“I know.” My voice was rough. “But I don’t know how to do that. Not after what I’ve done.”
“What have you done?” The question was gentle, not accusatory. Like she genuinely wanted to know.
So I told her about the drinking. The blackout. The woman I didn’t remember. Then I stopped, because the next part was harder.
“There’s this woman—” I started, and stopped. Of course she knew Bea. I’d been the one to send Bea to her. My head wasn’t tracking right — too much whiskey, not enough sleep. I rubbed my face. “Sorry. You know Bea. I’m not — I’m not all the way here this morning.” I dragged in a breath. “She’s my whole world, Mrs. Curtis. I thought we’d be together for the rest of our lives. I really believed that.” My voice cracked. “And then Danny died and I fucked everything up. Sorry — language.”
“Holden, my son was in your MC. I’ve heard worse before breakfast.”
I almost smiled. Almost. “I don’t know how much Bea told you. When she was coming to see you after — I don’t know what she said.”
Mrs. Curtis shook her head. “That girl didn’t say a word about herself. Every visit was about me and Danny. How I was sleeping, whether I was eating, did I need anything.” She paused. “But I could tell something was wrong. She had that look — like she was holding herself together for everyone else and falling apart when no one was watching.” She met my eyes. “Such a lovely woman, your Bea.”
“Yeah.” The word came out rough. “She is.”
“So what happened?”
I told her the rest. Mrs. Curtis listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment. “That’s a lot of pain,” she finally said. “Yours and hers both.”
“I don’t know how to fix it.”
“Maybe you can’t.” She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. “Maybe some things are too broken to fix. But that doesn’t mean you stop trying to be better.” She looked at Danny’s photo on the fridge for a moment. “He believed you were worth saving.”
I stared at her. She’d lost her son because of me. She had every right to blame me. To hate me. “Why are you being kind to me?”
“Because Danny would want me to.” She squeezed my hand. “And because I know what guilt looks like. You’re carrying enough for ten men. You don’t need me adding to it.”
I didn’t deserve her kindness. Didn’t deserve any of this.
“Thank you,” I managed.
“Come back,” she said. “To the grave, to this house, wherever. Don’t carry this alone. Danny wouldn’t want that.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
I stayed for another hour, listening to stories about Danny as a kid. His first bike. His obsession with action movies. The way he’d cried when their dog died but tried to hide it because he thought crying wasn’t manly.
Chapter 16
?
— Bea —
Iwoke at 4:17 AM with his voice still in my ear. He’d been at my kitchen table, reading something. I’d been moving around behind him, making tea, not talking — just the quiet of a night with nowhere to be. In the dream it was completely ordinary.
Then I was awake. The room was dark. The sheets were cold on his side. And I remembered.
I lay there in the dark with the residue of it, which was somehow worse than waking angry — the grief with nowhere to go because there’d been nothing frightening in the dream to push against.
Sally called this “intrusive grief imagery.” I called it annoying.
“You’re doing better than you’re giving yourself credit for,” she said at our session that week.
“I’m not sure what metric we’re using.”
“You’re feeling it. You’re not intellectualizing it or controlling it or redirecting it. You’re just feeling it.” She tilted her head slightly. “How many of your clients can you say the same about after six weeks?”
I thought about Sarah, still in the acute phase after three months. The young man I was seeing for complicated grief who’d been deflecting for half his life.
