But I didn’t get to finish. With a light stirring of wind, he was gone.
Chapter 66
Forever Haunted
As soon as Karson left, my body sagged to the bed as if all energy was drained out of it. I curled into a ball on my side. The rain tapped on the windows as grief smashed through me. My eyes fell to my emerald ring on the bedside table. My mother would have known how to best support Karson now, she would have known exactly the right thing to say. No one would ever replace my mother, but Mary was as close as anyone had ever come.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the prickling behind them.
When my mother died, my best friend, Kelly, said I’d get over the grief. It had been over four years since she died, and I could officially inform her you didn’t. If I was speaking to her. However, I would break my no-speaking rule to officially inform her to go fuck herself.
Grief was a funny thing. At first, it would slam through you, splitting your heart in half, and you would cry, or rage, and scream about the injustice of it all. Then when the pain got too much to handle and your entire being grew numb, you would move through the world smiling when you were meant to smile, answering when you were meant to answer, meeting expectations of the judging eyes. Outwardly, you were the same.But inside, once the numbness passed, it would feel as if a tsunami had roared through you, your bones were flayed bare, your flesh pulverized, soaked earth and debris clogging your chest.
You couldn’t just get over grief—you couldn’t just open some door and kick it out. Instead, you absorbed it until it became a part of who you were, turning your body into a rotted house, forever haunted.
But you could learn how to close the doors on the ghosts. Mostly.
I was dragged from sleep by a fluttering of ice-cold air in the room. The soft thud of sandshoes on floorboards. The drawer sliding slowly open. I recognized the sound.
Mary doing housework.
My eyes flew open into a syrupy twilight. Mary stood at the dresser, her back to me, packing away clothing.
My heart stopped beating as my breath choked in my lungs.
My rational mind knew that she couldn’t be standing there, dressed in her peach-colored blouse. And yet I could see her. I heard the drawer. Felt the flutter of air as she opened the door.
A whining sound tumbled out of my lips.
She turned around and smiled, her eyes warm as the spring grass. She couldn’t be here, she was dead, her soul gone to another realm, her body lying naked and cold in a morgue.
And yet?—
She was standing here, that terrible, giant bleeding eye on her blood-stained blouse. But I barely took notice of that because I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. Karson’s blood had worked.
Mary was alive.
Tears trickled down my cheeks, my hand trembling as I sat up and reached for her.
“Mary,” I cried. “Is that really you?”
“Who else would it be.” She smiled, crinkling the corners of her eyes.
“Oh.” The word came out as a croak. “Oh God, I love you.”
The smile vanished as she looked to the door as if someone had called her name and back again urgently. “Find him,” she said, her voice seeming to float to my ears. “Find him and forgive him.”
Chills crawled over my body as if I’d been dunked in ice. “What?—”
Mary vanished into thin air.
For a moment, I was frozen to the spot, staring at the empty space where she had just stood. I looked around the room wildly, but there was no sign of her. The door was closed; the drawer was closed.
Find him and forgive him.The words echoed through my head.
What the hell did that mean?
The chills kept crawling like a swarm of frozen cockroaches up and down my entire body. Did I just dream the whole thing? I felt shocked, scared. Worried. But this time, I trusted the cold dread of knowing. I lurched out of bed.
