24. Such a Scream

24

Such a Scream

KEYS JINGLED IN the front door as Mom unlocked it and stepped in. I only took my eyes off Ben for a second as I scrambled to my feet, but when I turned back, he was gone. Disappeared again, though I didn’t know where he went. Mom jumped when she saw me standing in the parlor, and put a hand over her heart.

I shook my head. “Not at all.”

She handed me my food after I pulled on my coat. “Thanks. I haven’t been here for that long, have I? You guys just left.”

She shrugged. “It was weird without Xavier. We couldn’t stay.”

She was taller than I was, and thin like Alice. They both had dark hair, and when Alice was going through her rebel phase, she would steal dark lacy dresses from Mom’s closet and wear them to school like a real-life Lydia Deetz, though by then I was already in college and well away from Mairmont.

Mom locked the funeral home doors on the way out, and we stepped down into the brisk April night. There was still a chill tucked into the wind, but I could remember the way April warmed so suddenly to summer it was almost a shock. One week there were coats, the next shorts and flip-flops. Maybe tonight was the last cold one, maybe tomorrow, but either way time was passing, slowly ever on, leaving people behind like a flower losing its petals one by one.

I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Yeah.”

We passed the ice cream parlor where she and Dad went every weekend when I was little and she was pregnant with Alice. She always craved pistachio ice cream. If I closed my eyes, I could see Dad in the booth by the window with his sundae, feeding Carver with a small plastic spoon. “Here comes the Douglas DC-3 aircraft in for landing! Zzzzzzoom!”

But the parlor was different now, with a new coat of paint, a new owner, new ice cream flavors. However much Mairmont stayed the same, it kept shifting ever so slightly. Just enough for me to feel lost, for my past to feel like another lifetime ago.

And his ghost would probably still be badgering me about trying out for the debate team. He was adamant that I could argue my way out of trouble if I had to. And I proved him right my junior year of high school when Officer Saget caught me one too many times doing something slightly illegal for very good reasons.

Halfway back to the house, Mom said with a sigh of remorse, “Oh, what are we going to do when Carver and Nicki get married? It isn’t quite like I can dance with your father’s corpse.”

I nodded seriously. “You don’t have the upper arm strength.”

Gallows humor.

I missed it. I missed talking about death like another step in the journey. Lee Marlow hated my humor. He thought talking about death was gross and immature. And the guy before Lee—Sean—thought I was weird when I joked about death. William didn’t much care. And Quinn absolutely would not hear of it.

I missed my family.

I missed this. Mairmont’s quiet evenings, and the black dots that were palmetto bugs skittering across the sidewalk, and the moths fluttering around the streetlights, and the sound of the evenings buzzing with insects and the wind through the trees. I missed the certainty of Mom, and the defiance of Alice, and the middleness of Carver, and the steadfastness of Seaburn, and the slow bloom of Mairmont.

It seemed like New York was changing every time I blinked. One way one moment, and then completely different the next—a chameleon of a city that never fit into one box, that never clung to one descriptor. It was always something new, something exciting, something never before seen.

I loved that for a long time, the steady march to something impossible, the ability to reinvent itself again and again despite hurricanes and pandemics and elections. And I loved everyone who I met on those streets, the Williams and Seans and Lee Marlows . . .

But the sky was always dark, and only the brightest stars shone through the light pollution of the city that never slept.

Dad said that I’d miss the stars too much, and their permanence. In New York, it was hard to pick any out, but here in Mairmont, I could see them from horizon to horizon, and the spring thunderstorms that bubbled up on the southern edge of town.

The kind of thunderstorms Dad loved.

The ones that never made it into Lee Marlow’s book, and with a sudden realization I understood why I had felt so uncomfortable here. Coming home was one thing but—ever since I’d been home, I’d kept Mom and Carver and Alice at arm’s length. It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, or didn’t miss them.

I was ashamed, but talking with Ben helped me realize that I had no control over what Lee Marlow wrote. That it wasn’t my fault.

I couldn’t shoulder every burden, and especially not his.

She breathed out a sigh. “Thank god. I don’t think I could bury my husband and welcome a grandchild all at once. My range of emotions is not that flexible.”

I hesitated. “There’s more to it than that.”

And then I took a deep breath—and I told her. About Lee Marlow, and the stories I told him about our family. I told her about his book deal, and how I found out, and the last conversation we had before I found myself outside in the rain. It had been my choice to walk out. My choice to leave.

But really, what was the other option? Staying?

Mom crossed one leg over the other, and took out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “Fuck him,” she quipped.

I . . . never thought of myself, my story, my life, as anything more than a boring book shelved in a boring library in a boring town. But the more I thought about my family, about the summers I and my siblings ran around in the sprinklers, and played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, and the Halloweens Mom dressed as Elvira and Dad hid in a coffin and popped out to scare every poor kid who came trick-or-treating, and the years Alice and I played dress-up with the vintage clothes we found in the attic, and the summers collecting animal bones, and lighting candles for midnight waltzes through the parlors, and sitting so quietly in the kitchen with Dad to listen to the wind sing—

There was nothing but love in those memories.

We might’ve been a family in black, but our lives were filled with light and hope and joy. And that was something that Lee Marlow never understood, never wrote in his cold, technical prose.

It was a kind of magic, a kind of love story, I didn’t think he’d ever understand.

From the oak tree in our yard, a crow cawed in the branches, and a few of his friends echoed. My chest tightened.

Ben.

Mom tapped me gently on the nose and smiled. “That’s how I know I’m a good mother. Now, these old bones need some rest,” she sighed, and stood. She kissed me on the forehead. In the porch light, she looked older than she ever had. Weighed down by sadness—but held together, still, by hope. “I’ll see you at the Waffle House in the morning. Sweet dreams, dearest.”

Then she went into the house, and closed the door behind her.

I sat there for a while longer as the wind began to howl through the trees as the storm grew closer. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky.

In my memories, I could see Dad sitting on the steps of the house, smoking a stinking cigar as he watched the storm roll in, a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, Mom leaning her head against his shoulder, a glass of merlot in her hand, her eyes closed as she listened to the rumble of thunder.

Another streak of lightning crawled across the sky, and I finally stepped out into the night.

The air was heavy and human. Alice said she couldn’t smell the rain, but I never understood how she couldn’t. It was so distinct, so full, so alive, like I wasn’t only breathing air, but the movement of electrons sparking together, igniting the sky.

As I started back toward the inn, thunder rolled across the town in a booming, house-shaking rattle that left my ears ringing. I hoped that when they eased Dad into the ground, the dirt would part for the thunder. I hoped the sound would rattle his bones still, make them dance, like they did mine. I hoped that, when the wind was high, blown from some far-off shore, I could hear him singing in the storm, as loud and high and alive as all the dead I’d ever heard singing.

I passed the inn and kept walking toward the town square. It was empty with the night and the coming storm. And then the rain came with a soft, low hum. First a droplet, then another, and then the air broke and the humidity rushed away to cool, sharp pinpricks of water. I tilted my head back, face toward the thunderous sky.

In Lee’s book, when it rained, Mairmont smelled like mud and pines, but standing in the middle of town, my flats flooding with water, the world smelled sharp from the oaks that lined the greens and the sweetness of the grass. He said that when it rained the town was quiet.

But my ears were full of noise.

I was soaked in a matter of moments. The rain passed right through Ben. He looked as dry as he had been before because he wasn’t real anymore. He was a ghost.

But he was here. Now. In the moment. Nevertheless.

He didn’t respond, so I guessed he never did.

My entire life was built on those kinds of things that I wasn’t supposed to do. I wasn’t supposed to move away, and I wasn’t supposed to ghostwrite for a romance author, and I wasn’t supposed to fail in turning the last book in, and I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Lee Marlow, and I wasn’t supposed to come back here.

Not like this. Not for Dad’s funeral.

To that Ben replied, “Well, I’m dead and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing to exist after me. I was just here and now I’m . . . I’m gone.” He sounded frustrated and sad. “I had so many plans—so many. And now I will never be able to do any of them, and I just—I want—”

He looked at me in surprise. “Yeah. I do.”

He paused. “Do it?” he repeated. And suddenly—Ben screamed. Just a loud, vicious yell that echoed off the storefront windows and the town hall.

I stared at him, startled.

He said, “Like that?”

A smile curved my mouth. I didn’t think he’d actually do it, but . . . “Do you feel any better?”

And he screamed again. In his voice there was aggravation, and heartache, and sadness, because he was a ghost, and he had left his life behind, and he had died in the prime of it—and I hadn’t even thought about what he must’ve been feeling. To be dead. To be ignored. Invisible.

I was the only one who could hear him screaming.

But he didn’t do it for other people. He didn’t do it to be heard.

So I took a deep breath, and I screamed with him. I screamed into the howling storm, and my voice was carried off in the wind, it was struck down by thunder, it was dampened by the rain. I screamed again. And again.

And it did make both of us feel a little better.

25

Deadweight

BY THE TIME I made it back to the bed-and-breakfast, I looked like a drowned rat and my teeth were chattering, but I didn’t really care. I felt okay again—better than I had since I landed at the airport. Like a weight had been . . . not lifted, no, it was still there, but it had gotten a little lighter. Dad was gone, and I was grieving, and it was going to be okay.

It wasn’t yet—but it would be. I didn’t know you could feel like that. I didn’t know I could feel like that again—okay.

Not good, but better.

He asked, “You always take ghosts to scream in the rain?”

I tore my eyes away from his forearm. “No, I only take people I like.”

He barked a laugh. “Another talent of yours?”

He laughed again, and shifted on his feet. We stood awkwardly. My heart hammered in my throat, and I curled my fingers tightly into my palms because all I wanted to do was reach out, brush his floppy hair out of his face. He needed a haircut. Then again, I liked his hair when it wasn’t gelled to perfection. It curled at his ears and at the nape of his neck, the kind of curls I’d wrap around my fingers and toy with.

This felt like one of those moments when I should’ve said something. Anything. How much I appreciated his help, and how much I liked him near, and how sorry I was that he was dead—

We were on a boat passing under a bridge, for a second in the shadow, a moment—the moment—like the moment I felt with Lee in that private library, when I accepted his hand and let him pull me toward places unknown, like the moment with Stacey in the college bar in SoHo, when he asked my favorite ice cream flavor, and Quinn when he offered me a stick of gum in civics, and John in high school, inviting me out to pizza with his friends after prom. Small moments you catch, and keep in glass jars like fireflies, or you let go.

I couldn’t catch this moment; I couldn’t keep it—I couldn’t keep him. Better than anyone else, I knew what happened when I got too close to someone already dead, when I opened my heart and let someone in. It had happened before, and I found his murdered corpse on the Ridge three days later. A stupid, small part of me had thought he was still alive. But he wasn’t. He was a ghost.

Ben, too, was a ghost. Not alive.

Not real.

If I wasn’t careful, I’d make that mistake again.

And he knew it was a mistake, too, because we both let the moment pass, and found ourselves on the other side. He was meticulous. He thought things through. Of course he wouldn’t do anything, he wouldn’t say anything, he’d keep me at arm’s length for both of our sakes.

But then why was I so frustrated that he did?

He cleared his throat and nodded toward the door. “You should probably go inside before you catch your own death.”

Dana was sitting at the front desk, reading another book. An N. K. Jemisin fantasy this time. They looked up when they heard the bell above the door chime, and jumped off their stool. “You’re soaking wet!” they cried, grabbing a towel from underneath the desk, and coming around the side to hand it to me.

Everyone had that one person who made their high school career unbearable, and Heather was mine. We had been friends for a brief moment, until she came to the conclusion that I was crazy after the murder case. She never believed that I talked with ghosts—she thought I was looking for attention. She was also one of the main reasons why the rest of Mairmont thought so, too.

Out of the corner of my eye, Ben moved slowly into the lobby, his hands no longer in his pockets but on his hips. He stared in at the book club with pursed lips.

Dana, bless them, leaned forward on their stool and said loudly, “How’s your stay, Florence? Do you need anything? Towels, shampoo? Peace and quiet?” they added pointedly, darting their eyes at Heather.

She smoothed on a smile and poured herself a glass of lemon-infused water from the dispenser on the far side of the desk. “Well, I know when I’ve overstayed my welcome. It was nice to see you, Florence. Maybe we should catch up sometime,” she added, scrunching her nose with a grin, and clipped her way back into the living area, where book club resumed.

I sighed and leaned against the desk. “Damn. For two seconds I’d forgotten about her.”

They winced. “Yikes, sadly not.”

In the lounge, the book club tittered some more. I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to hear what they were saying about Midnight Matinee. Ben was leaning against the doorway, hands crossed over his chest, listening in on them. His face didn’t tell me anything, except that he was either bored with their analysis of my writing or he wasn’t paying attention to them at all.

I winced. “Yeah, I’ve thought about the Ridge.” Hadn’t been back there since that day. Of course wildflowers would be there, the one place I didn’t want to look. But it turned out, I might not have had the choice. “Thanks. I’ll hike up there tomorrow and see it.”

I grabbed one of the mints from the bowl and began to head up the stairs when my name caught my ears—a bare whisper, but there. From the living room. The women in the book club were talking about me now, and if who they had been in high school was any indication, it wasn’t anything good. My shoulders tensed.

Dana mouthed that I didn’t have to go, but I did. I’d spent ten years running from these assholes, and I was sick and damn tired of it.

Ben warned as I passed, “Don’t pick a fight.”

Oh, I wasn’t.

Heather quickly righted herself in the chair with an air of innocence. She’d been bent in toward some of the other women, whispering over their bookmarked novels. I wondered if they’d even read it, or if buying romance novels to never read and gossip over them was the newest trend. Heather looked like I remembered her, pretty brown hair and pretty brown eyes and a pretty smile over soft pink lips. She wore a sleek black skirt and a paisley-printed blouse. I remembered Dad once telling me that Karen had hired her as a clerk at her legal firm in town.

She smiled with strikingly white teeth. “Would you care to join us? We’re big fans of Ann Nichols.”

I bet she was.

I swallowed the rebuke bubbling up in my throat and sat down on the fainting couch beside her. “I love Midnight Matinee.”

I could feel Ben staring at the back of my head at that comment.

Heather asked me with a fixed smile, “What was that one book you wrote, Florence? We’d love to read it for our book club next month.”

I returned the smile, and it was a real one. “Seaburn said you already read it when it came out.”

I was sure she hadn’t. I took a deep breath. Wrestled my emotions under control. I was an adult, and I wasn’t running anymore. “I know you don’t like me, Heather, and I know it was you who spread those rumors about me in high school—that I was crazy or a devil worshipper or whatever.”

She went rigid and darted her gaze around the rest of the book club. A few of them went to high school with us. They knew. The others had a passing, vague recollection of what happened. It was a small town, after all. “It was hardly just me. It was Bradley and TJ and—”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

She narrowed her eyes. Did she remember? Probably not. She probably hadn’t thought about the boy murdered on the Ridge in fifteen years.

Dana gave me a weathered salute as I climbed the stairs and mouthed, “Holy shit.”

Holy shit indeed. I didn’t let myself pause until I was almost at the top of the stairs. My hands were shaking.

I let out a solid breath and dug around in my satchel for my room key.

Ben came up the stairs behind me. “Harry? He’s the boy you helped?”

He said, a bit sadly, “You liked him.”

He reached out, but then stopped himself and crossed his arms over his chest. His biceps strained his tailored shirt, not that I was looking. Because I wasn’t. Because he was so very off-limits.

The lock clicked and I shouldered the door open. “And anyway, thank you for tonight.”

A thought occurred to me as he made his way back down the hall. “Where do you go?” The question surprised him because he turned back around on his heels toward me. “I mean—ghosts don’t sleep, so . . .”

He shrugged. “I wander. Until I disappear, then I usually just come back somewhere near you.”

He shook his head.

Sit in my room, but that sounded weird. It was weird. For all I knew I was inviting him to stare at me while I slept á la Edward Cullen. He said he was a romantic, so it was really a coin toss on whether he’d be flattered to role-play Twilight or aghast that I’d remotely consider it. I shook my head and said, “Never mind. Have a good night, Ben.”

I closed the door and pressed my back against it, because I felt my heart beating—so fast it felt like it wanted to jump right out of my chest. He had been so close to me, so close I noticed the thin scar under his right eyebrow, and the beauty mark above his lip, and the fine black hairs on his arms and—

And not just because I was falling for—

I wasn’t falling.

I couldn’t.

I tried not to entertain the idea as I pulled up Dad’s obituary again, and stared at the blank document.

Then I took a deep breath, and remembering what my Mom told me earlier, I started with a simple story.

I started with goodbye.

26

Ridges of the Past

I WASN’T THE outdoorsy sort of person. In fact, I really hated nature that wasn’t grown in a cemetery. I hated the bugs, the hiking, the snakes you had to watch out for, the palmetto bugs, the ants, the ticks, the weird hairy caterpillars, the raccoons. One time in high school, on my way to my car in the morning, I was chased by an opossum with a bent tail. Chased. Straight to my car!

I gathered very early on in my life that nature didn’t like me, either. Even when I moved to New York, pigeons dive-bombed me and sewer rats always seemed to zero in on skittering over my feet. I didn’t want to talk about the Godzilla-sized cockroaches that lived in my first apartment. I will never be able to sit down on the toilet and pee in peace for the rest of my life because of that damn infestation.

So it was safe to say, hiking up to the Ridge the next morning, I was not having a fun time. Never mind the history with the Ridge. It wasn’t so much that I avoided it but . . . coupled with hating nature, I never really had a reason to come back.

What was worse, I hadn’t seen Ben all morning. I wondered where he was. Usually he waited for me in the living area downstairs, but this morning when I went to fix my daily cup of battery acid to head to family breakfast, he wasn’t around.

I couldn’t wait for him, either, so after my waffle and eggs I headed for the Ridge. There was a forest path on the far side of Mairmont that trailed up to the fields. Now that I thought about it, Dad did used to pick wildflowers when he went for walks around the Ridge. He’d gather a bunch of different colors and bring them back down the trail with us, and present them to Mom at home.

The trail had changed in the decade I’d been gone. There were now benches along the path to commemorate Harry, and the dirt trail was more defined, but the trees were mostly the same—large old oaks and pines unfurling their leaves for spring. New York seasons were wonderful, since you actually got to experience all of them. In Mairmont, it was either winter or summer, with a week of spring and fall in between. This week must’ve been spring, and I’d come down at just the right time. The morning air was brisk, and the sun was bright, and the woods were quiet.

It was just me and my gasping breath as I trekked up the path.

When I was almost at the top, I leaned against a pine, bent over, to catch my breath. Sweat was dripping down my back and that was not a comfortable feeling.

I pulled myself ramrod straight—and almost blacked out. Ben gave a yelp, flinging his hands toward me, as I caught myself on a tree. I blinked the spots out of my eyes. “What were you gonna do, catch me?” I asked, annoyed.

He mocked a bow. “Trying to find those wildflowers?” he asked as I pushed myself off the tree and climbed the final few steps to the top of the trail.

The tree line abruptly ended, and in its place stretched a wide meadow nearly a football field long before it dropped off a bit—the “ridge”—and more trees began. There was a bench over to the left of me, and a trash can that smelled like it hadn’t been emptied in at least a week. On the far side of the Ridge was a small plaque, donated by the town and placed by the town council, where I’d found the body. Harry’s dad didn’t think anyone would find him out here for at least a few years, so it surprised him when police came knocking on his door a week later.

Last I heard, he was rotting in the state prison.

What surprised me most about the Ridge, though, was that the field was covered in small white puffs. Dandelions. Stretching on and on like a fresh powdering of new snow. It was beautiful, struck against the contrast of the clear blue sky. I could lie down in it and be buried beneath the blooms, totally submerged, and sleep there.

They were weeds—technically wildflowers, I guessed, but not the kind I was looking for.

I let out a long breath. “Well, shit.”

Ben stood beside me, looking out onto the field. “Lots of wishes there.”

He waited for me to catch up, his hands in his pockets, patient and tall as always. “Imagine how many wishes you could get out of these. At least one is bound to come true.”

Ben never stopped fascinating me. “You believe in dandelion wishes?”

He tilted his head, actually debating the question. Finally he decided, “It depends on the wish.”

What kind of wish would that be?

I plucked a dandelion and twirled it around between my fingers. “Then set the scene,” I began. “What would a refined dead editor wish for? He’s walking with his chaotic author. It’s midmorning—well, probably afternoon now—and there are hundreds of thousands of dandelions to wish on. What would he wish for?”

The edge of his lips twitched. Then he bent down close to me, and my skin prickled at his nearness, and he said in a soft rumble, “If he tells her, then it won’t come true.”

My breath caught in my throat. “She won’t finish her manuscript on time.”

I quickly looked away, my cheeks burning in a blush. “That’s a terrible wish,” I forced out. “Wasted potential—my editor would circle that and tell me to recast.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Fine, then what would the author wish for?”

That I’d wish that this moment in the field would last forever. That we never had to leave, that we could freeze time and live in this moment where the sun was high and warm and the sky was a crystalline blue and my heart beat bright in my chest and he was here.

I wanted a moment that never ended.

This moment.

Standing there in the middle of the dandelion field, looking up into Ben’s soft ocher eyes, I began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe. I still believed in that—I saw it in my parents, in my siblings, in Rose’s unabashed one-night stands looking for some peace. It was why I kept searching for it, heartbreak after heartbreak. It wasn’t because I needed to find out that love existed—of course it did—but it was the hope that I’d find it. That I was an exception to a rule I’d made up in my head.

Love wasn’t a whisper in the quiet night.

It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.

Ben took a breath. “In truth, I’d wish for—”

A roar of wind swept across the trees, and when it hit the field, it plucked up the white fluff of dandelions like a roiling wave on the ocean. It swept across the field and rushed toward me in a whirl of seeds that looked like snow. I shielded my face as the wave splashed against me, over me, around me, and carried the dandelions across the rest of the field and up into the crystalline sky.

I whirled around and watched them go. “Holy shit, talk about spring winds. Right, Ben?” There was no response. “Ben?”

But he was gone.

27

Ghost of a Chance

WHEN I REACHED the bottom of the Ridge, Carver’s blue Ford pickup truck was parked in the lot. He dipped his head out of the open window, a John Deere hat flipped backward on his head, and waved me over. He had a beautifully carved wooden birdcage in the passenger seat that he’d made himself, strapped in for safekeeping.

I let out a low whistle when I saw it. “Is that mahogany?”

He scoffed. “Hell no. It’s cherrywood. What do you think I am, made of money?”

He playfully slammed me on the arm. “Shush. Just wait until you sell the next Harry Potter. Then you’ll be rolling in the dough and everyone’ll want you to be their best friend—perhaps with benefits, if they’re lucky.”

I rolled my eyes. “No one will sell the next Harry Potter. It hit a zeitgeist that’ll never be re-created, and because there is so much to choose from now, it’s near impossible to predict the next publishing trend—”

I stuck out my tongue, and then nudged my chin toward the birdcage. “What’s that for, anyway?”

He grinned then. “I got an idea for a part of Dad’s will.”

He looked annoyed. “Do you have a better idea?”

Good, they used one of my favorite photos of Dad. It’d been taken a few years ago, when everyone had come to New York to celebrate the New Year and we’d all grabbed our champagne and climbed the fire escape to the roof. He had a cigar in one hand, laughing into the night, his face lit by New Year’s fireworks. I smiled at the memory.

Carver pulled out onto the road again and made a U-turn back into town. “You know—you don’t have to do all of this alone. I love scavenger hunts.”

I folded the newspaper back up and stuck it between the seats. “I know, but you’re all so busy. I’m the bum of the family.”

He shrugged. “Worth a shot.” He picked up a Slim Jim from the console and tore open the wrapper with one hand. “Want some?”

I winced. “Word gets around that fast?”

Seriously, was nothing sacred in this town?

I rolled my eyes. “It’s fine, she explained it—”

That surprised me.

I clenched my hands into fists. “Did you think he was crazy, too?”

That was it. I was out.

First it was Ben, who did a miraculous Houdini act at just the right time, and now Carver was laying into me about things I obviously did not need to work on.

My patience was already thin, but now it was absolutely demolished.

I reached for the handle and forced the truck door open, forgetting I was still buckled in. So I unbuckled my seat belt, after almost strangling myself, and shoved my way out of the car. “I’ll see you at the wake, Carver.”

He cursed. “No, wait, Florence—!”

I slammed the car door before he could finish whatever he was about to say. I didn’t want to hear it, anyway. Florence, the lonely island, was tired and sweaty, and she didn’t want to talk about her faults before a nice hot shower.

And what was more worrying was that someone caught me talking to Ben, and the rumors were at it again. I pulled my jacket tightly across my chest, folding my arms together, as I hurried back to the bed-and-breakfast. People weren’t looking at me as I passed—but what if they were? What if they were leaning in toward each other, whispering, “There goes the ghost whisperer,” and laughing under their breath?

Stop it. They weren’t.

It was my stupid brain turtling. This wasn’t high school anymore. I was a decade out of it. I was older. I was wiser. And despite Carver, my head was still filled with the memory of dandelions in the wind—and I realized that the rest of this didn’t matter.

And I was okay.

Somehow.

28

Dancing with the Dead

I HAD BEEN to plenty of wakes before, but never one like this.

As I slipped on my kitten heels on the front porch and made my way down Main Street toward the Days Gone Funeral Home, the townsfolk, wearing blacks and reds, began to close up their stores, carrying platters of cheese and crackers and lasagna and fried chicken and collard greens and various oven bakes.

For an hour, Mairmont had paused, all save for the lone Victorian house with black shutters and wrought iron fencing on the parapets. The closer I got, the more people there were. A sea of people, spilling out of the front door and down the sidewalk.

Seaburn was standing at the front gate in a brown suit, an orchid in his pocket. He saw me as I crossed the road, and pulled me into a tight hug. “Why’re they all outside?” I asked.

I walked up the pathway to the front steps, and hesitantly opened the front door—and stopped dead in my tracks. Because two of the three parlor rooms were full of flowers. Not just any flowers—wildflowers. All separated by color in clear glass vases. There must have been . . . there must have been a thousand of them.

I was baffled. “How . . . how did . . .”

Mom came out of the red parlor room, where Dad’s casket sat. “Oh, Florence! Aren’t all these flowers lovely?”

Then Heather stepped out of one of the parlor rooms, wiping her hands off on a handkerchief. What was she doing here? I began to ask that exact thing when she outstretched her hand to me and said, “Your dad was a good man. We will always want to help when we can. And you were right. But people change. Even me.”

I looked down at her hand, then at her again. “You . . . did this?”

I didn’t know if she was telling the truth, or if she had some ulterior motives—to look better if word got out about our confrontation? To paint me as the spoiled woman who never grew up? See? Heather did change, it was Florence who couldn’t let the past die!

Or . . . maybe that was my brain being cold and bitter. Thinking everyone had an ulterior motive when maybe, this was just what it looked like.

I took her hand. “Thank you,” I said.

We shook.

Then she took the vase of blue wildflowers and disappeared into the blue parlor room. Mom motioned for me to come into the viewing room when I was ready.

Seaburn elbowed me in the side. “Go see your old man so we can open up the house.”

I breathed out a long breath, steeling my shoulders. One step at a time. Carver and Alice were waiting inside the red parlor room—Dad’s favorite room—and outstretched their hands to me. I took them, and squeezed them tightly, and together we walked up to the dark mahogany casket decorated in wildflowers of blues and reds and yellows and pinks, to begin to figure out how to say goodbye.

The afternoon was a blur of people drifting in and out of the funeral home, shaking my hand and giving me their condolences. Casseroles began to pile up in the refrigerator in the kitchen, and more than one bottle of champagne was spilled on the hardwood floors. The entire town was here, crowded into the old Victorian house and across the lawn, in their best black clothes. They paid their respects to Dad one at a time, and the three Day siblings stood off to the side, our hands clasping one another’s, keeping ourselves upright. Mom was stalwart, sipping on a glass of champagne, so gracious to everyone who came to say their goodbyes.

Someone else said, “He was so proud of you.”

And everyone else just went by in a blur. I barely registered their faces.

My bottom lip wobbled, but I bit it to keep myself firm. Whenever I felt myself giving way, Carver would squeeze my hand tightly, as if to ask, Do you need a moment? And I would squeeze back that I was okay, and tighten my grip on Alice’s hand, too. The world spun on, and we were still here.

When the last of the visitors finally left, including Mrs. Elizabeth in a pretty pink suit because, she said, “Black isn’t my color,” with her ghostly husband in tow, I closed the front door and locked it. The smell of the wildflowers was so overpowering, we elected to keep some of the windows cracked to air the place out. But even with them open, the funeral home felt so quiet, I almost couldn’t stand it. Mom busied herself in the red parlor room, picking up the dried flowers off the ground and situating the wildflower vases. The arrangements wouldn’t be moved until tomorrow, when we had the graveside service, and I had to wonder how we’d get all of these damn flowers hauled over to the cemetery.

I leaned back against the front door and breathed out a long breath.

I glanced up toward the voice. Ben was standing awkwardly in the middle of the foyer, his hands again in his pockets. I hadn’t seen him since he disappeared on the Ridge, and I felt instantly better just seeing him. His presence was a balm.

He glanced around. “The wake . . . is over already? How long was I gone?”

Even though he couldn’t interact with the world, even though no one else could see him, even though I was the one who was supposed to be helping him . . . “You’re very thoughtful.”

A knot formed in my throat. The grooves on the front door pressed into my back, I leaned so hard against it. Isn’t that what I had wanted to tell him, what felt like eons ago? “Does it? Get better?”

He nodded. “Bit by bit. I lost my parents at thirteen in a car accident, and my grandmother adopted me. This is my dad’s ring,” he said as he took off his necklace, felt the ring between his fingers. “I keep it with me so I don’t feel so alone. She told me that you don’t ever lose the sadness, but you learn to love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And, eventually, you’ll pick yourself back up and you’ll find that you’re okay. That you’re going to be okay. And eventually, it’ll be true.”

He curled his fingers around his ring and put it in his pocket. “I’m sorry, Florence. I know you’ve heard those words a lot today, but . . .”

He sighed, and then gave the smallest chuckle. It cracked the sides of his face, and there was a smile. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. I bent toward him to get a better look. “What?” he asked.

Was that your wish? The one from the Ridge? I wanted to ask, but it wouldn’t do any good. I was here to help him move on, and he was here to leave.

Ghost stories never had happy endings.

For the next twenty minutes, I walked around the funeral home in the silence, righting everything, cleaning the tables, closing the guest book.

When I rounded to the red room where Carver stood, looking down at Dad in the coffin, I paused. He was muttering quietly under his breath, and slowly reached out a hand to Dad’s, folded so neatly over his chest, and rested it there for a moment.

Quietly, I backed out of the room.

Ben leaned against the doorway, looking into the room with my dad’s coffin. He said, “I like your Dad’s style. Great tux.”

Carver gently closed the lid of the coffin. For the last time. Then he moved out of the red parlor room where Dad was and gathered up the cups from the end table. I lugged the trash can with me, and held it out for Carver to dump the cups into.

A stereo sat atop the table, usually reserved for some sort of somber organ music during wakes and visitations. I couldn’t remember if we had it playing today.

My brother gave a sad sort of smile as his fingers skimmed across the stereo buttons. “Remember when Dad played music while we cleaned up?”

I groaned. “He had Bruce Springsteen on repeat.”

He chuckled. “Remember that time he pulled his back out wailing on an air guitar to ‘Born to Run’?” His eyes squeezed at the edges, prickling in the only way he knew how to cry. His voice was thick as he said, “God, Florence, I wish he was here.”

He gave a mock gasp. “Oh. My. God. Is Florence Day actually asking for help?”

Alice poked her head out of the doorway. “Fuck that,” she replied.

Carver bumped his shoulder against mine. “Always a yes.” Then Mom called him from the third parlor to help her move some vases, and he scrubbed me on the head as he went. I smoothed down my hair again, muttering to myself.

I tilted my head. “He wrote that we listened to Beethoven’s Für Elise—Carver went through a classical music kick—and that Dad danced with skeletons. Which he did,” I added, “but only on Halloween.”

He snorted a laugh. “I bet it was terrifying.”

Because Dad collected songs and danced Mom around the parlor—and together they taught us how to say goodbye. They taught us a lot of things that most kids rarely even thought of. They taught us how to grieve with widows, and how to console young kids who didn’t quite know death yet. They taught us how to put makeup on corpses and drain out the blood to replace it with formaldehyde, how to arrange clothes so the hospital bruises from the IVs and shock paddles and stickers weren’t quite as prominent. How to frame flowers on a casket to disguise how few some people received. Mom and Dad taught us so many things, and all of it led to this.

They gave us the tools to figure out what to do when they were gone.

And now Dad was.

I took out the topmost CD. A burned silver disc with Dad’s scratching scrawl on it.

Good Goodbyes.

I couldn’t remember how many times, after long viewings and sad wakes, Dad would call us to the funeral home to help clean up—just like this. Just like now. The Days Gone Funeral Home was small, and Dad didn’t like overworking his employees if he didn’t have to, so he worked us instead. I always made like I hated it, the too-clean smell of disinfectant and floral bouquets, the bright rooms, the dead people in the basement, but I had a secret:

I never hated it as much as I said I did.

By the time Mom had dragged me and Carver and Alice to the funeral home, usually on school nights, Dad had already shrugged out of his coat, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, exposing the tattoos he’d acquired in his youth (that most of Mairmont would gasp at if they knew). He’d put on this CD, and beckon us into the house of death with a smile and a good song.

I put the CD into the stereo, and pressed play.

The hiss of the speakers sighed through the parlor, and I closed my eyes, and the music started. The antiquated bop hopped from room to room, the shake of the tambourine, happy and joyful and light, and finally—finally—I felt like I was home. The song settled into my bones as if it wanted me to move, like it wanted me to throw my arms up, to twirl, to jump.

I didn’t need to see where I was going. Every corner of this funeral home was my childhood, every inch seared into my soul like a long-lost treasure map.

I remembered Dad standing by the stereo. I remembered the snap of his feet. Pointing to Mom, beckoning her close with an orchid in his mouth and the shake of his hips.

Carver, putting the guest book away in the office, looked at me like I’d lost my mind as Mom poked her head out of the smallest parlor room. A smile tugged at the edges of her rose-red lips.

I undid my hair from its tight bun and shook it out, because the wake was over, and began to sing along to the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Dad used to turn up the stereo as loud as it would go, so loud I was sure the corpses rattled in the basement, and take Mom by the hand, mouthing the words, and she’d laugh as they danced through parlors so accustomed to death, and they looked like home.

They were home.

This was home.

Because Dad left us things—little things—so that we wouldn’t be alone. So Mom wouldn’t be alone. So he could still be with us, even if just in the melody of a song. Any song. Every song. Not just the Foundations, or Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi or Fleetwood Mac or Earth, Wind & Fire or Taylor Swift.

Whatever song, whatever made us feel alive.

Carver grabbed his partner by the hand, and pulled him into the hall to dance.

The good goodbyes.

I always thought the CD was meant for the people laid up in coffins, with floral arrangements and bouquets and guest books—and maybe it was.

But maybe it was for the living, too.

To keep us moving forward.

Ben watched with a baffled look, so misplaced in a funeral home filled with light and sound, and before I could stop myself I reached out to try to take his hand, to get him to dance with us—when my hand fell through his.

He gave a sad sort of smile, and outstretched his hand. “We can pretend.”

And suddenly we were all moving and singing. He twirled me out, and back in, and I laughed in a way I hadn’t in years. And Ben was smiling. Really, truly smiling. It sent a shock straight through my core because he’d never smiled like that before. At least not for me.

He was beautiful.

It made my heart skip at the thought, and then the music, rattling in my bones so brightly, and I recognized—quite suddenly—this feeling. It was the kind I wrote about years ago, the kind he talked about, the kind that itched just beneath my fingers, lost on the doorstep of some Brooklyn brownstone—or so I thought.

It was the answer to a question, soft and subtle, but it was there—the kind of feeling, this hope, that had just been hiding, waiting for some specter to take my hand and dance me across the floorboards.

It felt, for a moment in time, like happiness.

29

When the Dead Sing

Alice eyed our brother. “Liar.”

I’d be damned if I was gonna start now.

Carver thanked Nicki for the plate and casually kissed him on the cheek. We were all still technically in our wake clothes, but we’d lost our jackets and shoes and most of our jewelry by then. A half-empty bottle of Maker’s sat on the table, along with everyone’s glasses.

Nicki patted Carver on the shoulder. “You are honestly something.”

Ben chuckled against his shoulder. I didn’t think he noticed me watching him, not at first, not as he took in my family. Alice and her chipped black nails and Carver and his boyfriend sneaking soft touches to each other and Mom humming “Build Me Up Buttercup” quietly to herself as she rearranged her card hand again and again. It was endearing, the way he pushed his fingers through his hair, and leaned forward to sneak a look at Carver’s hand, and how he laughed whenever Alice mumbled something smart to herself.

And I thought—with a pang of sadness—how much Dad would’ve liked him.

He finally caught me staring, and quirked a thick black eyebrow. I was in the middle of shoving pizza into my mouth, and quickly looked away. “So, where were we?” I asked between a mouthful of cheese, setting the pizza down on the table like the heathen I was. He didn’t catch me looking, I lied to myself.

He didn’t see anything.

Mom sat quietly at the head of the table. She took another sip of her drink. “Now, now, sweetie, Xavier and I never raised you to lie.”

I, sadly, had a heart left. Two, actually.

Alice flipped a card out of her hand. She tossed it into the middle. A four of hearts. Excellent. Carver played an eight of clubs. Which meant he either didn’t have hearts or spades . . . or he decided to throw a card. Because he knew Nicki would win the hand.

Carver made a ticking sound with his tongue. “Your turn, sis.”

I chewed on my thumbnail.

Ben eased himself off the counter and came around the kitchen. He leaned over me, his hand anchored on the table, a hmmmmm soft in his throat. Where he was near me, my skin tingled with cold. It felt like when your hand goes numb, quite the opposite of if he were alive and leaning so close. I wondered what he had smelled like when he was alive. What cologne he used, what shampoo, what he looked like naked—

Alice added, tongue in cheek, “Your ghost friend helping you out?”

Carver agreed. “If she had a ghost friend helping, she wouldn’t be losing so badly.”

Nicki slapped him on the arm. “Be nice!”

Ben bent down against my ear and said, the words a low rumble in his throat, “Annihilate them.”

I was thinking the same damn thing. It wasn’t cheating if no one knew. I pulled the queen of hearts from my hand and slammed it down in the middle of the table. And, like Ben said, Nicki had to play his hearts. I won the round.

And the next one. My family would play their hands and then Ben would advise me on what to play next, his voice tickling my ear.

When I took the fifth round in a row, Carver crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, this isn’t very fair.”

Mom recorded the score. “Florence, you’re only twenty behind.”

He threw his hands up. “That! You’re not this good.”

Mom set down her pen and gave me a level look. “Florence, is your ghost friend here?”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Mom, you know she won’t talk about it—”

Alice narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re cheating. Tell your ghostie friend to stop looking at my hand!”

I blinked at him. “You mean clubs?”

Alice eyed me suspiciously. “What about clovers?”

I ignored her. “He said you’ve got strong words for someone whose highest card is a ten of clubs,” I told her, and her eyes widened. She jabbed a finger at me. “Oh that’s not fair! Automatic dish duty! Cheater!”

Carver pressed his cards against his chest. “Has he seen my hand, too?”

My family shook their heads—even Nicki.

Carver agreed. “How else do you think he always won at those poker games?”

I nodded. “Yeah, he can.”

Mom laughed. “Tell him to call me Bella. I hate Mrs. Day. Nicki, dear, it’s your turn.”

And that was that. Ben came back around to stand behind me and point at cards, muttering about the probability of my family members having certain hands, and which were safest to play. I always threw down cards as a chaos agent, but he was meticulous and strategic, much like how he kept his office. Sometimes when he leaned over me to point at a card, muttering low and quickly, a shiver would crawl down my spine because I loved the way he talked softly, pinpoints on the edges of his words—

Loved.

Oh.

A few rounds later, we all decided to call it a game. Carver had won, which was no surprise to any of us, and Nicki politely thanked “the ghost” for playing. They left the kitchen, laughing about how I was still saddled with the dishes despite having ghostly help. I could hear them in the living room, talking loudly about the visitors from the wake.

As I pulled in all the cards and shoved them back into their box with the jokers, Mom said to me as she cleaned off the table, “He was always torn, you know, about the gift you shared. He wished you could’ve chosen instead of being burdened with something you didn’t want.”

That surprised me. “I never thought about it that way. I always thought . . . it would’ve been put to better use with someone like Alice or Carver. They’re so much better than I am.”

One of my biggest flaws. “What do you think’s in the letter that I have to read?”

Mom gave a think. “I’m not sure, actually.”

Mom turned to her left and said, “You’re welcome here anytime, Ben.”

I hesitated. “But I can do them . . .”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, we can do it together. Mom, I think Carver wants to go set that wooden cage out to see if he can trap those damn birds, and Nicki’s scared shitless of them—”

From the other room, Nicki cried, “I am not!” Then, after a moment, he added, “But they are terrifying!”

Alice gave Mom a look. “Can you help him so he doesn’t hurt himself?”

Mom sighed. “If I must . . .”

Alice and I did the dishes in silence. Ben had left the kitchen, but I didn’t know where he’d gone instead. Hopefully to oversee my ridiculous brother, because I had very little faith that Mom would do anything other than nod sagely without really knowing what to do.

I kept wanting to say something to Alice—this was the first time we’d really been alone together, not counting Dad’s corpse in the mortuary—but nothing sounded right in my head. I used to be so good at talking to Alice. We were best friends, with all the inside jokes of sisters who actually got along.

And then we weren’t. I didn’t really think about how leaving Mairmont would hurt everyone I loved, but especially Alice, and I couldn’t get our last fight out of my head. Well, the last few fights.

She almost dropped one of Grammy Day’s favorite dishes. “Oh my god, warn me before you do that.”

I blinked. “You don’t?”

I actually had to think about that one. “Thirteen?”

I didn’t know what to say—I’d never thought about it that way. That the one thing that I had run away from was also the one thing I remembered most fondly about Dad—and the one thing that neither Alice nor Carver nor Mom could ever have with him.

I dropped the towel, torn between hugging her and calling for help. My voice wobbled. “Alice . . .”

Because she was about to make me cry, too.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Maybe if you were here instead—”

She looked at me, and her eyes were rimmed red, and her bottom lip trembled. “I couldn’t protect him,” she sobbed.

We pulled each other into a tight hug, and cried it out on each other’s shoulders. It was cathartic in a way that nothing else had been this entire week. I kept holding all of the pain in, and I couldn’t imagine how Alice felt this whole time. I should have asked her. I should have wondered if she was okay because none of us were.

But we would be.

After a moment, she squirmed out of my hug and pushed the remaining tears out of her eyes. “I can finish the dishes alone.”

I grabbed my coat from the rack and slipped it on as I caught a glimmer of Ben sitting on the floral couch in the living room. He was relaxed out on it, his eyes closed, one leg crossed over the other, his arms softly folded over his chest, almost as if he was asleep. Over the past few days, he had slowly unwound in front of me, first his hair becoming disheveled, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his trousers cuffed, his tie lost somewhere in the netherworld between Friday night and here, and now—ever so slightly—there was the shadow of a beard crossing the strong angles of his chin. I’d never seen a ghost change before. They were immovable. Stagnant. Then again, I had never paid close attention, either.

He cracked open an eye. “Ready to go?”

My heart twisted. It felt so familiar in the weirdest way. As if in some other universe he was here, real, alive, sitting on the couch, waiting for my sister and me to finish the dishes so we could go home.

Perhaps in another life.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

He stood and came over to the foyer as I put on my shoes, and we left together down the front steps to the sidewalk. “Walk you home?” he offered.

It was nice, walking beside him back up the street to the inn. He asked about my sister, and if we were okay, without ever prodding, and I told him about our conversation. I didn’t know Alice had been hurting so terribly, and her hurting made me want to punch whoever made her hurt. But in this case, it was Dad. And me, to some extent. I knew that Alice didn’t like me leaving, but I didn’t think . . .

I just didn’t think.

Lee never escorted me home until we lived together, and even then sometimes I would duck out of his publishing functions early and take the train home alone. I always said to myself it was because I never wanted to bother him while he made connections, but the truth was I usually felt like an unwanted purse, standing quietly beside him as he talked to executive editors and poets laureate and god knows who else, feeling like an outsider even in an industry I was very much a part of.

Even if only secretly.

I wrapped my coat around myself tightly. Ben glanced over at me, frowning. “Are you okay?”

It did feel exactly like that. “But you got through it, so I think I can, too.”

I couldn’t remember.

I blinked the tears out of my eyes and cleared my throat. “Anyway, I appreciate your help during the card game.”

He snorted a laugh. “Well, you do suck at spades.”

The tips of his ears went pink, and he quickly looked away. “Yes, well, they’re not why I like you. They’re a bonus. Like a book sale. Buy two, get one free.”

I chewed on the side of my cheek, trying to hide a smile. “And that’s what I like about you.”

The last crisps of winter clung to the chilly evening air as a spring wind blew its way through the budding oaks and dogwood trees, and I felt the itch in my fingers to write this all down. To paint the sky in dark blues and purples and silvers and paint the sidewalk in shards of glittery glass, and wax about how it felt to walk quietly beside someone who enjoyed your company just as much as you did theirs.

I couldn’t believe that I was swooning over the bare minimum—decency.

Dana was at the counter when we came into the inn, and they smiled at me over another romance novel. This time Christina Lauren. “Evening, Florence.”

Ben walked me up the stairs to my room at the end of the hallway, where he stood and waited as I fished for the room key in my purse. “Your family is really cool.”

I winced. “True. Imagine us during weddings. We’re a riot.”

Trying not to think too much about it, I found my key at the bottom of my purse and unlocked the door. “Honestly, it’s not that special—Ben?”

He’d gone pale, suddenly, and caught himself against the side of the wall to keep from falling. I dropped my key and reached for him, but my hands passed through his arm.

Dana called from downstairs, “Florence? Is everything okay?”

Well, that was one way to do it.

I got inside and closed the door. The lamp outside stopped rattling. “Please, sit. I’m worried.”

He was holding his chest, shaking his head. “I’m fine.”

He pursed his lips, about to rebuke me, but he must have thought better of it and eased himself down on the bed. He swayed gently. Did he look fainter than usual? Paler? I couldn’t decide—though I did know that I was frightened enough that it killed my buzz.

My heart jumped into my throat. “You’re just tired. You can stay here and rest all you want. I’m going to wash my face, okay? I’ll be back.” And as I left for the bathroom, I thought I felt a chill of cold brush through my wrist, but I ignored it because if I didn’t, I was afraid we would start dancing on a tightrope, and the ground was too far down.

I took a long time in the bathroom. Too long. I didn’t know if I wanted him gone by the time I got out, or if I wanted him to still be there sitting on the side of my bed. No, I did know what I wanted, but I was afraid.

I wanted him to stay.

His eyes fluttered open. “Mmh, I’ll get up—”

He put his head back on the pillow. “On one condition.”

I scooted closer to him, so close that if we were alive, our breaths would mingle and our knees would knock together and I could pull my fingers through his hair. I said softly, a secret and a prayer, “Stay.”

30

Strange Bedfellows

MORNING LIGHT POURED in between the violet curtains as I woke up, and I rolled over to check my phone. Eight thirty. Thursday, April 13. Today was my dad’s funeral. I hugged a pillow tightly to my chest, and buried my face into it—when I remembered Ben.

He was lying beside me, eyes closed, still as stone. Ghosts didn’t breathe, and they didn’t sleep, either, but there were the beginnings of dark circles under his eyes. There was a bit of stubble on his cheeks, too, and I thoughtlessly reached to touch it when he opened his eyes.

I retracted my hand quickly. A blush crept up my face. “You’re awake—sorry. Of course you are, you don’t sleep. Good morning.”

I nodded, and hugged the pillow to my chest tighter. “I don’t want to go today.”

He nodded. “Though I don’t know how much it’ll help.”

His eyes softened. “I like being around you, too.”

I shook my head. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I haven’t finished that manuscript. I don’t know when I will. I—I feel like I just keep failing you.”

I let out a squeak. “You do not!”

I could imagine that, in some alternate timeline. Where he stood, and shut the door behind me, and knelt down beside where I sat, clutching a cactus, and asked me in this exact soft, growling voice—“May I kiss you, Florence Day?”

And I would’ve said yes.

I shook my head fervently. “No—no way. I—I had unwashed hair! And I wore my Goodwill tweed coat! And my scarf had coffee stains on it!”

He barked a laugh, loud and bright. “Climb me!”

I picked my dress out of the suitcase and froze. “Wait—a few years ago?”

Lee.

He nodded at the unspoken name, his hand absently going to the ring around his neck. He rubbed at it thoughtfully. “You were in the library and I can’t remember how many times I told myself to just go over there. To talk to you. This stranger whose name I didn’t even know.”

To think, he had been there since the beginning. We had passed each other like ships at sea and I never knew. All of my heartache could have been circumvented—all of his pain could have been mended. What kind of people would we have been if he had found me in that library? Or if I had mingled with Rose and found him instead?

He didn’t respond.

He swallowed thickly. “How come when I told myself the same thing a thousand times I didn’t believe me, but when you say it, it feels true?”

I tilted my head, looking at his reflection in the mirror. “Aren’t you?”

He chuckled, and finally looked up again, and his eyes were a warm, melted ocher. Like in the dandelion field. “I don’t think this is what you meant,” he replied, his voice soft and gravelly, and I realized how badly I was burning up on the inside. I wanted him to touch me, to run his fingers across my skin. I wanted his face in the crook of my neck, his lips pressed against the freckled skin there. I wanted to fold myself into his sharp angles and stay there. Exist there. Because there—there I was sure I wouldn’t fall apart, I wouldn’t disassemble, I wouldn’t feel broken.

Not because I couldn’t exist on my own, but sometimes I just didn’t want to.

Sometimes I just wanted to let my guard down, let the pieces of me fall to the ground, and know that I had someone there who could put me back together without minding the sharp bits.

He laughed. “And I want to complain about all the youths and their TikToks and sit on park benches together making up stories and go for walks in graveyards at midnight.”

He sighed and sat back on the edge of the bed. Morning sunlight slanted in such a way, it carved a stark golden shine across him. “That sounds awfully similar to the plot of The Forever House.”

I gave him a strange look. “What do you mean?” I asked as I gathered up my clothes and went into the bathroom to change. I left the door cracked. “They got together in the end!”

Finally, he said, “Fair. How’d you come to start ghostwriting for Annie?”

I poked my head out of the bathroom. “Guess.”

He came up behind me, outstretching his arms, hovering over my skin as he traced the contour of my hips to my middle. “I have an inkling that you would like me to reach my hand beneath your pretty lace underwear,” he whispered, his lips pressed close to my ear, “and stroke you slow. And while I did, I would kiss your neck and nibble at your ear.”

I felt myself flush, my heart beating in my throat as quick as a rabbit. I held my breath as he bent closer still, closer than he’d ever been, never touching, his fingers painting over me like a sculptor’s, relishing in my design.

I’d written more intense scenes than this. This was nothing.

Then why was this getting me all hot and bothered?

It was the look in his eyes, that dark glimmer. The promise that he would do exactly what he was telling me. For a man who liked his lists, and liked his order—that was powerful.

His mouth hovered beside my ear. “Romance isn’t a sprint, Florence. It’s a marathon. You start slow. With your blouse, one button at a time. You said I was meticulous, but I would show you just how meticulous I could be.” His fingers mimed undoing the buttons of my blouse. “For each button, I’d plant another kiss on your neck, your collarbone, and finally your perfect breasts . . .”

The edge of his lips twitched. “Oh, who’s to say it isn’t for me, too? I am quite the selfish man when it comes down to it—”

I swallowed the rock lodged in my throat. I was? Worthy of that kind of undivided attention? Because I never felt that way with Lee, not even as he kissed me and told me what to do, where to plant my lips.

He chuckled. “I wouldn’t call that a fault. Would you?”

I took a deep breath. “Then ask me.”

In the mirror, his eyes found mine. They were sharp, considering, thinking. He said this was for my pleasure, but I was terrible at being selfish. I could see it in the glint of his eyes, the swallow of his throat. He wanted nothing more—for how long? Since he first saw me? Before I ever knew his name?

I heard him take in a shaky breath. Then, “Unbutton your shirt. Slowly.”

My fingers slid down my wrinkled business shirt, undoing the buttons one by one, until they were all undone and the shirt hung loose over my bra. I relaxed my shoulders, and the shirt dropped down, puddling around my elbows, exposing what he very much considered to be very good breasts in my very best lace bra. “Like this?”

He made an agreeable noise. “You are perfect.”

His fingers twitched, and he curled them tightly into fists. “You are perfect,” he said again. “I like admiring the view.” Then, “Close your eyes.”

I did.

I laughed, and opened my eyes, only to find his hands over mine. I turned around, and finally looked at him—truly—for the first time, and pulled my shirt back up onto my shoulders. “It’d be a good scene,” I said, and my voice broke a little, my fingers buttoning my shirt back up. “Corny, but in a good way.”

My alarm went off, making both of us jump. I quickly stepped away from him and hurried across the room to turn off my phone. And reality crashed back in, because today was my father’s funeral, and I still had two things to check off his will. “I—I’m sorry. I have to finish getting dressed. So much to do. So little time.”

I tilted my head, and smiled. “No, you just being here is enough.”

My heart leapt into my throat. But what about Ann’s last book? I thought, but I didn’t want to voice it. I didn’t want him to change his mind because—“I’d like that.”

Because people always left. If they had a choice—they left.

And Ben wanted to stay.

I cleared my throat, tucking my shirt back into my skirt. “I better hurry up. Dad won’t bury himself,” I added, and went back into the bathroom to brush my teeth, but my blood rushed with the thought of all the corny moments I could have with Benji Andor. Even though he was dead.

It didn’t mean he was gone.

31

Bring Out Your Dead

ACCORDING TO MOM’S text, we were all going to meet at the funeral home before walking over to the cemetery. And I, in true Florence Day fashion, was miserably late. My siblings were already outside, about to leave for the cemetery.

List of songs . . . ? I put the question away for later. “Thank you, guys. And the crows?” I asked Carver hopefully.

He sighed and hefted up the empty cherrywood birdcage. “Yeah, didn’t catch a single fucker.”

He gasped, stricken. “Never!”

Though I figured the murder didn’t leave the rooftop of the inn last night, since Ben hadn’t left, either. That was . . . just slightly my fault. Not that I’d admit it. Alice cocked her head and looked up into the old willow tree. Beneath it, Ben was standing with his hands in his pockets. He looked up, too. She nudged her head toward the murder of crows perched in the tree. “Do you mean those bastards?”

I took a deep breath. “Dad?”

My voice echoed through the building. I waited patiently, but there wasn’t a reply.

The house creaked in reply.

And I had leaned in, so sure it was a cure for death, a way to bat it away—

Not in the horrific way Lee wrote it. Not with moaning ghosts and terrifying poltergeists and living dead, but in the way the sun came back around again, the way flowers browned and became dirt and new seeds bloomed the next spring. Everything died, but pieces of it remained. Dad was in the wind because he breathed the same air that I breathed. Dad was a mark in history because he existed. He was part of my future because I still carried on.

I carried him with me. This house carried him.

This town.

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the tears to stay back. I was going to cry enough today. I didn’t want to start early. “Yeah. We should probably bring the crows over.”

He caught himself on the doorframe. Shook his head. “Sorry—I—dizzy,” he muttered. His hands were shaking, and his skin had dropped to that pale, sickly tone from last night.

A knot formed in my throat. “You’re not okay.”

The doorbell rang.

Ben and I exchanged a look.

It rang again.

My heart fluttered. The last time I answered the doorbell, it was Ben. Perhaps this time . . . maybe this time . . . I hurried to the front door, almost crashed against it, and flung it open—

My best friend stood on the doormat to the Days Gone Funeral Home, a duffel bag in tow. She flipped down her Ray-Bans in awe. “Holy shit, bitch! You didn’t tell me you lived in the Addams Family house!”

She gave me a blank look.

The toilet flushed and Rose stepped out of the bathroom in her red-soled high heels, the same ones that I wore years ago to that horrible Dante’s Motorbike book launch, and grabbed me under the arm. “Are you ready to say goodbye to the old man?”

I hesitated with a look at Ben, but he smiled at me to give me some comfort and promised, “I’ll see you there.”

She jostled my arm. “Florence?”

I squeezed her hand tightly. “Yes. Let’s.”

Rose was my copilot. My rock. My impulsive, wonderful best friend.

And I was so, so glad that she was here.

32

It’s a Death!

THE CEMETERY WAS peaceful, and the grass looked like a watercolor painting against the pale shale of the tombstones. They stuck out like jagged bottom teeth, some crooked, most cleaned. As we passed some of the darker, mold-grown stones, I made a mental note to come back and scrub them pretty again—and then stopped myself.

I wasn’t here to work. I was here to mourn.

Though I was sure Dad would have done the same.

Almost the entire town came out, with lawn chairs and picnic snacks. The wildflowers they had donated—all one thousand of them, arranged by color—sat stacked around Dad’s casket like a mountain of petals, as Elvistoo crooned “Suspicious Minds” from his portable karaoke machine.

And—perhaps best of all were—

I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, they do.”

Unlimited Party had delivered—and decorated—the funeral home lawn, tying balloons to the backs of chairs and hanging streamers from the oak trees that read IT’S A DEATH! and HAPPY DEATH DAY! They had also passed out party hats and kazoos, and some of the town kids were playing “The Imperial March” near a statue of a crying angel.

Rose and I joined my family in the front row of chairs that had been set out, and it looked like Alice was nursing a migraine.

Carver said regretfully, “The balloons got her. She almost had a stroke, she was so livid,” while Alice, poor Alice, was muttering, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him—”

I introduced Rose to my family. Whenever they’d come for Christmas, Rose had gone home to Indiana, always missing each other by mere hours at the airport. But finally, now, they got to meet. Mom leaned over Alice to shake Rose’s hand. “Pleasure, though I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances.”

I scanned the crowd for Ben, but I didn’t see him. Had he disappeared again? I hoped he was okay. One by one, the crows landed in the nearby oak tree and quietly ruffled their feathers against the wind. So he had to be here somewhere. That gave me some relief.

After a few minutes, Elvistoo’s rousing rendition of “Return to Sender” interrupted my thoughts, and I glanced down at the set list.

Right.

Dad, in his will, said he didn’t want a preacher or a bishop or any sort of holy person. We weren’t really the organized-religion kind of family, even though we dealt in death. All he said by way of a speaker was the letter he wrote.

I took it from Karen, Dad’s lawyer. The paper was soft and crinkly. “It’s showtime.”

Alice looked worried. “Florence . . .”

The tension that had coiled Alice’s shoulders a moment before unwound, and she agreed. Carver bumped against me gently, giving me a little nod. I took Mom’s hand, and she took Alice’s, and Alice took Carver’s, and we made our way to the space in front of Dad’s casket. Elvistoo handed me the microphone.

I always went about everything on my own. I thought I could solve everything myself—though I guess I never really had to. I had family, and I had friends, and I had parents who loved me and would always love me until the end of time and—

And there were people out there, too, that I didn’t know and wanted to, like Ben, who saw me for all my chaotic flaws and my stubbornness and still wanted to stay.

He wanted to stay.

I wanted him to stay, too.

I cleared my throat, and looked out over the cemetery, and all of the people who had come with their lawn chairs, wearing party hats and telling the kids to shush on their kazoos. “Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming. This is going to be a different kind of funeral than you’re used to—though I think if you know my dad, you’re already expecting that.” I opened the envelope, and took out the letter. “Dad gave me a letter to read to you. I don’t know what the contents are, so let’s find out together.”

My hands were shaking as I unfolded the piece of yellow stationery. Dad’s handwriting unfurled like a story. He must’ve written in the quill I gave him for his birthday a few years ago, because of the ink stains and the way the letters bled together.

What the letter said didn’t really matter. It was an explanation of why he asked us to go through so much for his funeral. It was an apology for not being able to stay longer. It was a goodbye filled with horrible puns and the worst dad jokes imaginable.

It was a letter addressed to me. To Alice. To Carver. To Mom.

It was a soft goodbye.

Wildflowers for Isabella. A thousand flowers with ten-thousand petals for every day he would love her to eternity. Songs we danced to in the parlors, soft and good and bright goodbyes. Banners and kazoos and party hats for all of the birthdays that he would never get to attend. A murder of crows, to remind us to look for him still. Because he would be here.

Always.

And for me to read this letter—because he knew I would try to do these impossible tasks alone.

Carver covered up a laugh, and Alice elbowed him in the side.

He hoped I asked for help because asking was not a weakness—but a strength. He hoped that I would ask more often, because I would be surprised by who would come into my life if I let them.

Not all of my companions would be ghosts.

I wish I could say that at that moment wind rustled through the trees. I wish I could say that I heard my dad in the wind, telling me those words himself, but the afternoon was quiet, and the black birds in the oak tree cawed to one another as if I had made a particularly funny joke.

And Ben stood at the back of the crowd, his hands in his pockets, and I felt a safe sort of certainty that everything was going to be okay.

Maybe not right now. Not for a while.

But it would be—eventually.

Not all of my companions would be ghosts, but it was okay if some of them were.

Because Dad was right, in the end, about love. It was loyal, and stubborn, and hopeful. It was a brother calling before a funeral to ask how the latest book was going. It was a sister scolding her older sister for always running away. It was a little girl on a stormy night tucked into the lap of an undertaker, listening to the sound of the wind through the creaky Victorian house. It was a ballroom dancer spinning around in an empty parlor with the ghost of her husband and a song in her throat. It was petting good dogs, and quiet mornings waking up beside a man with impossibly dark eyes and a voice with the syrupy sweetness of third-shelf vodka. It was a best friend flying in from New York on a moment’s notice.

It was life, wild and finite.

It was a few simple words, written in a loopy longhand.

I folded the letter back up and whispered softly, privately, one final time, “Goodbye, Dad.”

33

The Last Goodbye

As soon as Bruno introduced himself again and starting to sing “Love Me Tender,” Alice and Carver and Mom embraced me, threading our arms together in a hug. I loved them so much, I started crying—or maybe I was already crying? I couldn’t remember when I started, and I couldn’t remember when they started crying, either, but we hugged each other as tightly as we could. Because there was a secret about all the Days—we cried whenever we saw someone else crying. So if one Day cried? All the others followed, and at that moment I wasn’t sure if I’d started it, or Carver, or Mom (definitely not Alice, never Alice), but it didn’t matter.

Carver took a breath. “I think I’m going to propose. To Nicki.”

Mom gasped, “Oh, darling! I’m so happy!”

Alice stuck out her tongue. “I don’t even have a partner.”

I glanced over to Ben, on the far side of the funeral, with the good mayor happily keeping him company, as Mom recounted when she first met Dad at a conference that was one-third furry con, one-third ballroom-dancing championships, and one-third mortuary seminar. It was a good story, but we’d heard it a thousand times.

We could hear it a thousand times more.

I couldn’t tell those kinds of stories about Ben. Half of the people wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would think it was a tragedy. Maybe it was. Dad said I wouldn’t keep ghosts as companions my whole life—but what if there was one I wanted to keep?

What if one was different?

Ben must have felt me staring, because he turned his dark eyes to me, and mouthed, “You did great.”

And I couldn’t help but smile.

My shoulders squared. “He’s not my boyfriend!”

Alice tugged her hand out of mine. “Ugh, this is getting too mushy for me. Go get your ghost boyfriend or whatever.”

Ben stood and tilted his head toward the far side of the cemetery, where we sat a few nights ago, and as I thanked the people for coming and accepted their condolences, he patiently waited under the oak tree.

But she wasn’t worth any more of my time, either.

I didn’t manage to make my way over to the bench until Elvistoo was on his second glass of champagne and had devolved into singing anything the crowd shouted, so he was currently howling through “Welcome to the Black Parade.”

He nodded. “They’re louder. And it’s—getting harder. To stay here.”

A chill crept over my skin. “But I haven’t worked at all on the book! You shouldn’t be going anywhere,” I replied in alarm.

To which he swallowed thickly. Pursed his lips. And admitted, “I don’t think it’s about the manuscript, darling.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why? What haven’t you told me?”

He shook his head. He hadn’t been able to meet my gaze since I came over to the bench. Why was I just noticing this? He couldn’t meet my gaze because he knew I’d see the truth if he did. “I . . .”

He clenched his jaw.

I clenched my fists. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. If he wasn’t here because of the manuscript, then . . . what else could there be? “Okay. What is it?”

I forced a laugh. Really? “Ben! C’mon, I know you love her. She was like the matron saint of romance to all of us—”

There was a lot of information in that sentence that could have surprised me. The fact that he hadn’t told me the myriad of times we talked about his grandmother. The slant of his nose that perhaps looked a bit like hers. The sharpness of his jawline. How much he knew about Ann Nichols. How he always called her Annie.

No, it wasn’t any of that. What surprised me was one simple word: “Was?”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “She passed away five and a half years ago.”

Five . . . and a half years? Just about the time when I met her, when she sat down across from me and offered me a job. I was shaking my head vehemently. “That—that can’t be right. No, we met at that coffeehouse . . .”

I wasn’t sure if that made things better or worse, actually. I tried to keep myself calm, but I was anything but. My head was spinning. “And—you—the estate—just let me? Without knowing she was dead?”

Ben let out a soft laugh, leaning close to me. His hand was so near mine, I could almost reach out and take it if he were alive. “Annie did used to say the universe sends you the things you need exactly when you need them, and I want to think it sent you. I don’t know about afterlifes or what happens after—after this but . . . finding your book was divine. Giving you Annie’s legacy and watching it flourish under your pen was a blessing. And this?” He looked into my eyes, and suddenly this no longer felt like a conversation. It felt like a goodbye. “These last few days have been . . . beautiful. It’s a good ending, darling. As your editor, I have no notes.”

My throat constricted. “Ben . . .”

I couldn’t count how often I wanted to hear those exact words from someone—anyone—and here was this man telling me he loved them. Cherished them.

My mouth grew dry, and I didn’t know what to say. If I said, You’re welcome, would he disappear in a sparkle of dust? Would the wind carry him away into the afternoon?

I’d heard that before. “Not even the ones I want to stay,” I replied. My heart was breaking.

Something inside of me gave then. Not hope, exactly, but the small thread of happiness I had this past week, because it couldn’t support me. I was balancing precariously on a string that snapped, thinking it was made of sturdier stuff.

He couldn’t. He was begging me to let him go.

I took a deep breath. The good goodbyes were what you made of them. Elvistoo crooning The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” in the background, Mom laughing through her tears as Seaburn spun her through the grass.

I turned back to Ben, and I smiled the only kind of smile I could muster. It was sad and broken, but it was mine. “Thank you, Benji Andor, for letting me live in your grandmother’s world for a few years. And thank you for wanting to live in mine.”

All I wanted to do was take his face in my hands and kiss him, but as I reached out to try, his eyes widened. He sucked in a short breath.

As if he saw something past me. Something I couldn’t see. Something I never would.

And then he was gone.

Forever this time.

34

Ghosts in the Floorboards

IN THE CORNER of the Days Gone Funeral Home, beneath a loose floorboard, there was a metal box full of my deepest dreams and my smutty fanfic. When you grew up in a family where everyone knew everyone else’s business, you had to find ways to keep your secrets. Carver hid his in the backyard. Alice wrote poetry and stashed it in a tree somewhere on the Ridge. And I hid mine beneath the floorboards.

Something beyond burying Dad, anyway.

I took out the box and dusted it off.

Then I opened it.

There was a letter on top, written in that familiar loopy hand. Dad’s handwriting. He must’ve found it while cleaning the parlor—stepped on a loose floorboard, and pried it up to see what was underneath.

Or maybe I was never that sneaky.

Maybe he always knew I hid my secrets here.

I’m so proud of you, buttercup.

And stapled to the bottom were receipts. A sob caught in my throat. They were sales from the bookstore in town. A Rake’s Guide to Getting the Girl, The Kiss at the Midnight Matinee, and The Probability of Love. He had bought them. And he knew they were mine.

He knew.

I hugged the note to my chest.

And if he knew, then that meant—when the bar owner interrupted Bruno. The half-finished sentences about my writing. Ann Nichols’s new books in the window . . .

Alice found me in the red parlor room like that. She froze in the entryway, eyes wide, holding two glasses of whiskey on the rocks. “The hell? This is some Goonies shit here.”

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I am sworn to secrecy.” We put the note and the rest of the books back into the box, and I slowly began to shuffle through the rest of it. Journals, concert stubs, little notes filled with smaller stories. She watched, stirring the ice in her glass. “Dad found mine, you know.”

She gave me an astonished look. “You knew?”

I took a sip of my drink. It was a lot stronger than the drinks Dana made. It personified Alice—she was there, in your face, unable to be forgotten. I admired that about her. She wouldn’t have let her ex-boyfriend steal her stories and publish them. She would’ve chased him down, and shit in his shoes, and penned an article for the New Yorker painstakingly detailing how much of a liar Lee Marlow was. Not just to me—but to his colleagues, to his friends, to journalists, and to colleges and deans asking him to be their guest professor.

She would have annihilated him.

As the sun began to sink across the evening sky, the shadows in the parlor grew longer and darker, but we didn’t get up to cut the lights on. There was a certain kind of softness to the way the golden light filtered in through the windows and kissed the dark corners. We knew this funeral home with our eyes closed, anyway, and the floor wasn’t that uncomfortable yet.

Alice squirmed. She did that when she was trying to keep a secret that was physically trying to escape her body. “Karen read most of the will before you arrived, so you missed this part of it.” She pursed her lips tightly together and was quiet for a long moment. “You had your ghosts with Dad, and I thought I had nothing. But . . .” She looked around the parlor, as fondly as Dad always did. “I had this place. Well, I have this place.”

I realized with a gasp. “Dad gave you the business?”

She gave the smallest nod. “After Mom dies, of course, but—he put it in his will. He said it went to me. And Mom said she’d happily turn it over before she kicks it but I really don’t want it that badly and—”

Her bottom lip wobbled, and then she threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she said into my shoulder.

I hugged her tightly. “I know you’ll do a great job, Al.”

She finally let go and sat back on her feet, and wiped her eyes. “I think I met my crying quota for the year.”

Alice’s eyes widened. “Oh, sis. Ben?”

For some reason, someone else saying his name made me sad all over again. Tears burned at the edges of my eyes, but I dutifully brushed them away. I’d helped dozens of ghosts in the past. Most of the time I just had to listen to them—to a story—before they left.

Alice gave me a strange look. “Who told you that lie? It’s never easy. It’s also never really goodbye—and trust me, we’re in the business of goodbyes. The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched. There is no happy ending, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can. Or whatever. Metaphor-metaphor-simile shit.”

I bit my cheek to keep from laughing.

I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “He’s gone.”

Maybe there was some truth in Alice’s words, though I didn’t really believe them yet. As I took out my fan fiction and leafed through my journals, there was a certainty in that teenage girl’s words, in what she wanted, in who she was, the parts that I clung to, the parts of my first book Ben loved. She believed in happily ever afters and grand romantic gestures and one true loves that stretched on beyond their canon endings. I wasn’t that girl anymore—or so I always told myself. But maybe I was.

And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

Lee Marlow had said that romance was only good because you read it with one hand.

He was wrong. He had stolen my stories and rewrote them into some literary circle jerk with award potential, but I had the memories of my parents waltzing in the parlors, of Carver and Nicki kissing in the cemetery, of Alice pinning a wildflower in her hair when she thought no one was looking. He might have had the plot, but he didn’t have the heart.

Ben was gone, but Alice was right. He was still here, and I still had a book to write. And now I finally knew how to write it. I still didn’t know how to write Amelia and Jackson’s ending, but I knew that I could. I knew that I was capable.

I think knowing that would’ve made Ben proud.

Alice grinned and punched me in the shoulder. “About damn time you realized how smart I am! You can call me Saint Alice if you please.”

I gave her a strange look. “Who?”

Rose said, “Your editor—I mean,” she said, and glanced at Alice, “Ann’s editor.”

Alice waved her hand. “I already know.”

My best friend took her phone out of her bra. “Erin texted me when I was coming back from the cemetery. He just woke up.”

Rose shook her head slowly, about three types of confusion crossing her face. “I . . . did not say that.”

Didn’t she? I mean—it didn’t matter, Ben was right there. He haunted me. He was dead, he had to be. But the more I thought back to our conversation the less I became sure about it because . . . I wasn’t sure if she had said he died, or if I inferred it. She said that he was hit by oncoming traffic, and I inferred the rest.

I mean, he was a fucking ghost.

And now he was gone. I watched him fade into the wind, but—

What if . . .

What if that wasn’t because he moved on?

It was hope.

Rose showed me the text message from Erin.

HOTTIE MCHOTCAKES HAS RISEN! He’s awake!!

As if he was—

The times he disappeared without warning. The voices he heard. The sounds. The pain—I’d ignored most of it because it didn’t matter. He was dead because my stubborn ass said he was. But he wasn’t, and while he existed here, some part of him was still being pulled back to his body, wrenched back, even though he kept trying to stay here, thinking that wherever he was going was worse.

If I’d been more perceptive. If I hadn’t written off his weird experiences. If I’d just thought a little, that things weren’t always the same, not always certain.

I pressed my hand over my mouth to muffle a sob.

Rose took me by the shoulders. “Florence? Babe? Are you okay?”

I shook my head. The world blurred with my tears. “H-He’s alive,” I said between sobs. “B-Ben is alive.”

Alice looked up from her spot on the ground. “Your ghost boyfriend, Ben?”

To that, Rose asked, “A ghost?”

And that made me cry even harder, and Rose pulled me close to her and wrapped her arms around me, even though she didn’t understand. He could feed his cat again, and he could go to bookstores, and read his favorite novels, and he could take all of those vacations he never did before, and meet new people, and find a new family and—

And me. He could find me.

I wanted to have memories with Ben. I wanted to see him on the front porch and sit with him and make up silly stories about the people that passed on the sidewalk. I wanted to share a beer with him down at Bar None, and I wanted to dance with him—really dance with him, our hands intertwined, my unruly heart beating so loud it gave me away.

I wanted to kiss him, obviously, but it was so much fucking more than that.

When I was with Lee, I could see my entire life unfold around him. I knew where I fit in, I knew what part to play and how to play it. I had a place in his life, and I boxed myself into it as best I could, and I tried to be the perfect girlfriend for someone who was looking for a saint.

But when I thought about Ben, about his disheveled hair, his timid smile and soft voice, a heartstring pulled so taut in my chest it almost broke, and it hurt. Because I thought I could—

I thought I could love him.

Cautious and organized and stoic as he was. Just as he was. He didn’t need to fit into a perfect place in my life. He just . . . needed to be.

He existed. And the rest of my world made room.

He was right in the end. Romance wasn’t dead, after all.

35

Unruly Hearts

USUALLY WHEN YOU flew into LaGuardia, you kissed your ass and hoped for the best. I hated flying into LGA—the turbulent air, how you’re going right over the water, how you think you’re going to land in that water when at the last minute the tarmac comes up and your plane juts down and—

I didn’t like flying.

At all. But I braved it. In fact, I didn’t quite mind it at all. Because I was going to see Ben.

After the funeral, I had thought to stay a few days longer, but as soon as my family heard about what had happened—from Alice, because she was about as good at keeping secrets as my dad was—they all told me to go. Catch a flight back with Rose, come home in the morning, go to his hospital—to find him.

Perhaps this wasn’t my grand romance, but this was my story, and whether I was the rule or the exception, I didn’t care. I just wanted to see him. I wanted to make sure he was okay.

Rose’s phone pinged with a few texts. Probably all from Alice. They had gone on a date last night to Bar None, and Rose hadn’t been able to shut up about my sister since. I loved it—and hated it. My chaotic best friend and my smart-ass younger sister? It was a recipe for trouble.

What were Ben and I? Were we anything? I wondered. I didn’t know. I thought back on my last conversation with him, and I was filled with mortification all over again. His grandmother was Ann—he’d read all of my sex scenes! He’d seen me naked!

I wasn’t sure which was worse.

They were all pretty bad.

Though, did he remember any of that? Or when he woke up, was it like waking from a dream? Erin had told Rose that his injuries were minimal, and the doctors hadn’t known why he wasn’t waking up. Because he wasn’t there. His soul—spirit—whatever. I wasn’t sure what made us tick. The memories in our electrons? The wind in our lungs? The echo of our words? Whatever it was, he was awake now, and even though it felt like an eternity since I sat in his office and gave him a cactus, it had only been a week to everyone else.

I wanted to puke.

Leaving the airport was always a lot easier than coming, but LaGuardia made it hard no matter what. It was like whoever designed the place wanted everyone who came through it to suffer as much as they could. All of the open gates were on one side of the airport, but the line for the taxis was across the parking garage, down an incline, through a construction zone, at the far end of what was probably once a bus stop. It took thirty minutes to get there, and calling a car would’ve taken just as long because the pickup area was right next to the taxis.

But we finally managed to nab one, and Rose told our driver to take us to New York Presbyterian in Lower Manhattan—and take the shortest route possible. Because of the layover in Charlotte, we didn’t actually manage to get back to the city until rush-hour traffic, so a drive that usually took thirty minutes took an hour and some change. That was one thing I didn’t miss about the city. At least in Mairmont, there weren’t enough people for an hour and a half’s worth of traffic.

By the time we pulled up at the hospital—and the right building—I just wanted to go home, but Rose was nothing if not stalwart.

Of course I did. That wasn’t the question. It wasn’t if I wanted to see him but—this last week had been strange, and otherworldly, and who was to say that he wanted to see me?

Rose paid for the taxi and dumped her duffel on the sidewalk beside a fire hydrant, out of the way of most of the people. “I’ll be out here,” she said, waving me inside. “I don’t really like hospitals.”

As if I could. I’d been repeating the number over and over in my head for the entire taxi ride, but a small voice, one that I had been trying to ignore, trying to shove away, kept asking, What if he doesn’t remember you?

What would I do then?

I didn’t know, but I didn’t think about it, either, as I got into the elevator and hit the fifth floor button. A moment later, an older woman stepped in with me. She had on the loudest sweater I’d ever seen—every color of the rainbow vomited onto it and knit together. I’d seen a sweater like that only once before.

The older woman leaned toward me. She smelled like lilac perfume and dumplings. “Thank you, Florence.”

And that sweater—she looked like—

She looked like Ann.

The elevator doors dinged and opened to the fifth floor. I stepped out and glanced back one more time to make sure that the woman wasn’t there, but of course she wasn’t. She was dead. Five years dead.

I didn’t have time to think about Ann, because as the elevator doors closed, I heard a familiar voice say my name. And it wasn’t the voice I wanted to hear.

I turned around, and standing there in the lobby, with blond hair and a trimmed beard, was Lee Marlow. He was holding a bouquet of yellow flowers in his hand with a card stuck in them that read GET WELL SOON!

I felt myself go clammy all over. “Lee—h-hi.”

He frowned, as if trying to puzzle out exactly how I knew him. And I didn’t know where to start. Though I should’ve known better, because it turned out, Lee didn’t much care. “ ’Course he’s popular with the ladies.”

Ben? Right. I’m sure he told himself that because no one came to see him when he had his appendix out on our two-year anniversary.

He really couldn’t think about a world beyond himself, could he? Charming and suave, of course he was, and the world he knew danced around him like planets around the sun.

I forced my lips to smile as my hands balled into fists. Just one punch. Just one—

No, Florence.

You’re better than that.

I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to do this alone, either. My chest was beginning to feel tight. This wasn’t how I pictured seeing Ben again, with Lee Marlow to witness, but I began to care less and less about how we met again and just that we were going to. Because Ben was here, and the panic in my veins was slowly, with each step, transforming into excitement.

He was here. In this building. Alive.

Ben was alive. Ben was alive.

Ben was alive.

Hospitals didn’t look so different from publishing houses—at least not Falcon House. Glass walls separated patients from everyone else, sometimes frosted but never private. The cacophony of beeps coalesced into this jagged sort of rhythm that had no rhyme or reason, and my heart was louder than all of them, beating in my ears like a funeral march.

Lee never knew how to do anything in silence. He didn’t like quiet. He had to be either talking, or listening, or doing something. So, as we went together down the hall, he talked. “It’s good to see you—are you going somewhere?” he added, once he noticed the suitcase I was rolling with me.

I knew that shape. I knew him.

I came to a stop.

Fifteen feet away, in room 538, Ben laughed at something she said. It was loud and bright and—and happy. He was happy. I didn’t need to see him to know that.

A second chance. What Laura had begged of Ben, after she cheated, and Ben had wanted that. A second chance—but he didn’t think he deserved it, because what guy drove his girlfriend to cheat? But it was her fault. She made the choice.

And he made his.

But . . . she had been at his bedside this whole time. Waiting for him to wake up. She loved him. Really loved him—and they had the kind of shared history that Ben and I couldn’t have in the seven days we knew each other.

I . . . knew very little about Ben. What was his favorite food? His favorite music? What was he afraid of—what did he do on the weekends? Did he own one of those squatty potties? Questions I hadn’t thought to ask in the last week.

Then again, I’d been grieving. I was still grieving. It was hard to make space with a sorrow that full.

He gave me a strange look, and oh, I wished he could’ve said that he missed me. And I wished he could’ve apologized. And I could’ve told him that my stories were real, and that they were precious, and that I wanted to tell them someday. Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.

And this was not mine.

Lee Marlow said, of all the things he could’ve, “I don’t think we would’ve worked out, bunny. I don’t like dating rivals, though you got a while to go. I didn’t want to see you jealous—”

My hand was already in a tight fist.

It would’ve been a shame to waste it.

So I turned and I slammed it straight into his motherfucking nose.

He gave a howl of pain, backpedaling in surprise. His nose wasn’t broken. I didn’t know how to throw a punch that hard. But it did hurt my knuckles. He whirled back to me with wild, angry eyes. “The hell, Florence?!”

Then I left down the hallway, back toward the elevators.

And I didn’t look back.

Even as he shouted at me to stop, told me he’d call the cops, file a report—I didn’t care.

It felt good, and he deserved it.

And I was never going to think about Lee Marlow again.

Rose was still waiting for me outside, and the look on my face must’ve said it all. Her eyebrows knit together and she shook her head. “Oh, honey,” she whispered, and pulled me into a tight hug.

I told her I couldn’t do it. I didn’t tell her why, but it didn’t really matter anymore anyway. It wasn’t my move to make, and this wasn’t my part of the story to tell. I had helped him get his life back, and he had helped me through mine—and if that was it . . . then it was. He was happy, and so it was time that I was, too.

I went home with my best friend in the entire world, to our small apartment in New Jersey, and I finished writing a love story.

36

Lovely Meeting

Amelia Brown stood in the rain, and she knew she didn’t want to be alone.

She winced. “I never sent in that article. I couldn’t.” Because she had realized over quiet dinners at the kitchenette and saving dogs and running from paparazzi—she realized she didn’t want that. She didn’t want a loud life.

She just wanted a good one.

He said, “I know. Thank you.”

She hugged herself tighter. “We’re even, then.”

She cocked her head. “Depends. Is the guitar included?” She motioned to the guitar slung on his back.

She took a step toward him, and they were close enough that all she had to do was reach out her hands and take his, and pull him into the warmth of her house on the Isle of Ingary. “What would you play?”

He reached out slowly, softly, and took her hands in his. “Don’t worry,” he replied, “it would be a song with only the good notes.”

I wrote. And I wrote. For three months, as April turned to May, turned to June and into July, I polished and I edited and I cleaned the draft as I sat in front of a fan and drank sweet tea and fell in love over and over with Amelia and Jackson and their magical Isle of Ingary. I checked my texts, though they were mostly from Rose checking in on me, and Carver asking about plans to propose to Nicki, and even Alice a few times! Though whenever she texted it was mostly about Rose.

I could see that trouble coming from a mile away. My best friend and my little sister? God help me.

I ate takeout Thai from the restaurant down the block and went to bed too late and woke up at noon to fix myself a pot of coffee I would take one sip of before abandoning it as I fell into the story again.

I hadn’t written like this in years, not since I first began writing for Ann.

It felt like everything over the last year, all of my pent-up frustrations, all of my failures, all of my wants and hopes and dreams, they all came tumbling out of me. On the page I could make sense of all of them, mold them into a beginning, a middle, and an end—because all good love stories ended.

And then, just like that, I was no longer in the dark night. I was stepping out into the daylight, into the happily ever after, and it felt good and whole and bright.

And something to be proud of.

One evening, Carver called to tell me, “He said yes,” on a video chat with Nicki, showing both of their golden engagement bands. “And we’re gonna have the wedding in a few weeks at the funeral home. I figured since Alice basically owns it now, she could bump a wake or two and give us a family discount. Bruno is officiating.”

Three weeks later, on the hottest day of July on record, I finished the last book I would ever write for Ann Nichols.

And it was good.

I sent the novel attached in an email to Molly, who then forwarded it to Ben’s new assistant editor, Tamara, the one who had done a lot of the heavy lifting while he was away on medical leave. Tamara knew I was Ann’s ghostwriter, too. I wasn’t expecting to hear back. It had been three months, and if Ben remembered me, if he missed me, then he would’ve found me. He knew how.

A few minutes later, Molly called. And offered me representation.

I told her I’d think about it, just to make her sweat a little for keeping Ann’s death (albeit a secret) from me. Molly was one of the best agents in the business, and I liked working with her, so it was a no-brainer, but you know, I had time to sit and think on it, since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.

I’d just finished a book, after all.

Was Ben going to love it? No, I already knew he would. He was going to love it because for a few days during a chilly spring in Mairmont, he loved me, and like Jackson singing a song with only good notes for Amelia, the book was filled with only the good parts of us.

That evening, instead of takeout, I decided to make some celebratory mac and cheese while Rose stopped by the discount liquor store to get our favorite pineapple wine on her way home. My phone dinged as I was draining the noodles. An email.

I looked at who it was—

And my heart slammed against the bony cage of my chest. I almost dropped my phone into the hot noodles.

The email was from Ben.

Miss Day,

It was a pleasure working with you. I wish you all the best on your future endeavors.

Best,

Benji Andor

And that was all it said.

For the next four hours, I paced the apartment trying to decode every secret message within those twenty-two words with Rose and a bottle of pineapple Riesling.

Does he remember? No—he couldn’t. If he did, then he would have contacted me so much sooner than this. That couldn’t be it.

Rose watched me pace from her perch in the middle of the couch, sipping on her wine. “Perhaps it was just a polite email?”

I stopped pacing. “What?”

She took another large gulp. “Tell him you’d like to meet, and then finish up your unfinished business.”

In reply, Rose forcibly set down her wineglass onto the coffee table and reached behind her on the couch to our bookcases. She grabbed one and presented it to me. “Sign, seal, deliver.”

I stared down at my own book, Ardently Yours. The book that Ben said was his favorite in the whole world. And I let out a very long sigh. “Remember your last idea involving Ben?”

She shrugged. “You got to punch Lee, didn’t you?”

She had a point.

So, the next morning, while I nursed a hangover and ate congealed oatmeal, I wrote a reply email.

Mr. Andor,

It was a pleasure. Though I do have something for you. Do you think we could set up a meeting?

Sincerely,

Florence Day

Miss Day,

Would this Friday work, at noon?

Best,

Benji

Mr. Andor,

Noon would be lovely.

With all my best,

Florence

And that was that.

I second-guessed my email the entire week. Was lovely too strong a word? Should I have signed it Miss Day? Should I have addressed him as Benji instead of Mr. Andor? Rose told me that Wednesday that if I spiraled any more, I’d drill myself to the center of the earth.

So I tried to spiral more quietly.

I think I might’ve had a full-on panic attack if it weren’t for having to finalize plans for Carver and Nicki’s wedding that weekend. Right after the meeting with Ben on Friday, I was to take a taxi to Newark and hop on a plane home for their wedding on Saturday. Friday was the rehearsal dinner and bachelor parties, and as the big sister who did absolutely nothing to help with the wedding while I was in the deadline trenches, I had to at least show up for those. I reserved my room at the inn (to John and Dana’s pure ecstatic joy), and walked Mom through the whiplash of “I’m so happy!” and “My baby’s all grown up and leaving the mortuary!” and I managed to talk Rose into coming with me purely because I was the best eldest sister in the entire world and I knew for a fact that Alice would never ask her. She was bold at doing absolutely everything, except when it came to her own happiness.

I guess it ran in the family.

So I gave myself a little leniency when I realized that I hadn’t brought any sort of WELCOME BACK! or GLAD YOU LIVED! card to go with Ben’s gift until I was already in the elevator going up to Falcon House Publishers. I bounced on my heels, quite unable to stop moving.

It was summer in the city, and the men in the elevator looked like they were about to sweat to death in their ironed business suits, the women in flouncy skirts and kitten heels.

And I was in what I felt best in, an oversized blouse and straight-leg jeans with a hole in the left knee, and red Converses. I didn’t look like I fit in here, but looks were deceiving, and best of all?

I didn’t really care anymore. It didn’t matter. What mattered was where I was going.

I wasn’t scared of the looming floor number that we rose to meet. Executive editor Benji Andor had been back in the office for a little less than a month, though I was beginning to suspect he had done more than a little work from home before that. He apparently still had a lot of catching up to do, from what Erin told Rose. Then again, when did editors not have a lot of catch-up work to do? As long as I’d known Lee, he’d been majestically behind on every deadline. But I had a feeling that, unlike Lee, Ben actually wanted to catch up—but then why would he agree to entertain a meeting with me?

I was nervous. What if he thought I was some sort of weirdo who wanted to give him his favorite book? Couldn’t be any worse than a weirdo giving him a cactus, I guessed.

Because it had been three months, and I wasn’t going to lie, quite a few of those nights I spent drowning in a bottle of wine, wondering what happened with Laura. Wondering if she stayed. If he wanted her to. If they decided to try anew.

I was alone by the time the elevator stopped at the floor for Falcon House Publishers, and I stepped out into the clean white lobby. The glass-cased bookshelves looked exactly the same. Ann Nichols’s bestsellers sat on a shelf all to themselves, and the glass reflected me, freckled cheeks and dry lips and messy blond hair pinned up into twin buns.

Erin was reading a book as I came up to the front desk, but she quickly put a sticky note on the page and closed it. When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow.

It came out this week.

Erin gave a pout. “But they have such a good cheese plate.”

Rose wasn’t going to work today; she’d already caught her flight to Charlotte, where Alice would pick her up to drive to Mairmont. After this meeting, I’d be on my way, too. I asked if I could stash my suitcase behind Erin’s desk, and she happily agreed. “I’ll ring Benji and tell him you’re here.”

As Erin called Ben’s office phone, I leaned against the front desk to get a better look at Lee Marlow’s novel. The cover was decent, I guessed. A bit too much like The Woman in the Window for my liking. It wasn’t as if I could forget that Lee’s book came out this week. It had been everywhere in the city—on subway ads, in magazines, an entire article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and even in my favorite indie bookstore. It wasn’t something I could quite escape, but I no longer felt under the shadow of it, either.

Lee ended up not filing a police report after I’d punched him at the hospital. Probably for the best, because I had secrets that could make his life very uncomfortable for a while, and he didn’t need that sort of bad press before the release of his instant bestseller.

After a moment, Erin hung up the phone and said, “That’s odd, he didn’t answer, but he should be in his office. You can head back there, if you want. His door should be open.”

So took a deep breath, and I went.

37

The Dead Romantics

I REMEMBERED THIS walk three months ago. I remembered how terrified I was, how I hoped whoever this new editor was would give me a little slack. I did end up getting the extra time I needed, but it didn’t quite go the way I had planned. I passed meeting rooms separated by foggy glass, and assistant editors and marketers and publicists working diligently to make the machine that was publishing run.

It really was a miracle that anything came out on time. Well, a miracle and way too much caffeine.

At the end of the hallway, Ben’s office door was open like Erin said it would be, and there he sat as if he’d always been there. As if he hadn’t been a spectator during the worst week of my life. His hair was a little longer and wavy, not gelled back like the last time I’d met him, and curling gently against his ears. His sleeves were rolled up, and the slightest hint of his father’s golden wedding ring peeked out from beneath his collar. There was a shallow scar running slantwise across his left cheek, still a little red and tender, but healing. He wore large thick-framed glasses, though they didn’t seem to help him see any better because he was still squinting at something on his computer screen, a pen hanging out of his mouth.

It was a snapshot of his life. I wanted to take a photo of it, memorize how the door framed him in a perfect setting, the window behind him with midday light flooding gold into his office.

I steeled myself—and my heart.

Even if he didn’t remember me, it was okay. It was going to be okay—I was going to be okay.

I rapped my knuckles against the doorway.

He gave a start at the noise. The pen dropped from his mouth, but he caught it and shoved it in an accessory drawer in his desk. “Miss Day!” he greeted in surprise, and quickly stood to welcome me in, knocking his long legs on the underside of his desk. He winced at the pain. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

He held out a hand over his desk, and I took it. His was warm and calloused and I thought I had prepped myself for this sort of meeting, but at that moment I realized how woefully underprepared I actually was. Because he was alive. When so long he had been a specter that faded in and out of my life, first a ghost and then a memory and now—

Now he was standing in front of me and no matter whether he remembered me or not, he was here. The feeling of his hand in mine made me happy in a strange and comforting way.

And that sort of happiness, even bittersweet, made my heart so full it might just burst.

I squeezed his hand tightly. “Thank you for fitting me into your schedule,” I replied, smiling. “I’ve got to get to Newark, so I won’t be staying long.”

The Swell of Endless Music would have been a damn good revenge fantasy.

But it was a better romance.

To my surprise, he had kept my apology cactus. It was sitting on his desk beside his monitor, and it was still alive. He’d made room for it, on his tidy desk where everything had its place.

I had changed so much in these last few months, and I wondered how much he’d unknowingly changed. If somewhere deep down beneath his flesh and bones there was an echo of moonlit walks in graveyards and screaming in the rain and dandelion fields and funerals.

Or were they my secrets now? I held them close either way, though not as close as I held my purse right about then.

He smiled softly. “You were right. And the title? The Swell of Endless Music is so lyrical and soft. It’s great. I think we might use it—where’s my manners? Would you like something to drink? I’m sure the break room has tea or burnt coffee, if you’d prefer that?”

He grinned. “Might be for the best. Your zoom-zoom juice might backfire on the flight.”

I gave a start. “My what?”

We sat for an awkwardly quiet moment.

Then he cleared his throat. The redness of his ears was inching down toward his cheeks now, and he checked his watch. “Anyway, there’s a reason you wanted to meet with me?”

Yes, but I didn’t want to leave after this, and go on about my life. I wanted to stay in this uncomfortable chair as long as humanly possible, because I knew when I left, I would never be coming back again.

Dad once told me that all good things came to an end, eventually.

Even this.

I opened my purse and took out a book-shaped present wrapped in brown paper. “I wanted you to have this. As a thanks. Or—I don’t know—a get-well present? I was thinking about getting you a card, but it just felt weird to write, ‘Glad You’re Not Dead!’ on it, you know?”

He laughed—actually laughed. It was deep and rumbly. “Apparently, I was pretty close to dead for a few days. I dreamed that I was.”

My throat began to constrict. “Well, good thing it was just a dream.”

He was quiet for a long moment, too long.

Oh god, had I become the weirdo who gave him a cactus and a book now? This was a terrible idea. I knew it was from the beginning. I was going to put googly eyes on all of Rose’s vibrators for ever suggesting this.

I stopped in the doorway, and steeled myself with a breath, and turned to face him. He was staring at me strangely. Then he was on his feet, brown eyes wide, and the way he looked at me, I could have been the ghost.

Maybe I was.

Metaphorically.

I shook my head, and my heart was beating so bright I could barely stand it. “I’m one hundred percent real. I think. But . . . maybe kiss me again to see if I’m actually here?”

He laughed, deep and humming, and kissed me again in the quiet corner office of Falcon House Publishers. “I’m sorry I made you wait. I’m sorry I didn’t realize.”

He scrunched his nose. “Wouldn’t that be a bit cliché?”

Until my starry-eyed ass came back to earth like Armageddon. “Oh—oh god,” I gasped, pulling away. “What about Laura?”

He snapped his eyes open and gave me a strange look. “Laura? She just wanted my Nora Roberts books if I kicked it, I assure you.”

I unwound with relief. “That must be one hell of a collection.”

He chuckled. “I’m proud of it. Do you want to get dinner tonight?”

Ben glanced at the analogue clock on his desk. “Almost twelve thirty—wait, didn’t you say you had a flight?”

I didn’t want to say no. I didn’t want to leave. And then I found myself thinking about what came next. Dates, and movies, and holidays, years passing in a single blink. He’d keep his hair floppy, and I’d cut mine short, and we’d be somewhere else in the story, or maybe secondary characters in someone else’s. And I thought about years after that, when he’d gotten used to my chaos and I his caution and the world was a little blurry. I didn’t know where we would be, or if he would get tired of me, or if I would break his heart—

But I thought—I thought I wanted to find out.

I said, “Come home with me.”

He didn’t even think. He didn’t weigh any odds. He didn’t pause to find his words. They were there, as sure and certain as his smile. “Can we swing by my apartment first on the way to the airport?” he asked.

38

Body of Work

The North Carolinian afternoon was sweltering hot, so all the windows were opened to let the golden sunshine spill in. Mairmont’s only bed-and-breakfast looked so much different in the summertime, with the wind catching on the sheer curtains, and the sound of insects humming through the old house. All of the flowers and bushes outside in the garden had flowered into blooms of reds and purples and blues, and ivy and jasmine crawled up the terraces on either side of the house. It was oddly picturesque.

I hugged Dana as they came around the desk. “It’s nice to see you! How’s John?”

At the airport, he used the miles he had accrued from years of traveling to writing conferences and book expos to buy a ticket, and he’d traded seats with a nice older lady who had never flown first class before, and she was delighted. Ben squeezed himself into the aisle seat beside me, and curled his fingers through mine, and it was as simple as that, as if he had always been a part of my life, and I had been a part of his.

He did this thing where he rubbed small circles around my thumb joint with his own thumb, and it made the skin there tingle. We talked about our favorite places we’d been, and he was a lot more traveled than I was thanks to Ann’s book tours, and he hated flying almost as much as I did, but we both wanted to take a cross-country drive. He hated skiing, but we both liked snow tubing and burnt marshmallows. His comfort food was ranch dressing on Hot Pockets, while mine was box mac and cheese, and neither of us cared about that new hipster deconstructed meatball joint in SoHo. We were indifferent about the beach, but we loved beach reads, and the two-hour flight felt like two minutes.

Then we’d rented a car from Charlotte, and he’d rolled up his sleeves and said that he could most definitely drive an SUV, but after accidentally knocking the car in neutral and almost running into the airport bus, we swapped places and I drove the distance to Mairmont. He was much better at picking the driving music, anyway.

I squeezed his hand tightly, too. It was a reassurance to myself, standing in this small bed-and-breakfast, that he was actually here. Real. The girl who saw ghosts standing beside a man who had once been a little bit ghostly. Mairmont’s gossip ring could eat their hearts out.

Dana’s eyes flicked to Ben. “And who’s this?”

They accepted it. “We’ve met before?”

They grinned. “I do, don’t I?” They checked us in and took a key off the hook behind them and dangled it from their finger. “Enjoy.”

I took the key. “Thanks,” I replied, and grabbed his hand again, and we disappeared up the stairs with our suitcases in tow. I liked how he felt beside me. I liked the company we kept. And whenever he brushed his thumb against my knuckles, there was a shiver that went from my toes all the way to my scalp, and I couldn’t stand it. Not in a bad way.

But in a way that drove me crazy.

At the end of the hall was the hotel room with the wolfsbane on the door. I’d booked it again for old times’ sake, before I’d ever asked Ben to come with me. I thought I would be spending it alone. Funny how a few hours could change everything.

I unlocked the door, and he rolled our suitcases inside. Sunlight spilled through the sheer curtains, catching the dust motes that floated in the air. I remembered a lot about this room—from the fake wolfsbane in the vase on the dresser to the knot in the hardwood I kept toeing the night I wrote my dad’s obituary because I couldn’t stop pacing to the side of the bed where Ben slept the night things started to spiral, the night before Dad’s funeral.

The hotel room hadn’t changed at all. Still could use more purple, but I was far from caring what color the room was. All I could see was Ben drawing a shadow against the window, sunlight shining golden on his dark hair, and I’d read about aching before. I had ached before.

But this was—I was—

I remembered the morning we woke up together, and the things he said he’d do to me, for me, and it all came back in such vivid detail I had to tell my brain to slow down. Breathe. I wasn’t some weirdly horny teenager anymore—I was absolutely a refined woman with exquisite taste in rum and Cokes, thank you very much, and—

Oh, who was I kidding.

Don’t climb the man mountain, I told myself. Don’t climb the man mountain. Don’t climb—

Then I took hold of the front of his jacket and pulled him close, and to my surprise he met me halfway. Our lips crushed together, and then he pulled away, whispering, “Sorry, sorry, you’re just so beautiful and I finally get to touch you and—”

A lot, it turned out.

In a scattered mess we tipped back toward the bed, stepping out of our shoes, dropping my purse to the carpet, his tie abandoned somewhere on the bench at the foot of the bed. He lifted me up and sat me on the bed, and kissed me like he wanted to devour me, teeth scraping against my skin, nibbling my lip, and I couldn’t get enough of him, either.

I wanted to explore the curve of his neck as my fingers slid down it, and I wanted to ask about the scar just above his collarbone, where his father’s wedding ring always seemed to catch. He kissed the birthmark under my left ear that I always kept hidden because it was shaped a little like a ghost and that was too on the nose for me. It was electric, our contact skin to skin, as if little sparks ignited between our cells every time we touched. If our pasts sang in the wind, our present was in the touch of his hands on my waist, the way his fingers trailed across my body, the breathless kisses he planted against my mouth, as if he wanted to write me into his memory—burn it there.

My fingers tentatively found their way underneath his charcoal-gray jacket as I began to slip it off his broad shoulders, and he shrugged it off the rest of the way. It puddled on the floor. He leaned into me, deepening his kisses, and I just wanted to sink into him, and bury myself into the crook of his body, and stay there forever.

I pressed my hands against his hard chest—and paused. Came back to myself for a very, very brief moment. “Wait. Wait-wait-wait,” I muttered to myself, and started to unbutton his pristine white work shirt. He didn’t have an undershirt on, and I most definitely had felt— “Oh sweet chiseled Jesus.” I traced my fingers across his hard chest to his abs and very distinctive V cut into his trousers. “What are you—an underwear model? Are these suckers airbrushed?”

His ears went red with embarrassment. “I’m an anxious person. I swim when I’m anxious. Which means I swim a lot.”

He pressed his mouth against mine, still ravenous, and made me shut up. And you know? It was sexy and I was super okay with it because whatever I’d been about to say succumbed to the part of my brain that seemed to always go offline whenever he kissed me that hard. And quite frankly, my brain had been on for way, way too long. It needed a hard reboot.

At some point he undid my bra, and at some point, I slid off his belt, and at some point he was kissing me—everywhere. He pressed a kiss between my breasts, then just below them, then against my soft stomach. He went lower and lower, muttering in a love language of tongues.

As an English major, I had studied rising actions, I had charted climaxes. Making love and making stories were close to the same thing. You were intimate and vulnerable and wandering, traveling across the landscape of each other, learning. You told a story with each gesture, each sound—every kiss a period, every gasp a comma.

And the way Ben touched me, the way he played his tongue across my skin and burrowed his fingers into me, made a story with my body—the way I bit my lip to hush a moan, and curled my fingers around the duvet—I wanted him to read every word aloud until the very last page, when our lips were swollen and our bodies intertwined into each other’s spaces, and he threaded his fingers between mine and raised them to kiss my knuckles.

After a moment, he asked, “I have a question,” in a soft and thoughtful voice.

I shifted a little to look at him better, flattening out the fluffy feather pillow. “I might just have an answer.”

My eyebrows shot up. “You ask that now?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Well, this—us—we’re a bit strange. Technically we’ve only known each other for a week and some change but . . .”

He closed his eyes, and there was a moment of pause when he was searching for the right words. “I like you a lot, bordering on the bigger word, but . . .”

I tilted my head. “But?”

He admitted, “It’s a bit cliché this soon, and if we’re going to tell our children this story in ten years . . .”

I laughed, because of course he would flag that in this story. “Then I’ll say it first,” I said as I sat up and leaned close to him, my hair falling in a curtain around us as I pressed my forehead to his. “I love you, Benji Andor.”

He smiled so wide it reached his brown eyes, and turned them ocher, as if that were the happiest thing he’d ever heard. “I love you, too, Florence Day.”

He gave a long sigh and sank farther into his pillow. “Okay, we can do that—”

I playfully shoved him in the shoulder. “Fine. Let’s be bunkmates, then.”

The light began to leave his eyes.

He quirked an eyebrow. “Second?”

I thought Ben was going to die—again. When the door was closed, he pulled the covers over his head and disappeared beneath them. “Please kill me,” his muffled voice moaned. “End my misery.”

Grinning, I pulled the covers off him again, and he looked dejected and mortified in the deathbed of pillows. “Absolutely not, sir. If I have to live with them, so do you.”

I began to crawl out of bed, when he grabbed me by the arm and swallowed me up underneath the covers with him. “Just a few more minutes,” he said, his breath hot against my neck as he held me tightly.

39

Ghost Stories

WE DID NOT end up catching either of the bachelor parties that night, but I was very certain neither Carver nor Nicki remembered the night very well anyway. From what I heard, there’d been an impromptu concert where Bruno almost threw out his back howling the laments of Dolly Parton, Carver accidentally lit the bar counter on fire, and Alice mooned Officer Saget right in the middle of Main Street. Sad that I missed that part, but I was glad we didn’t end up going. Someone had to be coherent on the wedding day.

I busied myself with final wedding preparations, rearranging the flowers in the parlor rooms while sneaking tastes of desserts in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure how Carver talked Alice into letting them have it in the funeral home for free, so I made a mental note to ask him what sort of blackmail he had on Alice for her to be so agreeable about it all.

The Days Gone Funeral Home looked like it was decorated in a flower crown, with large sunflowers on the porch and white ribbons draped across the old wooden roofbeams, and the once-suffocating floral-and-formaldehyde smell was replaced with the scent of bright and beautiful sunshine. The windows were open, as were the doors, and every so often a clever, happy wind raced through the old Victorian house, and the foundation creaked and groaned in hello.

Ben looked so at home in the red parlor, helping me arrange the sunflowers in vases kept from Dad’s funeral, as if he’d been here all this time.

Alice elbowed me in the side and said, with all honesty, “Good catch, sis. Not my type, but good catch.”

Alice gave him a once-over. “You take care of my sister, you hear?”

He raised his hands in surrender. “I wouldn’t dare.”

I gave her a salute. “Aye, aye, boss.”

When she was gone, Ben took a sunflower out of one of the vases and tapped me on the nose with it. “Your sister’s doing a great job with the business.”

I rolled my eyes and playfully shoved him away. “Stop being so sappy,” I complained, hoping he didn’t notice my reddening ears. If he talked like that much more, I was going to be in a permanent state of blush.

He liked me; it was still so hard to believe.

Benji Andor adored me.

And for the first time since Dad passed, everything felt almost perfect. The sky was this almost-perfect crimson—the color of Dad’s suit when we buried him—and the sweltering July heat had abated to a soft humidity that still felt sticky, but it was as close to perfect as you could get in the summer, and the entire town had come to watch my brother and his husband say their actually perfect vows.

They slipped on each other’s rings and professed their love under the ancient rafters that had echoed more sobs than cheers, and the purpling light of evening eased softly in through the windows, painting everything in shadowy hues of rose, and it was a fitting wedding for a funeral home.

Dad would have loved it.

After the wedding we popped champagne and played Dad’s favorite burned CD and danced through the parlors to all the good goodbyes, because endings were just new beginnings. And right now, we were happy, and Carver and Nicki were dancing with each other, and Rose and Alice were flirting in the kind of way that would lead to something else.

(What kind of romance writer would I be if I didn’t see how they fell?)

Because the same look was on my face, too, every time I looked at Ben. When he left to get us a refresher of champagne, Mom slid up beside me and gave a hard sigh. “Would it be frowned upon if, during the couples’ dance, I danced, too?”

I offered out my arm to my mom. “I’m not Dad, but I can dance with you.”

And just as she said that, Ben swooped in and offered his hand to—my mom. I gasped, scandalized. Ben said, “Patience makes the heart grow fonder.”

He winked.

(Ugh, this was for saying I’d put googly eyes on his washboard abs, wasn’t it?)

I moped about on the edge of the parlor like a lonely island, swilling the red punch that was most definitely spiked. Everyone had someone to dance with—even the mayor. And here I was, left to lean against one of the tall tables with the owner of Bar None and Bruno. They were smoking cigars that reminded me of the ones Dad liked—strong and sweet.

Bruno nudged his chin toward Ben and Mom dancing. “I haven’t seen your mom so happy in ages.”

I bit the side of my cheek to hide a grin, watching Ben trip over his own feet. He and Mom laughed, and it pulled at something deep in my chest. It ached, but not in the way I’d felt when Dad died. It was a good sort of pain. The kind that reminded me that I was still alive, and there was still life to live and memories to make and people to meet.

I tilted my head. The song ended, and I wondered how to explain it. He was a ghost who haunted me after I failed at turning in his grandmother’s last manuscript—“I met him at work,” I finally supplied. “I thought he was an absolute stuck-up asshole at first.”

I turned around to him. “Is that what you love the most?”

His lips twisted. “That I can say in current company.” Then he offered his hand to me, and I took it. He spun me around, away from the table and onto the dance floor.

A lifetime ago.

He laughed and brought me closer to him. “What love interest doesn’t?” We danced across the ancient oak floorboards, around Mom and Alice, and Seaburn and his wife, and Karen and Mr. Taylor, though I only knew that later, because all I remembered was Ben. The music was a little dampened, and the evening light slid through the open window in lazy hues of oranges and pinks, and he looked so perfect painted in it.

We danced slowly, his hands soft on my hips, swaying to a slow song that I didn’t know, but I liked it. It was sweet, with violins, with lyrics about want and yearning and everything that you really needed for a good love song.

A glimmer in the corner caught my eye. I glanced over.

An old woman with beautiful wide brown eyes stood in the doorway to the parlor, her hand outstretched to an elderly man in an orange sweater and brown pants, who took it tightly and kissed her knuckles. They shimmered in that star-glitter way spirits did. Ben glanced in the direction I was looking.

It meant I wasn’t alone.

When I looked back toward the couple, they had already melted into a brilliant flash of sunlight, and Heather walked through the doorway, arguing with her husband about their babysitter, as if nothing had been there at all.

I gave him a surprised look. “You’re asking?”

Life happened in old funeral homes, too.

The cemetery was warm and quiet in the summer evening. The iron gate was already closed, but we knew the perfect little broken bit of wall to climb over, and we held each other’s champagne as we did. My family had been busy, it seemed, since Dad’s funeral. Almost all of the tombstones were washed, gleaming like bone shards sticking up from the hills of bright green grass.

Dad was waiting for us on his favorite hill in the cemetery, in a nondescript shaded plot close to his favorite old oak tree, easily lost in the sea of stones. His marker was pristine and the weeds plucked out. Mom had put fresh orchids in the vase, and I picked out the spoiled leaves with care. His plaque only had a single word—beloved. Mom said it was because there were so many things Dad had been to so many people—“Beloved son, beloved parent, beloved husband, beloved pain in the ass . . .”—but secretly I knew Mom had requested only that word because it was her word to him. Her soft I love you.

Her beloved.

I brushed a ladybug off the plaque.

It still felt like he was here some days, like the world still turned with him in it. And parts of him still were.

Ben crouched down beside the tombstone, and I let him have some privacy as I followed the path up to the bench under the oak tree and sat down. The night had cooled off, and the wind whispered through the trees, and a murder of crows cawed in the distance. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine Dad sitting beside me like he used to, chatting about rates of flower arrangements and the cost of coffins and Carver’s newest chair he built and Alice’s latest chaos. I breathed in the sweet scent of freshly cut grass.

And things were okay.

Ben came over to sit down beside me after a while.

Those words made my heart soar. “Ardently?”

And maybe, if we were lucky, we’d find a happily ever after, too.

Eccentric Circles

IN THE DAYS Gone Funeral Home, in the back corner of the largest parlor, there was a loose floorboard where I once kept my dreams. I kept them locked tight in a box, storing them like treasure, until the day I could take them out and brush them off, like old friends coming to greet each other.

I didn’t store my dreams in a small box underneath the floorboards anymore. I didn’t need to.

But there was a girl who was a little bit tall and lanky for her age, dark hair and wide eyes, who wrote her dreams on spare pieces of paper and put them in a jar like fireflies, and when she found her mother’s old metal box and its smutty, smutty X-Files fanfic, she decided to store her dreams there, too.

And the wind that whistled through the old funeral parlor sang sweet and soft and sure.

Like love ought to be.

Acknowledgments

Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it took a village to raise Benji Andor from the dead. The Dead Romantics couldn’t be possible without a lot of people, most of whom I will probably forget in these acknowledgments, but you know who you are. Thank you for giving Florence and Ben a ghost of a chance.

This book wouldn’t be possible without the tender love and necromancy of my agent, Holly Root; my phenomenal editor, Amanda Bergeron, and assistant editor, Sareer Khader; my copyeditor, Angelina Krahn; my wonderful publicist, and the whole team from managing to production to marketing, Christine Legon and Alaina Christensen and Jessica Mangicaro and everyone else. And to my critique partners—Nicole Brinkley, Rachel Strolle, Ashley Schumacher, Katherine Locke, and Kaitlyn Sage Patterson—for being the Rose to my Florence and encouraging me when I was at my lowest.

Speaking of lowest, I would also like to give a very enthusiastic fuck you to my anxiety. Thanks for, as always, being the worst.

And finally, to anyone who has proclaimed drunkenly at a bar that love is dead—I’ve been there and trust me, love is not dead. It’s simply sleeping off a raging hangover. Give it two Tylenol and tell it to call you in the morning.

Thank you for reading this book. I hope you find a little bit of happiness wherever you go.

READERS GUIDE

The Dead Romantics

•   •   •   •   •

BEHIND THE BOOK

I SEE DEAD people.

Kidding. I really don’t, and if I did I would probably:

One, talk to my therapist and—

Two, schedule an exorcism.

Joking aside, I do kind of see dead people. We all do. We see them in family photos, when we remember the way your grandma used to talk to her flowers; and the way your granddad happily sat in his favorite rocking chair on the porch, watching lightning arc across summer storms; and the way your aunt used to have a laugh so infectious she would light up a whole room. We read about them, all the time. English class is full of dead people. Jane Austen? Dead. Shakespeare? Doth be dead and buried. Charles Dickens? A tale of two deads. We listen to them on the radio, we watch them in films, without really thinking that they—you know—caught the midnight train already.

But, honestly?

Death scares me.

That’s the crux of it. Death itself, in all its ferocious unknown, scares the living crap out of me. So why—why god, why—do I gravitate toward ghost stories? And if there’s a ghost romance? You bet your ass I’m going to be up all night reading it. Death and ghost stories go hand in hand, like peanut butter and getting it stuck to the roof of your mouth.

I don’t understand my fascination whatsoever, and you know? I’m not the kind of person to think too much on it, because if I do my anxiety is going to start to spiral and then all I will think about is my unknown, eternal end.

Which is probably why I write.

There’s this illusionary permanence to writing. My books will be here long after I’m gone. I mean, hopefully.

Forever. (Usually.)

People write for different reasons—to feel less alone, to understand their own feelings, to tell stories that make them happy—and people read books for different reasons, too.

For me?

I read because I want to be held. Not like, literally, by a book. (That’d be weird.) But metaphorically. I want to sink into a novel. I want to be romanced by the possibility of sunsets too pretty to describe and kisses that you feel all the way in your toes and love stories too wide and wild for you to ever feel alone.

If anything staves off the creeping unknown of death, I propose that it’s a good book.

Maybe not my book—I mean, I hope it’s my book. Or at least my book is a stepping-stone for what will be your favorite book. I hope I can write one for you. I hope I can write one for me, too.

I didn’t start writing The Dead Romantics to explore my feelings on an author’s legacy and what the dead end up leaving behind. I just wanted to write a fun ghost story! A chaotic gremlin of a woman meets the stern ghost of a man (who, secretly, has a cinnamon roll-flavored heart of gold)! They have sexy high jinks! Everything turns out fine in the end!

Well, I was the fool, apparently, because little did I know, I had the talent to do both.

Somehow.

It might be a one-time deal, so I am relishing in this moment. I managed to do something I didn’t realize I could. (Well, two things. I didn’t think I’d be able to write anything in 2020 but I showed myself that anything is possible with a few healthy coping mechanisms and nowhere to go during a pandemic.) Most of the time, I talk around my own insecurities and make fun of them until the person I’m talking to gets fed up with my turtling and tells me to just write a happy novel.

Well, I did! So joke’s on them! It’s also sad! And a little sappy!

But you know? I like a little corny in my life and I hope that you do, too.

I think, as readers, we all have a comfort read, the one book that protects us in the exact ways it needs to—whether it is a romance or erotica or a thriller or a crime story or a fantasy. A book that we find ourselves in, like looking in a mirror. Oh, you, too? It will ask, as it fills that soft, hollow place in your heart that nothing else dared to touch. I think we all deserve a book like that, whatever yours is.

It’s not about how many books are sold or whether they are turned into films or re-released with different editions that makes a book’s legacy. I think it is the readers, whether there are only seven of them, or seventy thousand. You’re the legacy, you’re the life beyond the story I give you.

Florence’s dad said that the people we love are in the wind, and I believe it. I think that the people we love can be in the pages of books, too.

I hope you find yourself in a book someday.

And I hope that book lives forever.