I hesitate. It’s one thing to read poetry, another to admit which poems you need at midnight. “Elias Shaw.”
She stops walking. Actually stops, right there in the middle of the path, rain falling around us. “You’re kidding.”
“What?”
“Elias Shaw’s the only poet I’ve ever dog-eared.” Her voice carries something I can’t quite identify. Recognition, maybe. “He was one of the authors I found after my parents died. His stuff about carrying death like a weight?—”
“Like it’s something you pack and unpack in every new room,” I finish.
Her eyes go wide. In the darkness, with the rain between us, they look like deep water I could dive into. “You know ‘Morning Inventory’?”
“By heart.”
We stand there staring at each other, rain soaking through our clothes, and something shifts. My pulse kicks up, blood rushing in my ears louder than the rain.
“Which one were you reading?” she asks. “The other night, I mean.”
“‘Letter to My Former Self.’” I’m embarrassed by how raw my voice sounds. “The part about forgiveness being a house you build room by room.”
She nods. “That’s the one that got me through the first year. After.”
She doesn’t say after what, doesn’t need to. I know what happened to her parents.
“I used to read it every morning,” she continues. “Like a prayer. Like instructions for surviving.”
We start walking again, but slower now, like we’re both trying to make this last. Our shoulders brush, and neither of us moves away.
“Shaw put words to things I couldn’t name,” I tell her. “Like it was okay to not have answers. To just... exist in the questions.”
She’s quiet for a moment, considering. “You write like that. Like you’re just trying to understand something true.”
“You read my book.” It’s not really a question. Her voice tells me she’s not talking about excerpts.
“I read your book,” she confirms. “All of it. Cover to cover. Several times, actually.”
“I always feel like I should apologize when people say that.” I push wet hair back. “It’s not exactly uplifting.”
“No, but it’s honest.”
I feel exposed suddenly, like she’s seen me naked.
“Along with Shaw, it was what I needed,” she continues.”The grief essay particularly. And the one about storms. They made me feel less insane when everything else felt like lying.”
“When did you read it?” I need to know. Need to understand how long she’s been carrying my words around.
“First time? When I was twenty. Susan lent me her copy.” She smiles at the memory. “She was so proud. Kept telling everyone her son wrote a book, like you’d invented the concept of writing itself.”
“She would do that.” I have to swallow against the sudden tightness in my throat.
“Last time was a few months ago. Bad night. The kind where the walls feel too close and too far away at the same time. I pulled it off the shelf and read it straight through until sunrise.”
She’s taking me apart with this confession. The thought of her reading my raw attempts at understanding loss, alone in her cabin struggling with her own grief, opens something in me I’ve kept closed.
“I thought I was writing to make sense of loss,” I admit. “Turns out, I was just writing not to disappear. Never expected the articles, the readings. People wanting me to explain what I meant when half the time I was just trying to survive the page.” I let out a breath. “I even threw my copy in the Sound on my first day back into town. Like some dramatic movie scene.”
She doesn’t look shocked. Just thoughtful. “Why?”
She waits, giving me room to answer or not. The rain fillsthe silence, patient. Maybe that freedom is what makes me speak. Or maybe it’s just her. Something about Maren bypasses my usual defenses, like she has a key I didn’t know I’d given out. “I think because it stopped being mine. Became something else entirely. A product. Locked me into a version of myself I don’t recognize anymore.” I run a hand through my wet hair, feel the rain immediately replace what I’ve pushed away. “The guy who wrote those essays was twenty-five and half-drunk on grief and rage. I’m not him anymore. But nobody wants to hear that.”
