I shook my head, still almost smiling, then looked back at the journal. The smile died fast. “Whatever comes next is bad.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.”
I nodded slowly. She did. So did I. Christina had confessed to giving away a son, to trading her body, to lying to Grace, to running, to dying with secrets packed so tight inside her they might as well have been another tumor. If there was something worse than all of that, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet the woman who had written it.
“I’m afraid I’ll hate her,” I said.
Trudy didn’t flinch. “Maybe you will for a while.”
I looked at her sharply.
“What?” she asked. “You want me to lie?”
“No.”
“Good, because I’m not going to. Maybe whatever she wrote next will make you hate her for a minute, or an hour, or a day.Maybe it should. I don’t know. But I don’t think hate is what brought you back to this table every day.”
I glanced around the bakery. My table. Her place. The journal. The cold coffee. The life happening around me while the dead tried to explain themselves.
“What did?”
Trudy’s voice softened. “Love.”
The word hit me like a brick.
I loved Christina. Still. Against all fucking logic, I did. Even with all the anger, all the grief, all the rage at what she’d done... I loved her. But I also wanted Trudy with a hunger that had nothing to do with ghosts. I wanted her sharp tongue and stubborn spine. Wanted her hands on me. Wanted her laughter, her anger, her fear, her hope.
I wanted to sit in this bakery and have her threaten to force-feed me pastries because I was too damn wrapped up in the past to remember my body needed food.
I reached across the table and took her hand before I thought better of it.
She looked down at our joined hands, then back up at me.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Read the rest. Be Grace’s father. Be whatever the hell I’m becoming with you. Stop being angry. Keep being angry. All of it.”
Her fingers tightened around mine. “Then stop trying to do all of it today.”
Simple.
Fucking impossible.
Just like her.
I let out a slow breath. “You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not. But you’re old. You should pace yourself.”
This time the laugh came easier.
“There she is,” I murmured.
