“Oh, hello. ” She smiled. “No, I would know you two anywhere even though we never met.”
The twins looked at each other. Yes, it was a little bit strange that she would be speaking to people she didn’t know? Wasn’t it?
“Your love was all over her. I could feel it. So perfectly meant to be with the children. Why yes, it’s the red hair.”
Rosalind jolted and met my gaze. Who was she talking to? Did she think—or was she seeing?—my parents?
Barrett squeezed my hand tighter. “It’s okay. It really is,” he whispered. “Whatever is happening… it’s a good thing. I mean, I’d rather have people around me as this happened than not, even if it’s only in my head.”
That was true.
Dina had known loneliness when her parents died, for a little while. She had known it again when some of the people she was seeing now had perished in a car accident. But she was a Lent and they always turned up for one another, particularly when it mattered.
My first tear slipped out of my eyes, and I batted it away. This wasn’t about me. This was about Dina who had adopted me into her life last June and changed everything.
If I lived past my eighteenth birthday, it was quite literally because of her. If I got to love the four Lent brothers for the rest of my life, it was because of her. I had her diaries. I would do what she had asked me to do. It was the least I could do.
There wassilence in the kitchen except for the sounds of water dripping. Eventually someone—maybe Daniel—got up and messed with the faucet to make it stop.
“Someone has to write an obituary.” Kit looked at Rosalind and then over toward where I sat with my guys. “Julian, could you do that?”
He rapidly blinked. “What?”
“It’s four in the morning.” Rosalind touched Kit’s arm. “Let’s do this a little later today. Okay? Noon. Ask Jules at noon or later.”
He nodded. “Sure.”
There turned out to be a lot of things that had to happen after someone died. My father didn’t have an obituary, not really. A statement—two lines—of death in a local Colorado newspaper where we hadn’t been mentioned. That was because he wasn’t real, had been hiding who he was. My mother had one. Her family had done it. But it had been vague. If Julian wrote Dina’s obituary, it was going to be beautiful.
“Sure, I’ll do it, Kit.” He nodded. “I may need to ask you for some details. Dates. Things like that.”
“Yep.”
We walked in silence back to our house. It was raining, a cool drip, and for once I didn’t mind it. My body was numb, and I could at least feel the coolness on my head.
“Anyone hungry?” I looked around, not really expecting a yes, and the shakes of their head confirmed it.
When we climbed into bed, I was between Phoenix and Barrett. Minutes passed and no one had spoken or fallen asleep. There was just oppressive silence in the room.
“I don’t think she expected this to happen so fast,” Julian whispered. “When she arrived she thought she’d have time. A little bit of it anyway but maybe it’s better.”
Maybe it was.
The night—or was it the day—ticked on.
I must have fallen asleep.We all did because I woke up and they were all still asleep. The clock read noon. The familiarsounds of the Lents sleeping were all around me. Phoenix’s hand was tangled in my hair, but he looked like he slept peacefully. Barrett had his legs over mine, essentially pinning me to the bed. He murmured in his sleep, which was probably what woke me. Sometimes he did that, and usually I slept through it but not this afternoon.
The twins snored on opposite sides of the other bed. They were really out. I stared at the ceiling. I could lie here, or I could get up and do what she asked me to do. I could read her journals.
Somehow I managed to get out from under Barrett and untangled myself from Phoenix without waking them. I went to the bathroom, cleaned up, and brewed coffee before I sat down to read. All of it felt mechanical, like I couldn’t think of anything except the actual movement I needed to do those things. I was a robot—I could perform tasks.
But I opened the journal and caught my breath. Could I actually do this? I hadn’t considered I might not be able to read her at all. She was gone. Okay. I was doing this. I just had to pull it together. That was all. I didn’t do grief well, and I was going to bet the Lents didn’t either. We were all kind of a mess on a good day. So I had to do this because the nicest woman I had ever known asked me to.
Of course she had been big on me not stressing myself out. Telling me not to read it during the summer when she wanted me to have fun. She might not insist on the day of her death that I open the journals and do this.
I steeled my shoulders. I could be a turtle, or I could take the world by the horns the way she would have. She’d learned to make it move for her. She was going to teach me how, and even though that hadn’t happened in person maybe she still could.
Okay. I was just going to do this.
