Vera nods slowly. “I know. That’s the trap, isn’t it? They always find the one thing you can’t sacrifice and use it against you.” She finishes her coffee, sets the cup down with a soft clink. “Just...remember who you are. No matter what happens. No matter what they take from you or what they offer you. Remember.”
It’s almost exactly what Gramms said to me on the phone three weeks before she died.
“Remember who you are, Raven. No matter what happens.”
“I will,” I say.
Vera stands, pulling her coat tighter around her thin frame. She drops a few bills on the table, enough to cover both coffees and a generous tip. “I have to go. Staying in one place too long makes me nervous these days.”
“Thank you for the journal and for meeting me.”
She pauses, looks down at me. “Your grandmother loved you, you know. In her way. She just didn’t know how to show it except by preparing you to survive.”
A response catches in my throat, so I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
Vera turns to leave, then stops and looks back. “And Raven? If you find out why she did this, call me. Don’t try to handle it alone. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She nods once, sharply and finally, then walks out of the diner. The bell over the door jingles behind her, cheerful and incongruous.
I sit there for a long time after she’s gone, staring at the journal on the table. Outside, the sun is setting, diffusing the grimy windows in shades of orange and gold. The diner empties slowly, the lunch rush long over, the dinner crowd not yet arrived. Dolores refills my coffee without asking, doesn’t comment on the fact that I’m just sitting here, not eating, not moving.
Finally, I open the journal.
My hands shake.
The first page is dated twenty years ago. The handwriting is Gramm’s perfect flowing cursive. The sight of it makes my throat tight.
I start to read.
The entries are clinical at first. Dates. Locations. Notes about contracts she broke, sins she absorbed. Professional observations about the houses she visited, Gold, Fury, Ruin. Descriptions of the angels, their domains, the way time moved differently in their spaces.
And then, about halfway through, the tone shifts.
The gold is beautiful, one entry reads.Everything in the House of Gold gleams and shines and catches the light. But beauty is just another cage. The more beautiful the bars, the less you notice you’re trapped.
I stop reading.
The words blur on the page, and my eyes burn. My chest is tight, constricted, like someone’s wrapped iron bands around my ribs and slowly tightens them.
This is her voice. Not the cold grandmother who raised me with stern lessons and sharper silences. This is... raw. Real.The voice of someone who was scared and angry and trying desperately to understand something that terrified her.
I flip forward a few pages. More entries. More observations. Her handwriting got slightly less controlled, more urgent.
They’re not telling me everything. I can feel it. There’s something underneath, something they’re hiding.
Another page.
I made a mistake. I thought I could control this. Thought I could walk into their world and walk back out unchanged. I was wrong.
I close the journal.
Carefully. Slowly. Like it might shatter if I’m not gentle.
I can’t do this. Not here. Not now.
Reading her words, seeing her fear written out in that handwriting, it makes her death real in a way it hasn’t been for the last six months. Makes the loss sharp and immediate and unbearable.
