“Sometimes,” she mutters. “Do you miss your family?”
I cross my arms again—maybe to hold back emotion or maybe to feel like an embrace, I’m not entirely sure. “I miss my mom every day,” I say. “That will never change, and it will never get easier.”
“I’m sorry,” she breathes.
“Thank you, but she was happy,” I tell her, my lips flinching at the memory. “Even when she was hooked up on chemo, and even when she asked me and my brother to shave her head, she was so fucking happy.” I chuckle. “We all shavedour heads with her, but Andrew, being the idiot that he is, shaved his eyebrows too.”
“I remember that.” Natalia laughs—the sound raspy just like her voice, andbeautiful. My favorite song. It always sounds like what a hug feels like on a bad day. “Andrew was always an idiot.”
I laugh with her. “Well, I miss him sometimes,” I say. “He goes to Penn now, and my dad is down there with him.”
Her eyes soften and she watches me for a quiet moment, the grief coming out of me and her own sadness pouring out of her. Quietly, she says, “You miss them a lot.”
I lower my chin. “I get it though. For them, our hometown was like…a haunting memory of her. Everywhere they went, her ghost was there.”
“And you don’t see her ghost?”
“I do.” I smile, emotion prickling my eyes. “But she doesn’t haunt me.”
“She visits.”
“She visits,” I echo.
“That’s…really beautiful, Rowan,” she says. “I never thought you’d be this…enlightened.”
I guffaw and go to retrieve her empty bowl. “Thanks.”
“Thank you,” she murmurs. “For dinner.”
“That was your dinner?”
She laughs, sad and mostly to herself. “And breakfast and lunch,” she mutters. “Thank you. It was delicious.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Nothing.” She shrugs. “I just forgot to eat today.”
I blink and tense. I guessed as much but it’s still upsetting. “This was the only thing you’ve had to eat today?”
Natalia nods and gathers her things, hopping off the stool. “Yeah. Anyway, thank you. For the food and my dads. I owe you croissants and lattes.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say quickly.
“You’re right.” She smirks. “You did it to yourself.”
“I never mind my business,” I muse.
“Never,” she agrees, amusement dancing on her plump lips.
“Do you know where they are now?”
Natalia pushes a rogue curl behind her gold-bedecked ear, intricate piercings filling her lobes. If I hadn’t done my research, I wouldn’t know that she has one in eachtragus, a hoop in herrook, a double stack in her lobe after the first hole, and a hoop in herconch.Her other ear has a rose gold hoop in itsdaith,which she got when we were eighteen, three in her lobe, a stud in her forward helix, and three gold hoops stacked on each other in her helix.
I also know she has a semi-colon tattooed behind her right ear.
“I got a postcard yesterday,” Natalia says quietly, drawing my attention away from her piercings and back to her eyes. “Toronto.”
I snort. “So they really went to Canada.”
