Chapter Twenty-Seven
She looked terrible. How was it she had been so vibrant and sparkling mere hours before?
Her beautiful gray eyes, so cool and calculating, were shut tight in a way that did not project peace.
She looked like she was fighting, at war with the strange and terrible goings-on of the frail human body.
He remembered that look. It came back to him so quickly he did not have time to shore up his defenses.
The memory dragged him down until he was there again, a doctor’s hand on his shoulder tugging him out of the room, so many hands on his shoulders trying to clear him away, telling him he could not help her, only they could help her.
Of course I can help her, he’d tried to tell them, but his words had been drowned out by the harsh lights and harsher reality.
She’d been dying then. She might very well be dying now.
His Rose, this Rose, perfect, inimitable Rose could be here one moment and gone the next.
But God, there was so much that he needed to say—so much that he should have tried harder to say even when she could not hear him over the volume of her own grief, cranked as it was to a level that shattered her eardrums.
The monitors beeped and whirred. “Rose,” he said.
He slipped into the chair beside her bed.
“Rose.” He felt lucky in that moment, that her name had followed her when she’d taken the pill.
Despite the desire to forget, and despite dropping the last name that had cemented them as a family, she’d kept the name that her father had blessed her with—had thought would be so perfect for her.
That had to mean something. It all had to mean something, or else why endure so much pain?
Then, she coughed.
His body tensed. “Rose?” he whispered. “Rose, are you in there?”
She wheezed.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
She turned her head to one side, eyes still shut tight.
The machines didn’t beep or whir any louder.
A good sign, he thought. But she was pale—alarmingly pale—and it made him wonder if this stability was only a lull before everything collapsed again.
Before her body betrayed her a second time, draining blood faster than her organs could keep up.
If that was the case, he didn’t have much time to say what he needed to say. He didn’t have much time at all.
He took her hand. “Hey, you,” he said. “It’s me.
You know me, at least a little. Some part of you knows me almost as well as you know yourself.
I’m just not sure how deep she’s buried.
So in case you forgot, I want to tell you about the first time I ever saw you.
It was fourteen years ago. Can you believe that?
” He let the weight of it settle in the room.
It always sounded like so long when he said it out loud, but it never felt long enough.
“The first weekend of freshman year, and God, did you look out of place at that party. Everyone around you just blended in with the scenery, but you—Rose, you had this magnetism. It scared me. It still scares me. You were wearing this black dress, and it wasn’t like me to walk right over to a beautiful girl and start talking, but I had this feeling that still haunts me.
I knew that meeting you would change my life. And it has.”
She turned her head again, this time toward Landon. The machines held steady.
“You sparkled everywhere you went. Bright enough that people noticed. Always a little bit brighter just for me. The day you—” He caught himself, stumbled over words he had to be brave enough to say.
“The day you almost died was one of the worst days of my life. It doesn’t change anything that it’s the day Cordelia was born.
You’ll think there’s something wrong with me for saying that.
I think you’re right. I don’t know if I was a good father.
A good father would have been able to parse darkness from light.
I couldn’t. I was groping around in the dark at even the idea of losing you.
“But you were a good mother. The kind people write books about. I mean it. Even when we lost each other for a moment, you wrapped her world in starlight so she wouldn’t feel it.
You know Cordelia. Some part of you still knows her.
That gives me hope. Because, Rose, she was perfect.
She had your magnetism. I mean, babies know how to capture attention in a room, but she didn’t even have to try.
She had your eyes, too. Maybe they would have turned, eventually, but I will never forget those gray eyes.
Sometimes they scared me. Like yours did. ”
Landon looked down at his hands. They were shaking like the last leaves of fall, just before a winter wind tears them loose.
“I’m trapped, Rose,” he said. “I am fucking trapped. I don’t feel like I’ve aged since that day.
I feel like I’m stuck there, forced to watch it happen over and over but not allowed to change anything.
I can think of a thousand ways to stop it, but I can’t.
I can only watch. Over and over. Fuck—” He was crying now.
“I don’t want to hurt like this anymore,” he said, clutching his chest. “I don’t want to feel anymore.
I want to be like you. I want to feel nothing.
I just want to feel nothing.” He took a breath, willing himself to calm down.
Someone was going to hear him and kick him out of this room before he said what he’d come to say.
“I was ready to do it, Rose.” Another long, slow breath.
“I was ready to take the pill. I swore to you over and over that I wouldn’t, but, Rose, I wanted to forget.
I wanted to forget more than almost anything. So I started writing everything down.”
Sometimes Landon could still feel the ache in his wrists and hands from the hours he’d spent hunched over the computer.
In the tradition of so many of his favorite storytellers, he had begun at the beginning, on the night he’d seen Rose in the black dress.
He’d tried to find the words to explain the way she’d consumed his every waking thought in the days after, the way she’d cemented herself as one of his core reasons for being, so quickly it scared him.
He’d painstakingly recorded their first date right down to the food that had nearly spiced him out, and the way she’d engaged with his peculiarities head-on—even seemed to like him for it.
He’d laughed out loud recalling the events that had led to their very public first kiss, and cried remembering the events that prompted him to blurt out “I love you” for the first time.
Words streamed out of him describing the ups and downs of the New York City years, the way they grew together, supported each other, figured out who they were meant to be even if it meant shedding old dreams and finding new ones.
He spilled what he knew was too much ink painting a picture of their wedding day, and knew that he could try to describe what it felt like to see her walk down the aisle for one thousand nights and would still come up short. Then, he stopped.
“I kept all the good,” he said. “And, Rose, there was so much good. It was amazing, reading it all back. It kept me going when you left. And I knew—I just knew—that if you read it, too, you’d understand.
So when the story was as perfect as I could make it on my own, I wrote you a letter.
‘Wrote,’ not ‘typed.’ You used to find that sort of thing completely unromantic.
You wanted my letters to you to be something that you could lose and never recover.
So that’s what I did. I made it completely impossible for me to ever remember the exact words, even though I know they were good.
Great, even. Those words were going to change everything. ”
Rose’s eyes twitched.
“You weren’t you anymore when you didn’t read the letter.
I’m going to butcher it now because your boyfriend bashed my face in and I can’t think straight.
But I told you what I’d done. And I told you my plan: that we could take the pill, together.
And if we took it together, at the exact same time, we could start over.
We could start from the beginning, but not lose everything that made us us.
Because I’d kept it all safe. All of the good, and none of the bad. I wrote it all down.”
A finger pulsed on Rose’s left hand. She opened her mouth, her lips cracking at the corners.
“Shh,” he said. “Save your strength. We can talk later. We have time.”
She shook her head left, then right, and he could see how much the movement pained her. The words came, gasping and labored: “It’s not our story… if it’s not the whole story… Landon.”