I stared instead.
How could she finally sob now, after all the missed chances? She hadn’t even noticed he was gone.
The rifle party fired. Three volleys split the sky like hammers. The first ripped through my ribs. At the second I whimpered, a sound I didn’t recognize as mine. At the third, time slowed. The blaze in my ears, the ache in my jaw, the way that flag looked impossibly small in hands that had not been there the way Hannah’s had.
Taps followed. The notes crawled under my skin and burned a map I didn’t want.
Then the living did the small mechanical kindnesses we do when we can’t do anything real. Heads bowed, leather creaked, uniforms rustled. Saints filed past with palms folded—prayer or oath, I couldn’t tell. Marines posted crisp salutes. People touched shoulders.I’m sorry.Tissues. Nods.
I should have moved with them. I should have let my knees bend and go with the stream, let people close around me like a net.
I didn’t.
The photo, the folded flag, the battlefield cross—the choreography of it—was too final, too neat. I stood frozen, a statue in a ritual I rejected.
Dalton eased an arm around my shoulders and tried to steer me. “C’mon, blondie,” he said, voice low and wrecked. “We gotta go.”
I pulled back. “I’m not leaving.” My voice was small but iron. My knees shook; I planted them anyway.
“Holly—” He tried soft.
“No.” The word came out raw. “I’m not leaving him.”
He tried reason—sleep, home, not falling apart in public. I didn’t hear a word. My hands were fists. My throat was rope.
The sound bubbled up—anger, grief, animal and human and infinite—and I let it. It scraped out of me and then tore free, a scream that split the afternoon. I said his name like I could pull him back through the air. I said it because naming him felt like holding him for one more heartbeat. I turned and hit Dalton’s chest with both fists.
Why are you making me leave?
Why don’t you understand?
He promised.
He wouldn’t just break that promise.
People turned. Momma Laverne held onto Maria who held onto her daughter, and I saw the way Diego angled hisbody around theirs. Mothers set hands on small shoulders. Mac’s voice came from behind, stern and impossible and kind. August’s face went heavy and furious and, somehow, tender.
Dalton’s hand tightened on my elbow. He tried to walk me. I wrenched free. “I am not leaving,” I sobbed. “I am not leaving him. I will not leave what’s left.”
My legs quit, and I fell into Hannah. She caught me without thinking, one arm around my waist, the other smoothing my hair like I was a child. My father slid in at my side; my mother flanked me. August took the flag from Julia—no, nottook,lifted, reverent as a relic—and carried it to the car like a second procession inside the first.
And I thought, wild and useless:I will never get to tell him just how strong it is. How strong I am because of it. My love for him.
Saints started their engines then, a low, guttural choir that filled the place with sound—a howled acknowledgment, not celebration. With every rev they told the world Jackson Morgan had been theirs too.
I didn’t move. My face stayed in Hannah’s shoulder, stealing her warmth and steel because there was nowhere else to land. The bugle faded. The bikes bled into the road. People left in small clusters, their condolences shaped like kind lies.
When the taillights finally blinked away and the silence settled, it was loud enough to hear my own blood. The flag would be placed. The papers would run. Letters would be written. Rituals would stitch themselves to the calendar.
On that damp grass, under a sky that hadn’t decided whether to cry, I mourned everything that could’ve been.
Chapter Thirty
? Holly ?
At some point, somehow, I found myself back at the clubhouse. I sat at the table, clutching a cup of coffee. Someone had shoved it into my hands, but I couldn’t find it in me to take a sip. So, I sat. Staring at it. The steam rose from the cup, and the smell…my mind went back to the first time Dalton had brought me a coffee at school. When he had shoved a mountain of a blended, caffeinated goodness into my hands and permanently planted himself in my life. Becoming my friend. Because Jackson had asked him to. Suddenly, the coffee repulsed me and I shoved it away angrily.
Maria came up behind me, claiming the seat to my right and pushing a plate of lasagna into the spot the coffee had vacated. I frowned at it. Why did the entire fucking world seem to think casseroles and lasagnas were the funeral blues cure-all?
