I knew Dane had tried to teach him for years, but I couldn’t remember him ever saying more than a few words.
Dane.
His name reverberated around my suddenly aching skull, and reality rushed back to me with the force of a derailed train. My breath whooshed out my body on impact, and suddenly I was pitching forward into Nova, hands tearing at his shirt, at his hair, painfully pulling and ripping at cloth and scratching into flesh as I half-attacked him half-hugged him.
“Nova!” I screamed again, and I knew it wasn’t my first time because I could taste the metallic tang of blood at the back of my tongue. “Nova!”
“Hush,” he demanded firmly, stroking my back with strong hands even as he let me molest him. “Quiet, Li, that’s enough yellin’. Hush, I’m here. We’re here. We’ve all got you, okay? We’ve all got you.”
But I couldn’t stop, not now that I’d started. I cried so hard I couldn’t breath, and the sobs ripped through my chest so brutally they set my whole body to aching. My tears saturated Nova’s shirt from collar to belly button, and I tore holes all across his back, shredding it as if I had claws.
But he held me. He cradled me in his lap and stroked me without flinching as I hurt him, and then he rocked me, soothing, humming nonsensically into my ear as I ran out of tears to shed, and my body started to crumble with exhaustion.
The yelling turned to whimpers, strange, curling mewls like a kitten in distress, lost without its mother.
“Let’s get her into bed,” Molly whispered at some point.
Vaguely, I was aware that Diogo had disappeared a while ago to answer a knock at the door I’d later find out was the police. Distractedly, I also realized when the sun was breaking over the crust of the horizon, spilling milky light into my bedroom, that it was hours later.
Nova didn’t put me in my small twin bed in the attic.
Carefully, he gathered my overcooked limbs into his arms and descended the stairs to take me to Molly and Diogo’s big bedroom. He waited beside the bed as Hudson carefully rolled thick socks over my frozen feet, as Molly gently replaced my soaked tee with a clean, dry one of Diogo’s, as Milo and Oliver turned down the bed, and I crawled in.
Nova set his knees onto the bed then walked across the mattress that way until we hit the center of the mattress before he settled in, me between his long arms, inked now for real, wrapped tightly around me like the harness of a rollercoaster ride.
Him holding me close grounded me slightly, enough to start trying to breathe properly again.
Then Milo curved into me on one side and Oliver on the other, their hands twining gently with my own so that the grooves between our fingers were linked and pressed tight.
Hudson crawled onto the bed with a wet face cloth and kneeled between my legs so that he could gently mop my flushed face with the cool fabric.
Finally, Diogo and Molly got into bed after closing the blinds tightly and grabbing more pillows. They bracketed us all, their entire family tucked away in the bed around the girl they’d made their own.
I started crying again, painfully leaking out the last tears in my body as I closed my eyes and whimpered.
But these were different tears, no less painful, but oddly cleansing.
Because I knew that where Dane was now, this was what he had given me before he left.
A family that would never leave me.
A family that would protect me and love me as hard as they could for the rest of forever.
But that fact meant nothing in that moment. Nothing compared to the colossal, all-encompassing loss of the man who had been my father, my brother, my protector and best friend.
Nothing compared to losing the best man I would ever know.
The man with the curls he’d let me slot my fingers into, the one with the eyes as blue and clear as Lost Lake on a sunny summer day.
The man who had been my everything for so long until he’d found a way to give me even more, a whole community to love and be loved by.
But it was something I would remember and cherish for the rest of my life, and it was enough, in that moment, to lull me into a disquieted slumber.
* * *
* * *
It took me two weeks to get out of the house. When I got older, it embarrassed me a little, as if I should have been more ashamed of my grief, hid it better, swallowed it easier. People didn’t know what to do with me when they visited to pay their respects to the Booths, to me. I just sat there in the kitchen and stared at the drawings Nova had done in the wooden kitchen table, tracing my fingers over the curling slope of Hudson’s name stylized in graffiti on the surface or the small version of Milo and Oliver fighting in cartoon form with boxing gloves.