34. Jake
JAKE
I do not visit as often as I should. Today felt like the day I owed her the truth.
Deacon found me loading a rake and a fresh bag of mulch into the truck bed before the sun had fully cleared the tree line, and he didn't ask where I was headed, because some questions a man just already knows the answer to.
"Want company?" he asked anyway, quiet.
"No. Not today."
"Didn't think so." He handed me a travel mug of coffee I hadn't asked for, already turning back toward his own truck.
"I'll take the kids for the whole afternoon. Carol's got Lily covered too. Go do what you need to do."
"You sure? It's a lot of kids for one afternoon."
"I got two nephews through worse than a movie night once. I think I can survive an afternoon with somebody else's kids."
"Thanks, Deacon."
"Don't thank me. Just go."
The cemetery sat on a low hill outside town, quiet in the way only cemeteries manage, wind moving through old oak trees older than anyone buried underneath them.
I parked near the gate and walked the rest of the way, gravel crunching under my boots, a rake I probably didn't need slung over one shoulder like a habit I couldn't put down.
Rows of stones ran off in every direction, some old enough the names had gone soft and unreadable, some fresh enough the grass still hadn't fully filled in around the edges yet.
I knew the path to hers by feel at this point, third row from the fence line, past the tall stone angel somebody's family had spent way too much money on, left at the old wooden bench nobody ever seemed to actually sit on.
Her stone was smaller than I remembered, plain granite, EMILY HARTLEY carved clean across the top, BELOVED WIFE underneath, BELOVED MOTHER under that.
I'd picked the words myself, in a fog so thick I barely remembered choosing them, and every single visit since I second-guessed whether they were enough.
They were never going to be enough. No words carved into stone ever could be.
I thought about the guitar for a second before I'd even meant to, the one Aria doesn't know the full story about yet.
I'd played Emily a song on our third date, two chords and a lot of confidence I hadn't earned, and she still told people for years afterward it was the most romantic thing a man had ever done for her. Generous standards.
That was always Emily's whole way of loving somebody, handing out credit a person hadn't fully earned yet and somehow making them grow into it anyway.
I stood there a while longer with that memory before I let myself move any closer, the wind pulling at my jacket, the gravel path behind me empty all the way back to the gate.
I knelt down and cleared the leaves off the base first, an old ritual by now, hands moving without needing instruction.
I spread a little fresh mulch along the edge of the plot where the grass had gone thin, small work that didn't fix anything but felt better than standing there with empty hands, and set the rake against the stone beside me.
"Hey," I said, out loud, the way I always did, even though talking to granite had never once stopped feeling strange. "Sorry it's been a while."
The wind answered instead of her, which was the usual arrangement.
"Noah started school," I told her.
"Kindergarten. He said his own name out loud to his teacher, first time in two years he's talked to anyone outside these walls, and I cried in a parking lot like a complete fool. You'd have laughed at me for that. You always did when I cried at the wrong moments."
I sat back on my heels, letting the quiet stretch, the kind of quiet that used to scare me and now mostly just felt familiar.
"He's got your smile," I said. "Same exact one, tilted a little to the left. Scares me sometimes, how much of you is still walking around in that kid."
A crow landed on a nearby stone and watched me with the flat, uninterested patience only crows manage, and I found myself talking to it too for a moment before I caught myself and turned back to her.
"There's a woman," I said, and the words came out rougher than I meant them to.
"Aria. Our neighbor. You'd like her, I think. She's got a mouth on her, gives me hell about everything, doesn't let me get away with anything, which you'd probably find hilarious given how much I used to get away with around you."
The crow cawed once and lifted off, and I watched it go, grateful for the small excuse to look anywhere other than the stone.
"There's a kid too," I said.
"Lily. Noah's practically her brother at this point. He drew four bedrooms into a picture a while back, like he already knew something the rest of us were too slow to catch up to."
I picked a stray leaf off the granite and turned it over in my fingers, buying myself a beat before the next part, because the next part was the part I'd actually driven out here to say.
"Somebody said something to me a few days ago," I told her.
"At the harvest festival. Renee, if you remember her. She said it's fast, me finding somebody. Said the kids bounce back easier than I do, which is probably true, and said something about somebody stepping into your spot, like there's a spot to step into. Like you're a job opening."
I hadn't planned on repeating any of it, but once the words started they kept coming, ugly and unfiltered, exactly the way they'd sat in my chest since the moment she'd said them.
"She smiled the whole time she said it too," I told the stone. "Like it was kindness instead of a blade. Carol handled her before I did anything I'd have regretted, and I'm still not sure whether to be grateful or ashamed that I needed handling in the first place."
My voice caught on that last part, harder than I expected it to, and I had to stop and let it settle before I could keep going.
"I told her she was wrong," I said.
"And she is wrong, mostly. But she also said one true thing in the middle of all the rest of it, and I haven't been able to shake it since. She said it's fast. And it is fast, Em. Two years. That's not very long, not when I measure it against everything I had with you."
I picked at the leaf until it fell apart in my hands, small pieces scattering into the grass.
"I'm not replacing you," I said, quieter now, closer to the stone.
"I want you to know that. Nobody could. I'm not even trying to. But I'm building something new next to the space you left, and some days I can't tell if that's healing or if it's just me being a coward about sitting in the hole a little longer."
"Noah worries me more than I let on," I admitted.
"Not the talking. He's doing better with that than I ever thought he would.
It's the other thing, the quiet way he watches me and Aria sometimes, like he's checking whether it's safe to want this as much as he already does.
I don't know how to promise a six-year-old that this time nobody disappears.
I don't know if that's a promise anybody's allowed to make. "
The wind picked up, cold enough to cut through my jacket, and I pulled my collar up without really registering I'd done it.
"She said someday we'd all live under one roof," I told the stone.
"Aria did. A few weeks back. She said it soft, half asleep, like it was already decided somewhere I hadn't caught up to yet, and I didn't correct her, because some stubborn part of me wanted it too badly to argue."
I laughed, short and humorless, more breath than sound.
"That's the part that scares me, if I'm honest. Not losing you.
I already know exactly what that feels like, every rotten piece of it.
What scares me is loving somebody that much again and finding out I get to lose it a second time.
At least the first time, grief only made me learn the lesson once.
I don't know if I can survive learning it twice. "
I ran my thumb along the edge of her name, the granite cold and smooth under my hand, worn slightly from however many times I'd done exactly this over two years.
"You'd tell me to stop being an idiot," I said.
"You always cut straight through my nonsense.
You'd probably tell me Aria's not you, and loving her doesn't erase you, and Noah having two people who show up for him isn't a betrayal; it's just lucky.
You'd say all of that, and you'd be right, and I still can't quite make myself believe it all the way down. "
A long silence stretched out after that, the wind moving through the oak trees overhead, the crow long gone, nothing left but me and a stone and two years of things I'd never said out loud in one place before.
I thought about the night Noah was born, the two of us laughing in a hospital hallway at three in the morning over something neither of us could remember later, punch-drunk on fear and joy in equal measure, certain in the particular way only new parents are certain that nothing could ever touch what we'd just built.
We'd been wrong about that, obviously. Nothing had protected us like we thought it would.
But some stubborn part of me still wanted to believe in that same certainty again, even knowing exactly how expensive it turned out to be the first time.
"I keep thinking if I let myself have this," I said, "really have it, all the way, then somewhere down the line I'm going to lose it too, the same way I lost you, and I don't know how a man survives that twice in one lifetime, or whether I'm brave enough to find out."
I sat there a long while after that, not saying anything else, just letting the quiet do whatever it was going to do with what I'd just admitted out loud for the first time to anyone, living or otherwise.
"I miss you," I said finally, simple, the truest thing I had left to offer her.
"Every single day, in a hundred small ways nobody else would notice. That's never going to stop, no matter what happens with Aria, no matter how this all shakes out. I need you to know that, wherever you are. That part doesn't change."
I looked up at the oak overhead, half its leaves already down, scattered gold and brown across the grass in every direction, and thought about how many seasons I'd sat in this exact spot without ever once saying any of this part out loud.
Saying it should have felt like setting something down. Instead it felt like picking something up, heavier than I expected, the kind of weight I was going to have to carry all the way back down the hill and into whatever came next, whether I was ready for it or not.
I stood up slow, knees stiff from the cold ground, and rested my hand flat against the top of the stone the way I always did before leaving, like I was shaking hands one last time with the version of my life that used to exist here.
I told Emily's headstone I was scared, out loud, for the first time, and the quiet that answered back did not feel like forgiveness. It felt like a warning I was not ready to hear yet.