Page 54 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

She leans into me, resting her head against my chest, and I wrap my arms around her. She smells of flour and narcissus and the faint trace of almond lotion she keeps beside the sink. For one impossible moment, I allow myself to pretend we are ordinary—a woman and a man with his heart breaking quietly in two.

Finally, she says, “Would you stay with me until it happens?”

“I will not leave your side.”

Every promise I have ever made has been kept.

This one will be no different.

She nods, closes her eyes for a moment, and says, “Then let’s make it count, hmm?”

The next hours blur together. We fill the shop with impossible color—tulips, ranunculus, blue hyacinths, every out-of-season bloom she has been hiding in the walk-in cooler for what she laughingly calls her therapy arrangements. Lavinia insists we deliver Emilio’s funeral flowers ourselves, and I carry the enormous lattice of lilies through the slush because she says she likes walking beside me.

She asks about my past, and I answer with half-truths. I tell her I have traveled, that I have worn many names, that I have been a collector, a grifter, a changeling. Today she does not ask about death. She wants stories instead. Gossip. Ridiculous moments from centuries gone by that prove people have always been foolish in wonderfully predictable ways. I give her everything I can remember that might still make her laugh.

She does.

Until the cough catches her.

It bends her forward for only a moment before she waves it away with an embarrassed smile, but I cannot dismiss it so easily. The sound settles somewhere deep inside me, feeding a panic that has been growing since I walked through the shop door.

By evening, we are eating soup in the cracked-front parlor of her house. She slips her stocking feet into my lap while we watch a ridiculous British detective solve murders with an endless supply of tea cakes and impossible accents. I barely follow the plot. Instead, I study her face, the curve of her eyelashes against her cheek, the tiny scar through her left eyebrow, the shape of her hands around her mug. I repeat each detail silently to myself, foolishly hoping that if I remember enough, I can somehow persuade time to do the same.

When she falls asleep, I carry her to bed. My arms are trembling in a way they never have before. I settle her beneath the quilt, then stand at the window, watching the first gray light gather over Blackthorn Bay.

I do not know how to pray. I never had reason to learn. But for the first time since my creation, I try anyway.

I wish for one impossible thing.

I wish for her.

Morning answers me with silence.

Two days.

It is always worse than you think, the waiting. Lavinia does not seem to weaken, not in any obvious way, but I see it anyway. The way she moves a little slower than before, the way her gaze, even when fixed on me, sometimes goes distant, as though she is listening to a frequency I cannot hear.

It happens midway through the afternoon. She is arranging violets and forget-me-nots for an order markedRECONCILIATION, while I pretend to check the register forloose bills, counting the same handful of notes over and over because it gives my hands something to do besides shake.

She says, without looking up, “Will it hurt?”

I do not lie.

“I won’t let it.”

She pauses, the ribbon still threaded between her fingers, before lifting her eyes to mine.

“Is that a promise?”

“It is,” I answer without hesitation. “Not even for a moment.” It is one promise I know I can keep. No one escapes death, but I have always believed they deserve kindness when they meet it.

She nods slowly, as though something terrible has finally settled into place.

“Thank you.”

Then she studies me for a long moment before asking, “Is it selfish that I’m only scared because I don’t want to leave you alone?”

No one has ever worried about Death being lonely.