Chapter 16
I used to think surviving meant reaching a day when Owen’s death no longer hurt.
That day never came.
It never will.
Sometimes I still wake hearing him call Mommy from a recording I wish had never existed.
Sometimes I sit on the bathroom floor until the shaking passes.
Sometimes Roman sits outside the door.
He never tells me I should be over it.
He knows love does not expire because the person you love stops breathing.
Owen would be fourteen now.
I wonder how tall he would be.
Whether his voice would have changed.
Whether he would still love dinosaurs or pretend he had outgrown them.
Whether he would hate Roman.
Roman insists they would be allies.
I tell him Owen would have exploited his wealth shamelessly.
Roman says that proves they would be family.
Every September, we return to the cemetery.
Emma brings something different.
A drawing.
A toy.
A rock she thinks looks like a planet.
Last year she left a handwritten note.
HI OWEN.
I’M YOUR SISTER.
MOM SAYS YOU WERE FUNNY.
ROMAN SAYS YOU CHEATED AT CARDS.
I THINK I WOULD HAVE LIKED YOU.
I sat beside that grave after everyone walked back to the car.
Rain began falling lightly.
For one second, I was back at the funeral.
Black dress.
White roses.
Mud on my shoes.
A woman who thought the worst thing that could happen had already happened.
She did not know betrayal was waiting upstairs.
She did not know her dead son had left behind the truth.
She did not know she was pregnant.
She did not know a feared man with a scar over his eyebrow was about to appear in her hallway and change the shape of her future.
She did not know she would survive any of it.
I wanted to reach backward through time and tell her something.
Not that everything would be fine.
That would have been cruel.
Everything was not fine.
Her son would still be dead.
Her marriage would still have been a lie.
Her second child would grow up with a father she knew only through court documents.
The man she eventually married would carry darkness of his own.
There would be no perfect ending.
Life rarely gives those.
So if I could speak to that woman, I would tell her only this.
You will still belong to yourself when this is over.
That is what Ethan failed to take.
That is what Roman never asked me to surrender.
I placed my palm on Owen’s headstone.
“I love you, baby.”
The rain grew harder.
Roman waited beneath an umbrella twenty feet away.
He never hurried me.
Eventually I stood.
I walked toward him.
Not because I needed to be rescued.
May you like
Because I was ready to go home.
THE END.
