Broken Knight (All Saints High 2)

Transfixed, Knight answered me, his eyes still on her. “No.”

“No?”

“No. She needs to see this one through.” He drew in a breath.

I was about to stand up and save my best friend’s daughter from a debacle when she hurried to the edge of the stage, produced a small remote, and darted back to the center. She swiveled on her heels, giving the audience her back, punched the remote keys a few times, and a portable projector behind Rosie’s casket came to life.

A picture appeared on the screen: Rosie and Emilia when they were no older than four and three, butt naked, their messy, curly hair the same shade of brown-blond, sitting in two buckets full of water, grinning at each other.

Luna looked back to the audience, took a shuddering breath, and opened her mouth.

“Here’s the thing about love—it’s an uncomfortable feeling. It pushes your boundaries. If any of you would have told me I’d be standing here talking to you a year ago, I’d have laughed in your faces. Silently, of course.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“She speaks.”

“Are you recording this?”

I heard all those whispers behind me, and knew Luna was in great discomfort, but I couldn’t help chancing a look at Trent, her father, who sat at the aisle behind me. He was smiling at the stage, his eyes shimmering. Pride radiated from every pore of his face.

The entire room was so quiet with scandalized shock, you could’ve dropped a pin on the floor and it’d make a colossal sound.

I returned my gaze to my son. He was smiling.

For the first time in months, he looked pleased.

Maybe not content.

And definitely not happy.

But there was something promising behind his jade eyes.

I looked back to Luna, just as she clicked the remote.

“The truth is…” She sighed. “I didn’t want to talk here. It was part of my promise to Rosie. She asked me to make this for Knight, Lev, and Dean so they’d remember her the way she wanted them to. Not in her last month, struggling, unhealthy, and fighting for each minute that passed. She wanted you to remember she’d had a good life, and that she expects nothing less from you. This picture was taken over forty years ago, in Rosie’s backyard in Virginia. Her first-ever memory. She told me it meant the world to her, because she’d thought a bucket full of water was the most joyous thing someone could have before she moved to glitzy Todos Santos, with all the Olympic-sized and kidney-shaped pools and the glorious ocean. She said Lev and Knight always asked her why she put them in buckets of water every summer when they were little. It was so they could remember that the small things in life count the most.”

Luna smiled at Knight, giving him a wink.

Next was a picture of Rosie, Emilia, and me from high school. Em and I were seniors; she was a junior. I had my arm thrown over Emilia’s shoulder, but it was Rosie I looked down at with a smile. Rosie stared at the camera, horrified, and although I’d lived many happy years with my beautiful wife, it still pained me to know I’d caused her a heartbreak, no matter how minor, no matter how long ago.

“Knight, Lev, Rosie asked me to tell you about this moment. Said it was the moment she realized she was in love with your father. But she chose not to do anything about it, because she loved her sister just as much. This is a message from post-life Rosie to you, in her own words: ‘Don’t be a Rosie. Be a Dean. If you want something, no matter what it is, go for it. Falling in love is rare.’”

Luna’s eyes were now on Knight, only Knight, and something in the room shifted. She wasn’t merely speaking the words, she was becoming them.

“Don’t give up this precious gift. Chase it. Catch it. Hold it close. Don’t let it go. And if it leaves anyway…”

Her eyes clung to Knight, and for the first time—for the very first time since I’d known my own son—there were tears in his eyes. It gut-punched me to the other side of the room.

“Fight for it,” Luna finished.

There were more pictures. More stories. One of us on our wedding day that captured me picking her up, crossing-the-threshold-style, and walking away in the middle of a soul-crushingly boring mingling session with a few of my colleagues. I’d carried her to our vintage rental car, straight to the airport, and to our honeymoon in Bali, Indonesia.

Knight in our arms when he was one day old.

Lev’s angry-red face right after birth.

Rosie’s first lengthy hospitalization, where the entire family had sat on her bed. We’d played cards, eaten cinnamon mini-pretzels, and made up elaborate life stories for all of the staff who’d tended to her.