Page 154 of Cross Checked
I followed because, let’s be honest, I would follow her into traffic.
The second I stepped into her living room, my eyes went to the marble sculpture in the corner.
I’d noticed it the first time I came to her apartment. It was impossible not to. A massive display of glass and color and light twisted together into something chaotic and beautiful, randomand intentional at the exact same time. Back then, I’d thought it was another strange little piece of Bliss Bennett. Something pretty and weird and impossible to explain unless you lived inside her head.
Now, after everything she had just told me, it looked different.
Heavier.
Less like decoration and more like evidence.
Bliss crossed the room toward it, quiet now, the earlier spark dimming into something softer as her fingertips drifted over a cluster of marbles near the center.
“I made it,” she said.
“I remember.”
Her gaze flicked to mine.
“I saw it the first day,” I said quietly. “I just didn’t know what I was looking at.”
Her smile trembled a little.
“I’m still making it.”
Something in her voice made me go still. The humor that had been dancing around the edges of the conversation faded first. Then her smile softened until what remained felt quieter. More vulnerable. Like she’d finally reached the part of the story she’d been trying to tell all night.
I glanced back at the sculpture. “Okay.”
Her fingertips lingered against the glass. “Those are all my Nevers.”
For a second, I didn’t answer.
Not because I didn’t understand the word.
I did.
She’d given me pieces of it before. The little moth marble. The prom one. The way she collected tiny things for the moments her mom would never get to have with her.
But this?
This wasn’t a collection.
This was grief made physical.
Hundreds of tiny, shining memorials built into one impossible thing by a girl who had found a way to make absence beautiful because otherwise it would have swallowed her whole.
My chest tightened so sharply I had to breathe through it.
“All of them?” I asked.
She nodded, eyes on the sculpture. “Every one I could name.”
And for the first time tonight, I realized I still had absolutely no idea where this story had been trying to take me.
24
Bliss
