Page 12 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

The fondness in his voice is unmistakable.

After a moment, he looks back toward the window. "I imagine the garden mostly looks after itself now."

I study the yard. The roses have wandered beyond their beds, and the lawn is slowly surrendering to dandelions. Borage sprawls wherever it pleases, bowing beneath the weight of the weather, but the bird feeders remain full, and a pair of field mice feast peacefully beneath them.

"She would approve," I tell him.

He nods as though I have confirmed something important, then reaches for the photograph on the table.

"I keep thinking she'll be waiting for me," he admits. "Then I wonder whether she's changed so much I won't recognize her."

His fingers tighten around the frame.

"Or whether she won't want to recognize me."

His voice is smaller now, stripped of humor and pride. At the end, fear is often the last thing a person has left to surrender.

I kneel beside him until we are nearly eye level.

"Love has an excellent memory."

He looks at me, waiting.

"I have watched it survive wars, oceans, lifetimes, and distances no living person could measure. It recognizes the smallest spark, even on the darkest nights."

His shoulders begin to loosen.

"She remembers you, Kilian."

His eyes shine. "Will it hurt?"

I pause for the briefest moment, not because I do not know the answer, but because I have answered the question more times than there are stars above Blackthorn Bay.

"No."

He breathes out slowly.

"But it may surprise you."

A smile pulls at his mouth. "I've always been easy to surprise."

For a little while longer, I allow Kilian to be nothing more than a man who is old, tired, and full of longing. His breaths grow slower, each one farther from the last, until the room becomes impossibly still.

When the world finally releases him, I take his hand.

"Shall we?"

He rises without effort, his body no longer bowed beneath pain or years, and together we step into the narrow corridor between the final heartbeat and whatever waits beyond it.

The world unfolds instead of disappearing.

The cold night melts away so gradually that I scarcely notice it leaving, replaced by warm sunlight and a meadow overflowing with wildflowers that seem to have chosen the place for themselves. Nothing has been planted or arranged. They simply belong, as though the earth always knew they would bloom here.

The sky above us is familiar in a way no living sky has ever been, blue with the memory of every summer Kilian loved. Grass brushes his knees, and flowers sway in the warm air, their scent carrying traces of every spring he ever remembered with joy.

Kilian stands straighter.

The stoop leaves his shoulders, and the years fall from his face until the young man beneath them is visible once more. He stares down at his steady hands, searching for a word large enough to hold the wonder of being whole.