Page 20 of Ghosts Don't Cry
Chapter Eight
LILY
I haven’t movedfrom this spot on my bedroom floor for hours. The sun has been creeping across my carpet, marking time with shifting light, while I sit here in the wreckage of a life I thought I’d buried. A ghost among the ghosts I thought I left behind.
Mom has called four times so far, and Cassidy’s texts have gone from concerned to worried. Her last one threatened to come over if I don’t answer. I should care. I need to move. I should be doing anything but sitting here drowning in memories.
The sun fades. Amber turns to deep gold, then the bruised purple of approaching night. Normally, I love this time of day. The hush before night settles, when everything turns soft and quiet. But tonight, the silence feels like it’s going to choke me.
The box still sits open beside me, its contents scattered across the carpet. I’ve been reading through everything again. The little notes we passed during school, his notes in the margins of his book, and the letter I found tucked inside it. The one he never sent to me.
I smooth out the page one more time, my lips moving with each word.
Some people are born knowing they belong to the world. Others spend their whole lives trying to earn a place in it. And some of us … some of us learn too young that no matter how hard we fight, the world will never make room. So, we steal places where we can. In books. In borrowed beds. In moments that were never meant to last. And we tell ourselves it’s enough, even though we know it isn’t.
And then there’s you.
There’s a drop of ink, a smudge, like he hesitated before writing the next part. My fingers trace the mark, feeling the slight depression where his pen pressed too hard.
You with your ridiculous words, and your laugh that always catches me off guard. You, who never asks for things I can’t say, but somehow hears them anyway. You, who walked into my life like the brightest light, and made me want to believe in things I know better than to trust.
If there was ever a word for you, it would be something untouchable. Something that slips through your fingers, but leaves warmth behind.
I knew from the start that you were borrowed time. That I could never keep you. And still, I wanted.
The ink is smudged in places, as if he dragged his thumb over the words after writing them. I never got to ask. By the time I found it, he was out of my reach.
My throat closes around the ache that spreads downward through my chest and into my stomach. I remember finding this note. I’d been packing everything of his away, and it fell out. I read it in the bathroom, my back pressed against the cold tile, tears streaming down my face.
I read the words again until the letters blur and my throat feels too tight. I can’t decide if I want to scream or crumple the paper in my fist or press it to my heart and never let go.
I thought he just liked the way words fit together, that he chose them for how they sounded, for the poetry of them. The way some people collect stamps or pressed flowers, just another beautiful thing to possess for a moment before it faded.
I never realized they were pieces of him. Pieces ofus.
And I never knew that even then, when I thought I was just a girl sitting beside a boy who loved words, he was already telling me goodbye.
My phone buzzes again with Cassidy’s name lighting up the screen, along with a string of messages I can’t bring myself to read. She’s probably already on her way, ready to break down the door if I don’t answer soon.
But right now, I can’t face her questions or the look in her eyes that says she knew this would happen eventually.
I need to move. I need to breathe. I need to get out of here.
Pushing to my feet, I grab my coat, leave the apartment, and walk down to the building’s entrance. The evening air wrapsaround me, cool and damp with the promise of rain. My hands burrow deeper into my jacket pockets while my feet pick a direction without thought. It doesn’t matter where I go as long as it’s away from that scrap of paper, the ghost of who I used to be, and the impossible news that Ronan Oliver is back in town.
Except it’s not impossible because it’s real.
My legs carry me down familiar sidewalks, past storefronts where everything looks exactly the same as it did yesterday, as it did last week, as it did years ago when my world fell apart. The sameness should be comforting, but it isn’t. Howdarethe world continue unchanged when everything inside me is screaming?
Main Street is winding down with the bakery closing up, its warm light spilling onto the sidewalk. Old Mr. Wilson is sweeping outside his hardware store, the same way he has every evening for as long as I’ve been alive. A few teens linger outside the movie theater, their laughter loud in the quiet street, probably planning which party to crash or which parking lot to hang out in until someone chases them off.
Then I see him.
At first, my brain refuses to process what my eyes are telling me. It’s just a man walking with his head down, hands tucked into his hoodie pockets. Someone I almost recognize, someone whose movements tug at something deep in my bones, a cellular memory that recognizes him long before my conscious mind catches up.
The set of his shoulders, the way he walks, the distance he keeps from the world around him as he moves along the sidewalk.
Dark hair flops forward over his forehead. Tattoos wrap his throat and disappear beneath the collar. That’s new. The ink covering skin that used to be unmarked except for scars he’d never explain. My eyes catch on the designs, trying to make sense of them from this distance.
