Page 104 of Haunt Me

Raven

Astra.

I say it to myself a few times, testing the shape and feel of it. Star. That’s what it means, or close enough, some old root language I only half remember from a class I didn’t pay enough attention to in high school.

It suits her more than she probably knows.

She fills up a room the way a star fills up a dark sky, not by trying to, just by existing loud enough that everyone else has no choice but to notice.

I like watching her be loud.

That’s not something I expected to feel, watching a stranger move through what used to be my home. But she laughs with her whole heart, head thrown back, no self-consciousness in it at all. Her hair moves when she talks, big and unapologetic, catching the light differently every time she turns her head. Her nails are always perfect, too. She wears a new color and pattern every few weeks, like plain would be a waste of a perfectly good canvas.

Each day she sorts through a little box of jewelry, holding pieces up to the window light one at a time, humming that same tune under her breath, muttering to herself about which earrings match which mood. Nothing about the way she does it looks practical. All of it looks like joy, the kind of joy that doesn’t ask permission to exist.

Astra wears herself out loud.

She doesn’t shrink for anyone. Doesn’t apologize for the volume of her voice, or the size of her opinions, or the fact that she takes up exactly as much room as she wants to. I used to be like that too, before illness taught me how small a body can be made to feel. Watching her reminds me what it used to feel like to be alive.

Knox drops by more evenings than his schedule probably allows, always finding some reason. Fixing a hinge that wasn’t really broken or checking on her Barbie pink scooter.

It isn’t what it might look like to someone watching from outside. There’s nothing romantic in the way he sits across from her at the little table in the kitchen. Nothing charged in the way she throws a dish towel at his head when he tracks mud in without wiping his boots. It’s the kind of teasing that only exists between people who’ve decided, without ever saying it out loud, that they belong to each other now.

He’s the big brother she never had.

She’s the little sister he lost.

Dad’s the same, quieter about it but no less obvious. He brings her things, small, thoughtful things—fresh vegetables from the local roadside stand, a paperback he thought she’d like. He doesn’t call it what it is. I don’t think he’s ready to yet. But I am. It’s a father’s hands finding somewhere to put all the love that used to have somewhere else to go.

I watch them both come back to life, piece by piece, in ways I couldn’t manage to give them myself no matter how hard I wanted to. My brother’s laugh has a full sound to it again. My father hums while he works now, something he hasn’t done since before I got sick. Neither of them will hay her name and mean anything close to what it actually means, but I can see it happening anyway. The slow unclenching of two men who’d forgotten they were allowed to want things again.

I still don’t know where she came from, what her life was before Ashbourne. She doesn’t talk about it, and I have no way of asking. That’s the one gap I can’t close no matter how much of the rest of her I’ve learned to read.

The Light gathers beside me before I’ve finished forming the question.

“Did you bring her here?”

“A gardener does not command a single seed where to root. She only tends the soil and waits to see what the ground was already willing to grow.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It rarely is, when the question is really a wish wearing the shape of a question.”

“Then tell me plainly. Does it matter whether it was you, or chance, or nothing at all?”

“Does the rain ask the field which drop of it mattered the most?”

“Yes,” I say, sharper than I mean to. “It matters to me.”

The Light is quiet for a long moment, long enough that I let myself believe, foolishly, that quiet might mean it’s actually considering giving me something plain.

“Some paths are laid long before any foot finds them. Whether she walked hers here on her own, or whether the road was always going to end at this door, is not something I hand out on a night like tonight.”

“That’s still not an answer.”

“It is the only honest one I have to give.”

I sit with that a while, the way I’ve learned to sit with most of what The Light offers. It’s incomplete and maddening, hidden inside something too large to unfold all at once. It’s the one question I still can’t answer for myself, no matter how much clearer everything else has gotten.