Page 88 of How I Met Your Murderer

We could focus on goodbye.

At 3:21pm, Raff put his overnight bag in the fancy guest room with a four-poster bed and shiny new dark wood furniture. Since I had nothing to unpack, I sprawled on the bed and gazed out the window over the castle grounds, trying to decide whether or not I’d miss the view.

My eyes strayed back to Raff almost at once. Freckles and a sharp chin and green eyes. Broad shoulders and dorky, company-issued overalls and a fighter’s physique that belied his gentle, caring nature.

Yeah, I would miss the view plenty.

I loved it.

I absolutely loved him.

He joined me on the bed and put a hand on mine, and we stayed like that for a long time. We didn’t need anything more.

At 6:15pm, our pizzas arrived. Plural. So many pizzas. I couldn’t decide what I wanted when Raff showed me all the options, so we just . . . got a bit of everything. On Jordy, apparently, as a thanks for the DM work and for setting him and Basil up. And even though the other ghosts definitely didn’t want a mouth full of hot cheese and scalding sauce as badly as I did, we still invited Síofra and a few of the others to come hang out in room 2B with us while we ate.

Old Liam Donnelly told a long, involved story about the time he was off the coast of Dingle, catching pollock and mackerel, when a silverback cod the size of a horse surfaced and swam alongside their boat, out of reach.

I didn’t even know if a silverback cod was a real fish, and made the mistake of darting a glance at Raff, who had a mouth full of pizza. When our eyes met, he nearly joined me in the afterlife from choking so hard with laughter. My bad.

Then Liam launched into the time a heron stole his bait and his dignity, which wasn’t very funny at all, and Raff was able to catch his breath.

By 8:20pm, the few spirits who’d joined us had mostly left.

“I’m not so sure about this bedding. It’s so . . . fluffy. And I feel like the mattress is trying to eat me,” Síofra sighed as she stretched out on one side of the bed next to me, with Raff on my other. She was the last to leave after Gráinne had taken all the hot peppers out of the various boxes and scampered off to feed them to her toy collection under the stairs—which I was starting to worry included a living squirrel.

Raff promised to take care of any potentially distressed creature in her possession in the morning, with or without me.

From the moment I had woken up in Ardruin, time had seemed suspended, like I was one of those beetles trapped in resin you can buy in a museum gift shop. I’d hated it. Told the worms in the dungeon all about it. But now . . . I wanted to go back to dust motes floating in the air, to light held in honeyed stillness.

I couldn’t, though, so I tried to focus on what my friends were saying as they talked quietly back and forth across me.

“I’ll talk to Jordy and see about staying longer—even if he doesn’t want to pay me,” Raff was telling our decaying countess.

“Even with the elemental hunting you, and with Eric gone?” Síofra’s eyes widened. “You’d do that for the rest of us?”

“I wouldn’t feel right leaving anyone here who wants help moving on,” Raff said, “no matter how long it takes.”

Just like his D&D character, he was going to finish what the party had started—what he and I had started: looking after the comfort of the other ghosts together—even if he had to keep adventuring alone.

At 8:26pm, I cried actual tears, because I knew Raff was doing it all—looking after the other ghosts—for me.

Staying close to the danger for me.

It took a while to convince Síofra I wasn’t going to turn into a puddle on the floor because of the alarming sight of water leaking from my dead eyes, but we got there.

At 8:42pm, the moment Síofra left, Raff put down the black salt at the doorway to keep anything else from coming in or out tonight. As he returned to the bed, I sat up and reached for his hands, drawing him to me. He had a bit of pizza sauce at the corner of his mouth, messy and human and not mine for long but oh, God, I wanted him to be.

“I used to resent my afterlife,” I told him, not quite meeting his eyes because, if I did, I knew my throat would get tight and the words would be lost. “I used to hate it here. But now I don’t even regret getting stranded for sixteen years because I got to spend a little time with you. And I promise, wherever I’m going next, if I become stardust or drift through the universe or something else I can’t even think of, I’m never going to forget you. Life with you has been really, really good. Good enough that I’m at peace with everything even though I was murdered.”

Raff pressed his lips together, his eyes glistening. Tears welled in his eyes, and he shook his head. I reached up and swiped at the pizza sauce by his mouth with my thumb, and he caught my wrist. I could feel how he trembled. Then he tangled our fingers together.

“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he rasped. “And I should’ve said it sooner, but I can’t let you leave without you knowing—I love you.”

“I love you.”

He beat me to it by half a second. And now I was crying again, too, just seeing the tears streak freely down his pale, freckled face. “I know,” I said, my chest heaving with a sob. “I counted the heartbeats.”

“I love you so much,” he repeated with conviction, and the hopelessness of a doomed man who knew exactly what he was about to lose. “Don’t—” He stopped himself there, but I understood what he’d been about to say: don’t leave me.