Page 125

I fold myself down onto the grass beneath the afternoon sun and I let her loose on me, and she gathers a lapful of little blooms—clover and forget-me-nots and slender stalks of something violet—and sets to work threading them through the pale silver of my hair with fingers far gentler than her grin.

She braids and weaves and crowns me, narrating my transformation with merciless commentary, and somewhere in the process she dissolves into laughter—real laughter, helpless and bright and entirely undefended—as she leans back to survey her handiwork.

“Oh, this is the best thing I’ve ever done,” she wheezes. “You look like a gothic fairy prince who got lost on the way to his own funeral. The dead are going to be so jealous when you go back to work like this.”

“I shall wear it with dignity,” I inform her, regal beneath my ridiculous crown, which only makes her laugh harder. I allow all of it. The flowers, the mockery, the indignity. Because her happiness is the actual reward here, the one I rigged the entire afternoon to win, and I would sit beneath this sun wearing a coronet of weeds until the stars came out if it kept that sound coming out of her.

Her fingers work through my hair with a tenderness that contradicts every wicked word out of her mouth, and I close my eyes and let myself simply feel it—the small careful tugs, the warmth of her so close, her sugar-and-ganache scent threaded now with crushed green stems and sun-warmed petals.

It is, I realize, the most anyone has touched me with pure gentle intent in years.

The dead I tend cannot touch me back. The living rarely tried. And here she is, this lethal mastermind, weaving forget-me-nots into my hair as if I am something precious enough to decorate rather than something macabre enough to avoid, and the simple animal comfort of it loosens a knot in me I had forgotten I was carrying.

I keep my eyes shut a moment longer than I need to. I do not want her to see what her hands are doing to the petal beneath the showman.

But while she experiences it as a game, something quieter and far more seismic is happening to me, and I let it, because I have learned by now not to flinch from the rare gift of feeling something good.

For years—for as long as I can truly remember—my life has been a thing composed of death, grief, and a loneliness so constant I stopped registering it as a wound and simply accepted it as the temperature of being alive.

I dressed the dead because the dead asked nothing of me.

I built Crowe because the world had no use for Silas. I existed in the hushed company of the departed and the cold comfort of beautiful things, and I told myself it was enough, the way you tell yourself anything you cannot change is enough.

And now I am sitting in a field with wildflowers in my hair and a psychotic, brilliant, luminous woman laughing at me in the sun, and for the first time in longer than I can measure, my life does not feel like a vigil. It feels like a beginning.

The grief has not vanished—grief never truly does—but it has, for this golden hour, made room. There is no embalming room here. No vigil. No cold. Just warmth, and her, and the absurd tickle of clover against my scalp, and the dawning, terrifying, exquisite realization that this—this ridiculous, flower-crowned, sun-drenched moment—feels, against all odds and all my careful defenses, like coming home.

It frightens me, the way only good things frighten a man who has learned to expect their theft.

I know what comes next in stories like ours. I know the ex-husband circles beyond the arches; I know the clock our queen pretends not to hear is winding down; I know that men like me, who deal in endings for a living, are owed a reckoning eventually.

A creature who has finally found something worth living for has, in the same breath, found something worth dying to protect—and I would not trade it back for all my old safe numbness. Let the reckoning come.

Let it find me crowned in weeds and hopelessly, irreversibly hers.

I have arranged a great many beautiful deaths. I have never, until her, had a beautiful life to set against them. I intend to fight like hell to keep it.

“Okay, we have to document this,” she announces, sitting back on her heels, cheeks flushed with sun and mirth. “For posterity. For blackmail. Take a picture.”

“Fine,” I sigh, with theatrical reluctance, and produce my phone. She takes over at once, naturally, snapping a barrage of photos of my floral humiliation from every conceivable angle, cackling at each one. I let her have her fun. Then I pat my lap in invitation. “Your turn. Come here. You can’t document the gothic fairy prince and leave out his queen.”

She goes still.

It’s a small hesitation, but I catalogue everything about her, and I see it—the flicker of something uncertain crossing that vivid face. “I don’t really…” she starts, then stops, then admits it with a small, strange shrug. “I don’t have any photos. Of myself. Of… anything.”

“None?” I keep my voice light, but the artist in me has gone very still and watchful. “Surely your wedding, at least?—”

“Gone.” The word is flat, final. “All of those are gone. Burned, scrubbed, lost—I don’t even know anymore.” She picks at a blade of grass, not meeting my eyes. “And after… everything, I just stopped. Taking them. For years. I never really understood why.” She frowns, as if examining the thought for the first time. “I think I stopped having a life I wanted to remember.”

The simple devastation of it settles over me like cold water.

A woman with no images of her own existence. No evidence she was ever here, ever loved, ever anything but a problem the world kept trying to erase.

She stopped photographing her life because her life stopped being something worth keeping—and the quiet horror of that, the sheer lonely tragedy of it, makes me want to commission a thousand portraits of her and hang them in every room I own.

I think of my work, then, in the strange way grief and beauty are forever braided in my mind. I have spent a decade ensuring the dead are remembered well—that the last image anyone holds of them is dignified, serene, a face composed into peace. I give the departed that gift as a matter of devotion.

Here is a living woman, breathing and brilliant and warm in my lap, who has fewer images of her own life than I leave behind for strangers in coffins.