Page 88 of Haunt Me

“Thank you,” I say, and before I can think better of it, I’ve got my arms around him.

Jon goes stiff for half a second, clearly not a man who gets hugged much by someone who’s little more than a stranger, before he pats my back, awkward and warm at the same time.

“Alright, alright.” His voice is gruff, but there’s no missing the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth when I pull back.

“I’ll swing by Pinecrest tomorrow morning,” Knox says as he stands. “We’ll get your first lesson in. Then I’ll bring you up to the cottage and help you get settled.”

“Okay.” It comes out quieter than I mean it to. “Thank you so much. Both of you.”

Jon reaches over and clasps a hand on Knox’s shoulder, something silent passing between them, and they head toward the door. I watch them go, the bell over the door jingling behind them.

Somewhere between the permit in my hands and a dead woman’s cottage being offered to me by people who barely know my name, this small town is starting to feel less like somewhere I landed and more like somewhere I could actually build a life.

Raven

I felt it the second it happened. A wrongness tearing loose somewhere in the world I can’t touch anymore, sharp enough that if I still had a body, it would’ve dropped me to my knees.

It came through the thread first, before I understood what I was feeling. That silver, quiet line that’s run between us since the night I died. The one I chose to hold onto instead of letting go the way I was supposed to. Most days it sits there faint and steady, a him I’ve learned to live inside of instead of drowning in. Tonight it went taut and burned, like something on the other end of it had been pulled hard enough to nearly snap the whole thing in two.

Samuel’s not drunk tonight. Drunk, I know how to sit with. I’ve been sitting with it for months, following him from one liquor store to the next, watching him pour himself into bottles like his grief might drown there instead of inside him.

This is different. This is pain, real and physical. It’s spreading so fast down the thread that I can’t find the edges of it no matter how hard I reach.

Worse than the pain is the shape underneath it. I know my husband. I know the particular quality of his silence when he’s given up on something. And what’s coming through tonight is no longer fear. It’s relief. Some terrible, aching relief, like he’s grateful for whoever’s about to take it the rest of the way from him.

He wants this to be the end.

I understand it in a way that guts me, because some nights I’ve wanted the same thing for him. Wanted it to stop costing him so much just to keep breathing. But wanting him to be free of the pain and feeling him welcome his own death aren’t the same thing, and the difference between them is tearing through me right now.

“Please.” I don’t know who I’m saying it to until I say it. “Let him hear me. Let me touch him. Let me help him.”

The Light doesn’t announce itself the way people probably think it does. There’s no blinding flash or voice booming out of somewhere holy. It just arrives, the way dusk arrives, surrounding me until I’m not alone anymore.

“You know the terms,” The Light says. Not unkind. It’s never unkind.

“He’s dying.” My voice doesn’t sound like a voice out here, more like the shape of one, but The Light hears it the same. “Right now, he’s dying, and I’m not allowed to do anything but feel it happen.”

“A river does not carry the boat. It only tells the boat which way the current runs.”

“I don’t want a river. I want my husband.”

“The boat still chooses whether to fight the water or be carried by it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It rarely is, when the question is really a wish wearing the shape of a question.”

I want to scream at it, the way I used to scream at Knox when we were kids and he’d pin me down and refuse to let go until I said uncle. But there’s no pinning down a presence that has no shape to hold onto. No words I can say to make any of this stop.

“You chose to stay.”

“No. I chose him.”

“You chose the space between staying and leaving. That space doesn’t include saving him.”

“Then what’s the point?” I ask. “If I can’t help him, if I can’t save him, what was the point of staying at all?”

“You already know the answer to that.”