That’s when I dipped.
Went home, every time.
I would only ever go with my mum.
Once a year, she would take me to the cemetery on the hill with the old, decrepit church, abandoned to ruins. We wouldeven travel back to Wales for this day, every year, and stay with mum’s parents in that eternally cold and rundown cottage.
Same day, every year—the anniversary of my sister’s death.
I don’t remember her.
I was a baby when Mari died.
I don’t remember her, but I remember my mum grieving her—and she did, all the way until her own life ended.
Then it was just me.
And Bee.
I’ve had friends, but never one like her.
There’s only one person in the whole world, before and now, that I cherish as much as Bee.
My mum.
I made sure she was buried in the grave next to Mari. Dad paid for the headstone, a wire transfer to my account, but I organised everything.
I did everything, the headstone, the funeral, the afterparty where I had to pretend to believe people’s performative condolences.
And I did it all with Bee’s hand holding mine.
But that hand is gone—
I feel the loss of it, the emptiness of the cold threaded through my gloved fingers, as I tread into the place of the dead.
It’s hollower than I remember.
A silence so sprawling, so empty, that it carves something out of me and leaves a deep ache.
I’m so distracted by it that, when the cold warrior tugs me off-path, I stumble into his arm.
The terse glare he shoots at me is curt and icy, and I read it just fine. He’s so done with me, he can’t take another moment of my presence lingering around him, that patience thinning and thinning and thinning—
But, same, you know?
I don’t exactly love having him with me all the fucking time. I never like anyone around me all the time. Not even Bee. It’s exhausting.
So the look I throw up at him, and his impatience with me, is risky.
It’s met with blizzards.
That whitish frost.
I’ve learned it means danger.
His lip twitches, begging to twist into a snarl before he takes a bite right out of my throat—but he doesn’t, thankfully, and instead he yanks me towards the headstone beside him.
My limp almost topples me over.
