Page 14 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
I’m jolted awake by my phone ringing, and I fumble for it in that just awakened what the fuck is happening and why is everything so loud panic as I sit up. Sir James Frazer is a dog croissant at the edge of the bed, and the only response he gives is a single rotated ear, which he rotates back to its usual spot the moment I slide the accept button on the phone and the ringing stops.
/> “Hello?”
“Proserpina. It’s Dad. Is this a bad time?”
“No, Dad, it’s not, I just—”
Was napping because I just took the British equivalent to Plan B?
Am tired because I spent the night having sex with five different people in the one place you never want me to be in?
“I had a heavy lunch and needed a nap,” I lie instead.
“Are you taking your medicine?” he asks. “Every day? And you know you have to follow a schedule; sleep hygiene is the most important—”
“Yeah, Dad, I know,” I grumble, feeling like a teenager again. Nothing irritates me more than him trying to help me manage my own fucking brain. And then I try to remember that he loves me and that’s why he worries. I soften my voice. “What’s up?”
The pause before he answers my question should have told me, but I’m still sliced open when he says, “The detective sergeant working on your mother’s case called. They’ve . . . finished. Whatever it was they needed to do, they’re done now.”
“Done?”
“They didn’t find enough evidence in Ralph’s things to say with real certainty it was him, although the detective believes it was, as I do. But with him also being dead, there’s not much more they can do. So. It’s over.”
“Oh,” I say. And then that’s it, I can’t say anything more, because even though I should’ve expected this, even though I did expect it, I didn’t realize that the investigation ending would feel so strange. Finalizing somehow. Closure without being closure at all.
“They’re sending her home,” Dad says quietly. “In two weeks. The funeral will be late June; I wanted sooner, but the headstone won’t be ready until then, and I thought since it’s already been so long, it wouldn’t matter if it was a bit longer and she could be laid to rest with her name over her grave.”
His voice thickens the slightest bit, like he’s holding back a deep misery. “She spent so many years in unmarked ground, you know? I couldn’t bear to put her back into the earth that way. I couldn’t do it.”
“Dad, it’s okay,” I whisper. “You don’t have to explain it to me. I understand why.”
He lets out a heavy breath. “I know, I just—I don’t want you to think that I’m stalling or that I don’t care. I care about it more than anything, and that’s why I need it to be right. I failed her so badly, Poe, more badly than you’ll ever know, and I’ll never have a chance to fix it. The only thing I can do is give her back the dignity Ralph took from her when he buried her in that cursed fucking place to begin with.”
Chapter Four
St. Sebastian
The light has shifted in my mother’s office, casting a framed picture of Richard Davey into shadow and throwing warm squares of sunlight onto the paper-covered floor. I kick away a metal box that I always trip over in here and then slide onto the floor, sifting idly through nearby papers with unseeing eyes.
My mind is full of Auden. Of the sun gleaming along his bare chest and the tines of his antlers as he chased me through the forest. Of him pinning me to the soft, bluebell-covered earth and kissing me until I couldn’t breathe.
Anything I want from you is mine.
He knew. Even then he knew, which of course he did. He was desperate afterwards, wild with something that wasn’t the forest, but was all Auden instead.
Nothing tears us apart again.
Never again, because I won’t survive it.
Swear it to me.
And I did. I did swear, because what would ever compare to belonging to Auden Guest? What force of history or nature could ever match the force of him? The tousled-haired, asymmetrical-smiled, public-schooled, artsy, cruel, elegant magic that was Auden Guest?
Nothing would or could, and so I swore never to leave him, but how could I have known? How could I have guessed this, of all things? And now I’m alone in my dead mother’s office, too numb to be as furious with her as she deserves, too shocked to start fixing the things I need to fix. There’s nothing but this crushing weight on my chest. Nothing but the acute knowledge that nothing will ever be good again.
That I can never be Auden’s again.
I feel—I feel wrong. I feel dizzy and floaty and infected with something that’s so much worse than loneliness that I don’t even know the name for it.
