Diego scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’ll lock the yard down,” he muttered, already halfway to motion.
August’s thumb moved at the base of my neck, slow circles, pulling me back into my body. “We go see Julia tomorrow,” he said, not a question. “Together.”
“Yes,” I said. “She won’t remember half of it when she wakes up. We put eyes on her. We make sure she eats.” He kissed my hair like he remembered how it made me melt twenty years ago. It still did. But this time, the familiar gesture couldn’t put back the pieces of my heart.
I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and stood. My legs held. Barely. Good enough.
Jackson Morgan was not my blood. He was mine anyway. I’d kept his mother alive for sixteen years out of love and spite and stubbornness, and I would keep doing it whether she deserved it or not. I’d keep Holly upright. I’d keep the Saints pointed outward. I’d keep breathing until a phone rang with an answer that wasn’t a sentence written without emotion.
Across an ocean, a boy I’d raised had vanished into the kind of dark you couldn’t light with a lamp.
Three weeks was a long time to hold your breath.
We locked the yard down, kept the phone charged, learned to live with the sound of it not ringing. Lawson called when he could, said all the words he was allowed to say and none that mattered.
“Ongoing efforts.”
“No updates at this time.”
“We will notify.”
I scrubbed Julia’s kitchen twice a week now, fed her, watched her read the same line of his casualty folder over and over until the ink should’ve worn off. Sometimes she woke up clawing at the air and called his name like she could hook him back from wherever the Marines had filed him. I still tucked blankets. I still took out the bottles. I still left notes.
Maria knew by the second day. I told her behind the bar with the dishwasher humming so loud it covered the first sound that ripped out of her. She put a hand over her mouth and then over her heart and then over Jewel’s head like she could shield her from a story she wouldn’t remember and never, ever needed to live. Diego took her home. She came back the next morning with food and a determination that frightened me more than her tears.
Holly and Dalton were still in Athens, chewing through finals and texting updates when they remembered to breathe. I watched their bubbles appear and disappear and wanted to put my hands around the world’s throat for not understanding timing. We agreed that we wouldn’t tell her in the middle of a test in a town that wasn’t home. We would not teach her to fear every phone vibration for the rest of her life.
I had never been at a loss. Not on a job site, not in a meeting, not in a hospital corridor. I couldn’t find language for this. I tried to rehearse it and the words stuck like dry bread. How did you tell the girl you loved like the daughter you never had that the boy she gave her heart to was a line in a book written in careful navy blue?
So I went to Ruth. I had never been to Holly’s home but it was just down the road.
She opened the door before I knocked. Mothers did that. She looked fine—pearls, pressed blouse, a list in her hand. David sat at the island, a massive marble thing that was too beautiful to bare witness to the news I was bringing.
Ruth set the list down and missed the counter. Paper slid to the floor. Her mouth opened, then closed, then trembled the way a dam trembled when it already was feeling the cracks. David came around the side and held onto as her legs threatened to give out.
“No,” she said softly, as if politeness could bargain with the world. “No, he…Hannah, he just left.” She blinked hard, like she could blink the sentence away. “He was at my table. He said Thanksgiving.”
“I know,” I said, and because there was nothing else to offer, “We’re going to do this right.”
She nodded, a small, helpless motion, then pressed a linen napkin flat with both palms until the blue stitching left marks on her skin.
David rested his chin on top her head, and looked between us. “When?”
“After finals. When they come home.” The word scraped on the way out. “At the clubhouse.”
She took a few wobbly steps towards me, putting a hand on my wrist like she might fall without it and then pulled herself up straight, the way women did when they decided the only way out was through. “We’ll be ready.”
I sincerely doubted that.
? Holly ?
We murdered our last blue books and sprinted for Sally like she was a lifeboat. Dalton folded himself into the passenger seat with the grace of a moose on roller skates.
“Your car was built for dolls,” he groaned, knees practically in his throat. “I’ve been living like a sardine all season and this is still a hate crime.”
“Cry more,” I said, patting the faded black dash. “Sally’s a lady. She doesn’t accommodate linebackers or egos.”
“My spine is going to resemble a question mark.”
