Tears slipped from her eyes, and she pressed her free hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.
“But it doesn’t help not to talk about her,” I continued. “I know it seems like it does, but it doesn’t, because she’s always there anyway. Don’t you feel her?”
She was crying openly now but she nodded. “Every second of every day.”
I squeezed her hand. “I do too. I even hear her.”
Her face lit up through her tears. “You do?”
“All the time.” I laughed through my own tears. “She tells me exactly what she thinks. About everything.”
My mom choked on a laugh. “Sounds like June.”
I nodded. “Yeah, and the more she talks to me the more I realize she’s not gone. I mean, she’s gone. We can’t hug her and stuff. But I don’t know… I feel her everywhere, and I don’t want to forget her, Mom. I want torememberher. And I think we all need that.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. June would want us to keep living. As for the rest…”
She was stopped mid-sentence by Olivia, rushing toward us with a blue-gray bundle in her hand. “Look! Look what I found! And it’s brand new! It still has the tags!”
My mom stood. “What is it?”
“It’s a comforter from that store in the mall,” Olivia said. “The nice one. And it’s brand new, Mom!”
My mom checked the original price tag, still dangling from the label. “Wow, what a deal!”
“Right?” Olivia hesitated. “And it’s June’s favorite color.”
My mom swallowed hard. Then she smiled. “You know what? You’re right. ThatwasJune’s favorite color. She always said blue by itself was boring…”
“And gray by itself was even more boring,” I added.
“But together they were something special.” We said the last part together, all three of us.
There was a long beat of silence. I think maybe Olivia was waiting for my mom to run from the room, which was what she sometimes did when remembering June was too much for her.
And me? I was waiting for my mom to retreat again, to busy herself with something else like paying for the comforter so she didn’t have to think too long about June and how she wasn’t with us.
Not in person anyway.
But this time my mom didn’t do either of those things. She pulled us into a hug instead, Olivia and me. And then we were allcrying because we missed June and she was never coming back and things were never going to be the way they were, but we had each other.
And together, we were still something special.
You did good, M.
44
ETHAN
I liftedthe thirty-pound dumbbells over my head and tried to focus on the motion, but it was all wrong. Instead of being in one of the high-end gyms in one of my many high-end homes — or one of Dimitri’s hideouts — I was stuck in a nondescript hotel room.
In a fucking Marriott, of all places.
It wasn’t my usual scene in the city — that would have been the Four Seasons or the Plaza — and as usual it was all Maeve Haver’s fault.
At first, I hadn’t believed my eyes when I’d spotted her through the crowd at Apex. But then I’d seen Barm Montgomery, who was hard to miss, and I’d known it was her.
I’d faltered, had almost tripped over the guards assigned to me by the conference organizers, guards that were required under the conference’s insurance policy because apparently I was a “high-risk asset.”
