Had I been walking, I would have tripped. “You? Like with your hands?”
“No, with my big toe and gusto.” He cracked a sad smile toward the chapel like it held memories too sacred for me to ask about. “Yeah me.”
“I didn’t even know.” Embarrassingly, my voice caught. “I mean, I had no clue you even knew how to use a hammer!”
I suppressed an eye-roll. Seriously? That was what I went with?
“I know how to screw too,” he snapped quickly and then sobered. “Sorry, I’m not sure where that came from.”
I elbowed him playfully. “Maybe the old Ash is tired of being sad and needed to get a good one-liner in there.”
His lips twitched. “Yeah.” He hung his head. “Maybe.” He sighed like the old Ash was never coming back, twisting my heart in his grip. “Come on.”
We kept walking in silence.
I noticed little jars lining the pathway; they were a bit dirty, worn, as if they were set out for something… for someone.
“I stopped lighting them when you left for Italy,” he whispered almost under his breath. “I said goodbye to her then, or so I thought, you know?” He frowned as if wondering why he was telling me all of this. “I’m not crazy, I felt her, I just needed the closure, and then I realized that there was so much more I hadn’t dealt with, memories I had chosen to forget because it made her death less holy, less… just less. When someone dies, you want to remember the good, only the good, because the bad just tarnishes the memory, and that seems like such a fucking cruel way to remember a person you loved, by even once focusing on the fact that they were human—she was, though, very human.”
“Aren’t we all?”
He chewed his bottom lip and glanced over at me. “Honestly? Sometimes I think you’re more angel.”
My lips parted on a gasp. “Wh-what?”
He shrugged. “I think it’s what I both hate and love the most about you. Your ability to be good even when things are so fucking bad. I used to think I hated you—now I think all this time, I’ve just been jealous.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I stared at him as a wave of emotions crossed his handsome face, and then we were walking again.
There was a small clearing.
And then.
Just feet from where they were to be married.
Claire’s grave.
I swiped at my cheeks, and before I could stop myself, I fell to my knees on the dirt in front of it.
Her grave marker was huge.
In the shape of an angel.
Immaculate in its glory as it towered over us mere mortals. He’d literally immortalized her, made her a goddess with the gorgeous headstone and the words encrypted on the rock.
“Until the sky falls,” I whispered. Using the right phrase, the one they used to use, not the one he’d said to me, the one that I kept as ours. The one I’d take to my grave too
I had no idea how much I missed her until that moment.
Until I burst into gut-wrenching sobs, the headstone a blur as I pressed my hands against the grass, almost bowing in reverence.
“She’d been my friend,” I cried. “My protector.” Another sob. “She said she’d save me!”
Ash’s arms were there before I could stop him, pulling me against him as we both collapsed against the grass. He braced me.
He held me.
And he let me be weak.
Something I didn’t realize I’d needed, not just in that moment… but since her death.
I never got to mourn, did I?
I was too worried about Ash.
Too terrified of the bruises on my arms and returning to the life that had given them to me.
Petrified of my own shadow.
Trusting no one but myself and Tank.
I couldn’t stop the tears. “I hope you’re at rest, Claire.” My voice shook. “I’m so sorry you felt you had to protect me from my family, that you took the car that day when it should have been me. Oh, God.” I covered my face with my hands, my fingertips wet from the tears. “It would have been better had it been me.”
“No,” Ash said firmly behind me. “No, Annie.”
“Yes! I ruined everything. I ruined—”
He turned me in his arms and pulled my hands from my face, the dirt from his fingertips mixing with my tears. “Annie, look at me.”
He pried my hands down, and I stared into crystal blue eyes, eyes I could drown in. Eyes that could hate. Eyes that could love.
His smile was sad as his voice cracked. “It was an accident. It was not your fault, do you hear me? It wasn’t your fault.” He shook his head. “If anything, it’s mine, for using you as a way to grieve, for being weak when I should have been strong enough. You didn’t do this. The fucked up world did this. You don’t get to take credit for something so sinister.”