That’s just Zane’s.”
I thought about the feeder. I thought about Tom filling it every single morning for twenty-one years, not because anyone was forcing him to, not because Anwen was standing over his shoulder enforcing a contract, but because somewhere in the doing of it, the obligation had turned into something else.
A man could stop filling a feeder any morning he wanted.
Nobody was checking. The birds would have survived without him. He just never stopped.
That wasn’t obligation. I had gotten that wrong, sitting on the kitchen floor last night, twisting it into something smaller and sadder than it actually was. It was the opposite of obligation. It was a vow so repeated it stopped needing the original reason behind it.
Zane could stop choosing me any morning he wanted. Nobody was checking. He just never stopped.
“He knew you,” Blair said, looking down at the letter one more time, her thumb tracing the edge of the page the way Austin’s had earlier.
“And he knew Zane, and he knew me,” she said to me.
“And maybe he knew, somehow, wherever he is, that we’d all end up exactly here.
All of us. In this kitchen.” She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
Austin looked at her, something soft passing over his face. “I told you that once,” he said. “In your room. After I found the picture.”
“You did,” Blair said. “I didn’t believe you then.”
“Do you now?”
She looked around the kitchen. At Austin.
At me. At the letter, folded now, resting on the counter like something that had finally been allowed to rest. “I think I do,” she said.
“I think he gave all of us something. Even after. Especially after. Maybe that’s how you need to see it, Seren.
He didn’t force anything. He gave us the chance to find people that love us. ”
“Thank you,” I said, to both of them, to the letter, to the kitchen, to whatever had conspired or simply happened to put all four of us, five if you counted the ghost still folded into the pages on the counter, in the same orbit.
“Always,” Austin said, the same word he always used, the one that had never once been a lie.
Blair reached over and squeezed my hand, and for a while none of us said anything else. We just sat there together in the quiet and let it be enough.