His cheek was pressed to my shoulder, the heat of it anchoring me, the rhythm of his heart steadier than anything I’d ever known. For all the years I’d spent despising him, the paradox was that his arms were the only place I felt safe enough to fall apart.
He didn’t say anything, not at first. He let the storm run through me, let the violence of my grief have its way.
When my lungs finally gave out, I let my head hang. Tears soaked the collar of my dress, leaving snail trails down my throat. I could feel the eyes of the town on us, but for once, I didn’t care.
I tried to say thank you, but the words got stuck somewhere between my ribs and my teeth. He didn’t let go, not even when I tried to peel away.
“I made a scene,” I said, pushing my knuckles into my eyes until little galaxies popped behind my lids.
“Yeah,” he said, “but at least it was honest.”
It was Caiden who got me up, wiping my face with the inside of his sleeve, his hands gentle but sure. He didn’t meet my eyes or say anything, just steered me toward the car, leaving behind the casket and the mound of dirt and the last, flickering memory of my mother.
I thought I would feel emptier after the funeral, but the opposite was true.
Grief was a thing with weight, and now that I’d let it out, my chest felt less like a hollow and more like an anchor. I carried itwith me, back through the little graveyard, past the stone angels and withered bouquets.
I know how grief played out. Some days it was weightless like the wind, other days it was loud and crippling like the stormy sea during a thunderstorm.
This grief would sit within me like a shadow for eternity, that I knew.
29
AMELIA
Seven yearsold
My mother was the first monster I ever loved, and in our house, love was a scavenger hunt.
My mother’s affections came in unpredictable currents, erratic and quick, the way a bat might veer through a living room if you left the window open overnight.
Some mornings, I’d find her collapsed at the kitchen table, forehead pressed to the stained counter, hands curled in fists like she was still fighting the dreams that clung to her.
Other times, she’d vanish for hours—days, sometimes—and I’d forage my own breakfast out of the splintered pantry, inventing games to make the silence less jagged.
I was seven years old and already an expert at the art of invisibility. If I held my breath to the count of fifty, I could become air and drift right up to her shoulder, watching her chin loll while she snored.
If I tiptoed just right, I could escape the house entirely.
When she woke, if she woke, she’d call my name with a start, like a mother who’d simply lost track of time, not a mother who had lost whole seasons of her life.
That morning, I walked myself to school, crunching acorn caps under my sneaker soles and pretending each one was a tiny skull. We lived at the bottom of a hill, the kind that grew longer when you looked at it with tired eyes.
At the top, our school hunched in a block of cinder and brick, surrounded by a yard of grass and the permanent stink of wet mulch.
I practiced counting the steps from our porch to the bus lot, my small way of controlling how the day might unfold. Thirty-seven sidewalk cracks, four sewer drains, two dead squirrels (run over, not murdered, though I liked to think of myself as a child detective and examine the evidence anyway).
It was late autumn, so my breath drew little ghosts in the air. I liked to believe the ghosts belonged to other kids who had walked this same route and survived it, their stories trailing out behind them like kite tails.
My knapsack was a hand-me-down that still smelled faintly of my father’s aftershave, even though he’d been gone for over a year. Sometimes I’d shove my face into the canvas just to remember the way his hugs used to squeeze the wind out of me.
I was almost at the crosswalk when an older boy—fifth grade, maybe—rammed into my shoulder with his backpack.
My knees buckled, scraping against pavement, and suddenly the world was nothing but hard gray.
He laughed and kept going. My eyes stung, but I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing me cry.
I was still on the sidewalk, palms stinging with grit, when someone’s shadow blocked out the sun for a second and a voice, not unkind, said, “You okay?”
