"No." Barely a whisper. "We didn't."
"I want to do something. Plant a tree. Set up a scholarship. Something that means they're not forgotten." He squeezed my hand. "Is that crazy?"
"It's not crazy." I stepped closer. Wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face against his chest.
"It's exactly right."
"A scholarship, maybe. For kids who want to be firefighters. In Emma's name." His arms came around me, pulling me close.
"And a tree." His voice was thick. "For our baby. Somewhere we can visit. Somewhere we can sit and remember."
"I'd like that." I pulled back enough to look at him. Reached up to touch his face. "I'd like that a lot."
We stood like that for a while. The mist drifting around us. The city sounds distant and muffled.
Two people who'd carried grief alone for too long, finally learning how to carry it together.
We walked back to the car slowly.
No rush. No urgency. Just the two of us and the quiet morning and the weight of everything we'd survived. The mist was starting to lift, pale sunlight breaking through the clouds, turning the wet grass silver.
Grief came in waves. Some days you barely felt it. Other days it knocked you off your feet, in grocery stores and at traffic lights and in the middle of conversations about nothing at all.
It never really left. I understood that now.
But it didn't have to destroy you.
Rebecca had let hers become a fire. I'd let mine become a wall. Somewhere along the way, we'd both gotten lost in it.
I didn't want to be lost anymore.
Garrett opened the car door for me. I slid into the passenger seat, watched him walk around to the driver's side.
He moved differently now. Lighter, somehow. Like he'd set something down.
Maybe we both had.
"Ready to go home?" he asked, starting the engine.
Home. His apartment that was now our apartment. The couch where I fell asleep waiting for him. The kitchen where he'd asked me to stay.
The bed where we woke up tangled together every morning.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm ready."
He reached over. Took my hand. Held it the whole way home.
The city passed by outside the windows. Buildings and traffic and people starting their days, unaware of everything that had happened.
Grief would come again. I knew that.
But I wouldn't be carrying it alone anymore.
That was what Rebecca never had. Someone to hold her hand through the waves. Someone to help her find her way back when the darkness got too deep.
I had Garrett. I had Shane and Maya. Brian and Ava. Rodriguez and his crew, the found family that had accepted me as one of their own.
And sometimes, that was enough.
