Page 105 of Haunt Me

“Then let me say this instead, since you won’t.” I look toward the window, toward the porch light Astra always forgets to turn off. “Whatever your part in this was, however small or large, thank you for bringing something back into their lives that looks like love again. I couldn’t do that for them anymore. Whatever did, I’m grateful.”

“You say that as though gratitude requires an answer.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“A field does not thank the rain to make the rain fall again. It thanks the rain because the thanking is its own kind of growing.”

The Light doesn’t linger after that. It fades the way it always does, dusk settling back into ordinary dark, until I’m alone again with whatever it left me to sit with instead of an answer.

Astra has the radio on, dancing a little as she checks the mixer. Like the conversation I just had never happened at all.

Some nights I sit with her while she bakes, watching her hold whole conversations with herself the way people do when they’re sure no one’s listening. She mutters little arguments about butter temperatures and oven timing like the recipe personally wronged her, narrating her own mistakes out loud in a voice that goes sharp and dramatic every time something doesn’t rise the way she wanted it to. Sometimes she swears, creative, inventive swearing strung together with genuine flair. It makes me wish, uselessly, that I could actually laugh out loud where she’d hear it.

I don’t know yet the full scope of what she’s going to mean to this town, to my family, to whatever’s left of the life I used to have. I only know that watching her unapologetically be herself, loud and soft and everything in between, feels less like watching my life get replaced and more like watching it get carried forward.

Star. It really does suit her.

Then I think of Sam.

The thought isn’t even fully formed before I understand exactly what I’m going to do with it.

That’s new. A few weeks ago, wanting something this size would’ve stayed a wish, formless and helpless, the kind of thing I’d sit with and grieve because I had no way to act on it.

Tonight it feels different. Tonight it feels like reaching for a muscle I only recently learned I have, testing whether it can lift something heavier than a page or a door latch. The scene around me beings to change. The sound of the radio dissolves into something colder, more familiar, more his.

I don’t decide to leave. I don’t walk anywhere, don’t will myself through any door. I only think of him, hard enough, wanting enough, and the wanting itself becomes the traveling, faster and more certain than it’s ever been before.

I’m in the clubhouse, in Sam’s room, before I’ve finished understanding I’ve left.

He’s asleep, or close to it. His sheets are tangled around him, like even his rest is a fight he’s losing slowly.

Samuel’s still sober. Still healing. Still holding onto grief like letting it go would mean letting go of me, too.

I used to think that was love, him refusing to move on. Lately, I’m not so sure. Seeing my brother laugh again, watching my father hum over the stove like something in him finally has room to be light, makes me want the same thing for Sam—fierce and sudden and entirely selfish in it’s own way.

I want him to laugh again. I want someone to fill up a room for him in the way Astra fills one up for everyone else in my family.

I don’t wonder anymore whether wanting something here actually works. I know it does. I’ve spent weeks proving it to myself in small ways, a page, a door, a stranger’s feet stopping on a path they shouldn’t walk any further down.

Tonight I stop being careful with it.

I gather everything I have left, every scrap of whatever I am now, and I aim it at the two of them colliding, on purpose, tonight. Astra, who’s found her way so easily into the space I left behind, and Sam, who I love more than life itself.

Outside, the sky doesn’t just shift. It splits open.

Clouds roll in low and violent over the tree line. The air goes thick and electric in a way that has nothing to do with the season and everything to do with me. Wind tears through branches that were still a minute ago.

Somewhere in the distance, thunder cracks hard enough that I feel it in whatever’s left of my chest. I understand with a certainty that terrifies me even as it thrills me, that I did this. I reached into the actual sky and pulled a storm down out of it because two people needed a reason to find each other tonight instead of some other night that might never come.

What might something this size cost me? I don’t know if there’s a limit to how much of myself I can spend before there’s nothing left to spend.

I’m too busy watching the storm I made to care.

Samuel

I stare at the bottle for a long minute, my hand inching toward it.

Just one drink. Nobody has to know.