Page 81 of Crown Me Dead
I never say it. But I feel it in the strings—that quiet, resonant ache that moves through me whenever one of them walks through the world the way Elara would have loved. The stubbornness. The competence. The absolute refusal to let death have the last laugh.
After a moment, Sera speaks, her back still to me, her voice carefully level. “You know,” she says, “my colleagues think I’m unhinged. Requesting my ancient, mysterious uncle attend surgeries.”
“Are they wrong?”
“About the unhinged part? Probably not.” A beat. “But having Death in the room does statistically improve outcomes.”
“I’ve never given you favorable statistics.”
“No. You just stand there looking grim, and everyone tries harder.” She turns, finally, and the composure has been reassembled. Nearly perfect, except for the brightness still sitting in her eyes. “You’re very motivating. As a specter of inevitable doom.”
“Highest compliment I’ve received in decades.”
Her mouth curves. That mouth. “Gran wrote about that, too,” she says quietly. “That you were funny. That she didn’t expect it.”
The strings hum. “She told everyone who would listen.”
“I know. I’ve read every word she left.” Sera looks down at the clean instruments in her hands, then back up at me. “She said the funniest thing about Death was that he kept choosing to show up.” A pause. “I think she meant it as a love letter.”
The room is very quiet.
“She meant everything as something,” I say, which is not adequate, but is the most I can manage with three heartstrings pulling at once.
Sera nods. Just once. Then she turns back to the mother and child, slipping back into the precise, unhurried competence of a woman with more work to do.
I look at the boy in his mother’s arms. At the blazing, impossible, finite aura that will one day dim. And one day, I will carry this soul, too—the way I’ve carried so many, the way I’ll carry all of them, every last descendant of a gravedigger who once lay down in a hole in the earth and dared Death to come find her.
But not today.
Today, Death helped bring a child into the world. Today, my bloodline stood over a table with steady hands and a sharp mouth and pulled life from the jaws of the very thing I am.
I used to fear this. An unending succession of losses. An infinite lineage of goodbyes. Every hello carries its goodbye folded inside it, like a letter you know you’ll have to open someday.
But hello comes first.
An endless succession of life, of love.
Ofnow.
