Page 30 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

"He loved peach pie," I say, before I can stop myself.

Her head turns, slow as a weather vane in a weak breeze. "How on earth do you know that?"

I smooth my thumb over a divot in the stone. The memory is small and sharp: a tang of late-summer air, the haze of kitchen steam, a trembling hand reaching for one last bite. "He told me," I answer.

She laughs, a little startled, delighted. "You mean, before he died?"

I nod.

She stands and gives me the kind of look people reserve for the clever, the odd, or the deeply lucky. "You're a good listener, you know that, Grim?" The nickname again, this time said soft and fond, like it is not just a private joke but an amulet.

I have no answer for that. I let her lead, winding through the maze of stones and sunken grass, the sharp scent of cut greens and old snow. She pauses sometimes, to greet the ones she knows—Mrs. Dvorak, who won every homemade cookie contest for sixty years; the infant twins, whose parents drive three hundred miles each spring just to sing them "You Are My Sunshine"; the high school teacher, buried with her lesson plans. With each marker she touches, I feel something unfurl. A memory, a filament, a little proof that none of these lives truly vanish.

We reach the old iron fence at the cemetery's edge. Morning glories climb it in lazy spirals, even now in the chill—Lavinia's doing, no doubt, coaxing them along each summer so that something will be blooming when the last of the mourners leave. She stops, transfixed. "Look at them! They're not even supposed to survive the frost."

She fingers a bloom, pale blue and creased like tissue. "I know someone who likes these," she says, side-eyeing me with a mischief I haven't earned.

She takes out her shears, snips the thickest stem near the heart of the vine, and holds the blossom out to me. For a small eternity, I do not move. In seven thousand years I have seen every flower, every hand, every moment when the living bestow a token of care on the dead. But never for me. The recognition seizes me whole.

I accept the flower. Her gloves are dirty, roughened by cold and work, but the squashed scent of green lingers on my palm. She waits for my response, tension flickering over her lips.

"Thank you," I say. The words are foreign, clumsy, but true.

She flashes that lopsided smile, blue eyes bright. "You're welcome." She makes a show of dusting off her hands, pretending the flower was only ever intended for the stone and not, in some impossible accounting, for me.

We walk together to the gate. The morning glory looks ridiculous in my fist, a ribbon of color in a world built for mud and shadow, but I will keep it: uncrushed, untossed, proof that something survived the frost.

At the corner, she squeezes my arm. "Come by again?" she asks, no trace of expectation—just hope, spun out over the gap between us.

I nod, and watch her walk away, hair flaming in the weak winter light, boots leaving perfect, damp imprints along the path. She will linger in the world, for decades if she's lucky, but she has already marked me in the only way that matters.

After she is gone, I sit on one of the old bench seats, the flower between two fingers. I try to think what to do with it. The blue is luminous, impossible. I want to tell her how, for all my centuries, this is the first time I have been given a flower, not as tribute or farewell, but as proof of having been seen.

I tuck the morning glory in my coat, careful as a thief, and walk home with the fragile thing still alive in my hand. It is a memory, a promise, and—if I am brave enough—a beginning.

CHAPTER 7

GRIM

It starts with the flower.

The morning glory she gave me—absurdly blue, the color of a robin's egg—rests between the pages of a book I still have not finished. I lift it carefully, mindful of its paper-thin petals. Time has curled the edges and stolen some of its softness, but the color remains, stubborn as ever, refusing to surrender to the weeks.

I do not know why I kept it.

Objects have never held much meaning for me. They are the things people leave behind when they no longer need them—watches, rings, photographs tucked into drawers, letters folded so many times the creases become part of the paper itself. I have watched entire lives reduced to boxes carried out by strangers.

Yet I cannot bring myself to part with this flower.

Beneath that simple truth lies another.

I want to give her something in return.

The trouble is, I have very little to offer. I could recite the name of every flower that has ever bloomed, but that seems a poor gift for a woman who has devoted her life to coaxing beauty from the earth. Around Lavinia, I become painfully aware of my own limitations. I am simply a tall man dressed inblack, awkward in conversation and strangely unfamiliar with happiness.

Then I remember something she said weeks ago while pulling weeds from a cracked terracotta pot.

"Wildflowers are best when they sneak up on you. I'd give anything to see a March meadow go crazy just once, outside a catalog."