He dropped his hands. And that was bad, because it meant he was staring directly at her now. He could see everything she was doing, and oh boy oh boy everything she was doing felt likewaytoo much. She couldn’t seem to breathe normally; she was pretty sure she’d started trembling.
And not just because he’d so casually accepted the concept of earning it.
No. It was because all she wanted to do was tell him he already had.
That it was enough to know he wanted to. To know he believed that his contrition alone didn’t just grant it.
And the effort it took to not say any of that wasintense. It felt like trying to hold back a truck with one hand. She was sweating within seconds, head swimming with all the reasons she should go ahead. But also all the reasons it would be a terrible idea.The moment you let him in, he can hurt you again, her mind whispered.
Which was true, she knew it was true.
But god, it tasted so bitter. And in the end, she had to saysomething.
“Maybe it’s not me you have to earn it from. Maybe whatever is out there has to decide, and you know what? I’m willing to bet that they think you’re doing okay. That you’re doing a good job. You’re trying, and I have to believe in a higher being or beings that is okay with trying,” she said, wincing a little when her words got too close to her own feelings. But glad anyway that she’d done it. She’d told him he was doing good things in some sort of stitched-together way. Then got to tell him this too: “And not just for you. For me too. Because I know that I can’t always do the right thing, exactly. Not even if I want to.”
Though of course he couldn’t quite get what she meant by the last part.
“You always do the right thing, Cassie,” he said, soft as anything.
While she died a little inside.
“No I don’t. Sometimes I just. I can’t.”
“But I bet you have your reasons.”
“Maybe. And if I don’t, well. Guess we’re sitting next to each other in hell.”
She laughed. Because she was joking, obviously. But when she looked at him, he wasn’t rolling his eyes at the gag. Instead, his expression was all warmth and surprise and delight.
“That is weirdly the most comforting thing you’ve said so far,” he said.
And oh, thewaythat made herfeel. It lingered in her, all the way up to the moment when he had to go. Then once he had—once she’d shut the front door on his retreating back—she leanedagainst it, and said aloud the thing his happiness had made her want to say.
“God-like entity, if you are indeed out there please know that no matter what I say to him, I truly forgive Seth Stanley Brubaker. So whatever you do to me for keeping that fact from him, you shouldn’t do it to him. I accept his sorry, wholeheartedly, and in that way spare him whatever hell there might be.”
CHAPTER NINE
She didn’t expect him to show up every day. But he did. At the same time each morning too. Like they had penciled it into planners neither of them actually owned.Every morning at nine thirty, meet up with standard enemy to have an enormous existential crisis,she thought.
Even though she wasn’t sure he was her standard enemy anymore.
Or that what they were having was an existential crisis.
It felt more like being with the friend you longed to have back, sharing things you never believed could be possible. Though of course, that was overwhelming in its own way. Sometimes something he’d said would hit her, while she was in the middle of doing something mundane like mopping the floor. And it would feel as if her heart had snapped to a stop. Twice she had to clutch her chest to make sure it was still going.
But even after she was reassured, the sensation of everything being so heart-stopping wouldn’t fade. Of course it wouldn’t. The veil between worlds was really starting to peel back for her now—and oh, she could see why Seth didn’t mind the downsides of any of it.
Why would he, when it was this awe-inspiring to behold?
She looked in the mirror in the morning, and somehow nothing about her was the same. One second she was as ordinary as could be. Then the next that glow he’d talked about would suddenly reveal itself in a faint shimmer of gold.
And that wasn’t the only amazing sight.
There was also what she saw when she went outside in her socks to grab the paper. The low hang of a delicious fall mist—at first a soft gray, like always. Then suddenly it was shot through with other colors. Wild colors that never existed in the human world. There were slivers of deep blue, and streaks of purple, all swirling and seething and intertwining.Beautiful, it seemed to her, in a way that made her heart feel like it was bursting out of her chest.
And it did it even harder when she came back inside, and spoke into the empty air of the house. “Gram,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Then of course expected no answer at all.
But she got one. She got one. She saw the keys on her laptop being depressed all on their own just as she stepped toward it, open on the kitchen table, ready for her to send that email to Nancy to thank her for the fruit basket. And after a second of holding her breath, there it was. Her beloved Gram’s words.
