My eyes graze over Lo’s grave before slowly making their way back to Kaiden. He’s watching me with no clear emotion on his face. At least there isn’t pity.
“Do you visit your dad?”
His eyes cast downward. “Yeah.”
I nod.
“Maybe you’re right.” I sigh. “Maybe the girls just didn’t know how to cope and I’ve been irritated with them since. Does it make me a bad person to like bad mouthing them to Lo? She thought Ria and them were great.”
He chuckles. “Nah, there’s worse you could say about people.”
“Like?”
He simply shrugs again.
I pull my knees up to my chest and rest my chin on them. “I think Logan is around sometimes. Like when I’m having a bad day or something, it’s like I feel her. In the wind. The sun. In music.” I angle my body toward him slightly. “Do you ever feel that?”
His eyes are unblinking. “No.”
I can’t tell if he’s lying or not. I wish there was a telltale sign, like a twitching eyebrow or a lingering gaze. It’s almost like he’s mastered the skill—like he’s had years of practice. How long as he lied to himself?
My head tips back up to the sky. “I read an article about people coming back as other things. This one time, a woman was doing a maternity photoshoot and a ladybug landed on her. The photographer snapped a picture when the woman explained her late mother loved ladybugs. Then, during the baby’s cake smashing photoshoot over a year later, a ladybug landed on his overalls. They got a picture of that too.”
He scoffs in disbelief. “You can’t honestly believe the woman’s mother was the ladybug, can you?”
“Why can’t I?” I challenge, staring only at Lo’s grave. “Sometimes we need those types of beliefs to get us through the day. Like when I see a rainbow, especially without any rain, I like to think it’s Logan.”
“That’s impossible.”
I question a lot of things—God, the afterlife, what comes after death. Everything about never existing anymore terrifies me. What if we take our last breaths and then that’s it? What then?
I scoot forward and put my hand on the cold marble stone in front of me. My fingers curl over the top, as though I’m holding Lo’s hand. “Ma
ybe it is,” I agree softly. “But maybe it isn’t. Who’s to say what’s out there and what isn’t? None of us really know.”
So we pretend.
We pretend our loved ones are still close to us.
We pretend we’re okay.
It’s not denial.
It’s coping.
It’s reassurance.
It’s how we get through another day.
My hand is cold. “Ready to go inside? Grandma is probably going to be gone for a little while longer, which means we have the TV to ourselves.”
His head tilts. “You want to watch TV?”
“What else would we do?”
His lips quirk in a devious smirk. “I can think of a lot of different things, Mouse. A house to ourselves can get us into a lot of trouble.”
My heart does a little jig in my chest, but I silently tell it to stop. I stand up, brushing my leggings off. “I guess it’s a good thing I was never a troublemaker then, huh?”