My voice nearly breaks as I begin again, the immensity of Celeste’s pain so vivid on this page it’s almost unbearable to speak aloud—like reading someone’s diary to a room full of strangers, except she asked me to, and that trust is the only thing keeping me upright. And I have to finish. Just one more line to go.
“And I’ll be counting down the days until I get to see you again. I love you, Whitney Trace. Until the end.Pastthe end.”
I lower the page.
“Rest now, Whit. You more than earned it, my friend. My best friend.My sister.”
The silence that follows is vast. Not empty—full.
Full of two hundred people sitting in the wreckage of their own composure, undone by the words of a woman they’d been prepared to judge.
Then, the applause. Not the polite, golf-clap applause that followed Eleanor’s eulogy. This is different—raw, uneven, building from scattered claps into something sustained and genuine. People are wiping their eyes and clapping simultaneously, which is an awkward physical act that somehow communicates more sincerity than any standing ovation I’ve ever seen.
I glance toward Eleanor. She’s sitting very still, hands in her lap. Her face is unreadable—but her lips look glued into a thin line, and her chest rises and falls with the deliberate rhythm of a woman who is working very hard not to feel something in public. Whether it’s grief or fury or shame, I can’t tell. Maybe all of it.
My eyes sweep through the crowd and find Raven. She’s near the back, standing because she probably couldn’t sit for that long with the nausea, and she’s beaming at me through a face full of tears. Her hand rests on her stomach. She mouths two words I can’t quite make out, but I think it’sthank you.
I fold Celeste’s speech carefully—along its original creases, the way she’d want—and turn to her.
She hasn’t moved. She’s standing where I left her, arms at her sides now, face wet, but her makeup by some miracle, still in place. She looks exhausted and emptied out and strangely, impossibly beautiful—the kind of beautiful that has nothing to do with clothes or makeup or anything you can buy. The kind that only shows up when every wall has come down and there’s nothing left but the person.
I step toward her and take her hand.
Her fingers latch onto mine so tight it almost hurts—a grip that saysdon’t let go, don’t let go, don’t you dare let go—and I squeeze back with equal force. A silent covenant that passes between our palms like a current.
I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.
We walk off the stage together. Down the stairs, up the aisle, back to our seats. It’s not long after that before the service closes with a final prayer from the priest. Celeste launches out of her seat the moment we’re dismissed, and as we hurry down the aisle, past the hundreds of faces looking at us, I notice something I didn’t expect in a room full of Eleanor’s guests.
Warmth.
We keep walking. Through the main hall, past the champagne station and the hydrangeas and the string quartet that has resumed playing something gentle and solemn. We don’t stop until we reach the courtyard, where the flowers are still blooming and the ocean is still indifferent and the birds are still singing for no one.
Celeste releases my hand. Takes a breath. Turns to face me.
And for a long, quiet moment, we look at each other. Two people who met this morning and somehow ended up here—standing in a courtyard at the edge of the Atlantic, holding a speech that made a room full of strangers cry, bound by a secret I need to tell her but can’t find a good time to.
She opens her mouth to say something.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I ignore it.
“Saylor,” she says. Just my name. Like she’s testing whether it still means the same thing it meant this morning, before I held her on a stage in front of everyone she was afraid of.
It means more.
“Yeah?”
She reaches up and straightens my collar—the one she sent, on the shirt she chose, part of the suit she picked. Her fingersbrush the side of my neck and I stop breathing for exactly one second.
“Thank you. For reading it when I couldn’t.”
“Thank you for writing it when no one else could.”
She nods. Wipes her eyes. Squares her shoulders. And just like that, the armor starts going back up—piece by piece, brick by brick—because that’s what Celeste does. She rebuilds.
But I saw what’s underneath now. And I’m not going to forget it.
“I was planning to stay the night but maybe we should head back to the city,” she says. “I did what I needed to do. You said what I came here to say. Time to go home.” She takes another deep, fortifying breath and I hate that I’m about to be the one to shatter her world again.
