It’s not like the others. Not the brief, anonymous transit of a stranger’s light being carried to rest. Hers presses against my heartstrings. Warm. Deliberate. Lingering. As if she’s running her hand along them one last time, checking her work. Making sure the mending holds.
Oh, it holds.
It hurts.
It’s a devastating hurt as she expands into the vast, peaceful stillness where all souls go, and the warmth goes with her, and the room is quiet, and my wife is gone.
I should stand. Should open the door. Should let the children in, let the grief be shared the way grief must be shared.
Instead, I fold forward until my skull rests against the quilt beside her hip. The sound that tears from my chest has no word, no name. It rips through three whole heartstrings with enough force to shred them, but they don’t. They hold. They hold because she made them hold, because she mended them with stubbornness and snowballs and the infuriating, magnificent insistence that love is worth the price.
I grip her hand and press it to my jaw, to my teeth, to the bone she once traced with fearless, curious fingers in a moonlitclearing when she could have screamed and didn’t. Tears streak down my skull—not gold, not silver—just salt and water and grief, pooling in the hollows of my sockets before spilling over in dark, spreading circles on the quilt.
“Gone for a minute, and I already miss you so much,” I choke out, speaking to a body that no longer holds my wife. “How am I supposed to live without you, hmm?”
The room doesn’t answer. The candles gutter. The sun has gone, leaving only the deep blue of twilight and the persistent, aching hum of three heartstrings that refuse to break.
I weep until there’s nothing left. Until my rib bones ache and my throat is raw tendons and the only sound is the creak of my bones as I breathe. Then I lift my head and look at her face: peaceful, smooth, the lines I loved softened by the particular gentleness that only death can offer.
I press my lips to her forehead.
Stand.
Open the door.
They’re waiting. Maren with her arms around her brothers. Rowan with his jaw set in his mother’s line. Edmund with red-rimmed eyes and a sleeping toddler against his shoulder. They look at me—at the tear-streaked skull, at the god who just lost the only thing that ever made eternity bearable—and they don’t flinch.
Maren steps forward. She wraps her arms around my ribcage, around the bones and shadow and the broken, beating heart inside, and holds on.
Then Rowan. Then Edmund, toddler and all.
I stand in the hallway with my children’s arms around me, my wife’s soul resting in the stillness of everything.
And my family holds me.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Death
“You’re hovering.”
“I don’t hover,” I say. “Iloom.There’s a distinction.”
“Loom quieter, then. You’re making the nurses question their life choices.”
She doesn’t look up from the instruments she’s arranging on the tray. Her hands move with a precise, unhurried efficiency I’ve watched in this bloodline for generations, though each pairof hands is somehow new, somehow hers in a way that still catches me off guard.
Her name is Sera. Great-great-great-granddaughter of Rowan, which makes her—I’ve long since lost count of the greats—mine. She has Edmund’s stubbornness. Maren’s jaw. Dark hair pinned in the same practical twist her ancestors have worn for generations, as though the women of this line agreed long ago that vanity is a luxury best left to people with less important things to do.
But her mouth…
That sharp, blunt, takes-no-prisoners mouth that is currently terrorizing the head nurse into a very small corner of the room.
That’s Elara’s.
They all carry a piece of her. A gesture here, a tilt of the head there. The way they frown when thinking, or laugh too loudly in quiet rooms, or dig their heels in on arguments they’ve already won. I find her scattered through all of them, refracted like light through a prism—each fragment different, each unmistakably from the same source.
