14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

T he idea of regrets follows me throughout the rest of the weekend. When we’re picking out paint chips for the walls of Caroline and Javier’s new place, I get stuck looking at the wall of pale gray-blue-green samples, thinking of Henry’s otherworldly eyes. His lips—would I regret not asking him to kiss me? I haven’t texted him at all this weekend out of principle. I’m trying to live my life, not stay tied to a man whose ghostly demise I’m actively planning. Would I regret the distance I put between the two of us?

When I hug Caroline goodbye on Sunday morning, she’s uncharacteristically serious. “I wish I could help you somehow,” she tells me. “But I don’t know how. I already feel like I’ve done the wrong thing, and I can’t take that back. You’re always so careful, so cautious. And the moment I push and encourage you to be spontaneous, it all blows up. I’m a terrible friend.”

“No, no,” I reassure her. “You’re not. Please don’t think that.”

She shakes her head. “Just know that no matter what, I’m here for you, okay? When you break the curse. Or if you never break it at all. No matter what. If something else happens, whatever it is, I’m here to support you. You know that, right?”

“Of course I do,” I tell her, wrapping my arms around her in a hug.

“Good. No matter what.”

“No matter what,” I agree.

I feel like I am fading away.

It’s all I can think of as I drive home to Grandma Lydia’s house. I feel like I’m fading away, that I’m going to become completely a woman of regrets.

What’s the point of protecting my heart if it’s already exposed, shattering more and more every day, filled with spider web cracks waiting for the final blow?

What’s the point of holding back? I’m already swirled together with Henry, already attached.

It’s this revelation that I carry in me to Henry’s house that night. Grandma Lydia’s already in bed, and I, on silent feet, slide out of the house. I’ve never snuck out of a house before. Even though I’m an adult, doing it to see Henry feels doubly scandalous. When I knock on his door, he opens it with a smile that brightens his near-incandescent eyes.

“Rency,” he says, not moving from the door frame. “I missed you.”

He offers the comment easily, as if it costs him nothing. It melts my heart. Stabs it, too.

It solidifies my resolve, though. I made a decision in my own heart while driving back to Oak River.

A decision that isn’t based on being scared, but on leaning in.

“I missed you too,” I say, matching his smile with one of my own. “I know it’s late, but considering you don’t sleep…”

I let the phrase hang between us and Henry steps aside, sweeping his arm out to encourage me to come in. As I step through the threshold, I don’t bother to try to not brush my shoulder against him.

Inside the little house, Henry has candles lit, casting the living room in a warm glow. A book is set next to the chair he favors—the very one he had sat in the first time I’d ever been inside the little house, when Caro and I confirmed that he was a ghost—and I’m delighted to see it’s a recent romance release that I myself had finished just last week.

“You like it?” I ask, tilting my head toward it.

Henry’s grin is a bit chagrined. “Well, I can’t have you outread me now, can I?” he says, stooping to pet Spectre .

“Impossible. You’ve thousands of titles on me. It’s me who will never catch up.”

“Hmmm. Well, I’ve an unfair advantage. Still, it’s good to stay current.”

Spectre runs towards me, rushing at my ankles with a “pprrrow!”

I reach down, scratching his head.

“Missed you too, Speck.” I scoop the cat up with one hand, the dark creature soft and feather-light as I tuck him against my chest. I can tell that he’s stuck in the gangly phase of adolescent kittenhood: lanky and not yet filled out, curious and endlessly energetic. He indulges me for a few seconds before wiggling to be put down.

As I lean down, my necklace falls out the collar of my shirt.

“New necklace?” Henry asks before doing a double take as I pull on the chain.

“Old, actually. It… well, my grandma gave it to me when I turned eighteen.” Henry steps closer, and I pull it over my head and hold it out to him, offering a better look. “It was…”

“Florence’s,” he breathes.

“Yeah.” I watch Henry’s face as he examines the ring. It’s curious, but not filled with pain. The chain of the necklace is wrapped around the circle of the ring and Henry slides it off the chain to look at it unencumbered.

“She picked it out of a magazine,” he tells me. “Did you know that?” I shake my head. “Yeah. From an ad. We ordered it through the store in town, and then I got it engraved when I was in the city, working on a job.”

The diamond catches in the light. It’s not an ostentatious diamond by modern standards: a little over a quarter carat, the gem is set in a silver setting that makes the stone look a bit bigger when paired with the contrasting gold of the band.

“It’s beautiful,” I offer. He flips it over to look at the engraving on the inside: her name is there.

My name is there.

“I’m glad you have it,” he says. “But… why don’t you wear it?”

“It doesn’t really fit any of my fingers. Well, none except—” I cut myself off, shocked when Henry grips my hand firmly in his own and slips the ring right onto my left hand’s ring finger. “That one,” I finish.

If I didn’t know that Henry’s a ghost, that he’s breathing from habit and not out of necessity, that his heart isn’t pumping blood through his veins, I’d swear that his breathing accelerated, that I could feel the thump of his heart through the hold he has on my hand.

“It suits you,” he says, our eyes meeting. My own breath catches in my throat.

“Thank you.” I don’t know what else to say. I certainly can’t say what’s on my heart.

“It’s yours. You should wear it.” Is there vulnerability there, in his expression? I can’t quite tell. “If you want,” he adds.

Slowly, carefully, Henry turns over my hand so that my palm is facing up. He places the chain of my necklace there in a slow, cool coil before closing my fingers around it and letting my hand fall.

I don’t say anything, but I don’t take the ring off, either.

Henry steps back, and once he’s a few feet away, I feel like I can breathe again.

“Did you have a nice time with Caroline?” he asks.

I nod, sitting down on the sofa. “It was really nice. Spending the weekend with her was good. Made me think through a lot of things.”

Is it my imagination, or do Henry’s shoulders stiffen just a bit? “Is that so?” No, I’m sure of it. He’s gotten more formal, a sure sign that he’s treading lightly.

“Mmmhmm. I’ve really missed her.” I try to keep my voice casual, recognizing that this is the moment I came over here for. “I know she only lives an hour away from my apartment, but it’s far enough away that I usually only see her every six weeks or so. And well, you know Grandma keeps talking about me moving in. So when I got back earlier today, I was checking my email, and there was still a position in my school district for moving to the virtual school and teaching online. It’s not entirely a history position—I would have to teach government, too—but I applied because… because I’m thinking of staying.”

Henry’s gaze is sharp, evaluative. “Is that what you want? What will be good for your career? For you?”I lift a shoulder, not knowing if I should feign nonchalance or if I should say what’s on my heart. “I… I don’t know. I just know that I don’t want to miss out on being closer to my best friend, and… ”

“And?” he prompts, face carefully neutral.

I swallow, cross my legs nervously. I’m determined not to lose my nerve. “And I don’t know when we are going to break this curse. I don’t want to leave you high and dry, and I don’t want to miss out.”

“Miss out on what?” His voice has an edge to it, but it’s too late to back down.

“On spending time with the people I care about.” It’s as vulnerable as I can manage, as close to a confession as I can get. I’m not brave enough to say what I really want to say: that I don’t want to regret not spending time with him before he crosses over.

Henry, though, doesn’t need me to say any more. He’s shaking his head, crossing his arms. “Rency, not because of me, though, right?”

I can’t deny it. I don’t. I won’t.

And Henry knows it. My silence confirms it. “Rency, I…” He runs a hand through his hair, paces a few steps before stopping in front of me. He shocks me by kneeling in front of me as I sit on the couch, a reproduction of how he positioned himself the first time we touched.

This time, though, he doesn’t reach out. It’s the emotion in his voice that wraps around me, the rawness of it.

“Rency,” he says, waiting to continue until our eyes meet. “I can’t sleep anymore. I can’t dream. But I can fantasize. And my list of fantasies is long. The places I would go. Greece and Italy and Egypt and Prague. The foods I would eat. I can’t smell or taste anymore, but I know that I would love pizza and sushi and guacamole. I used to fantasize that I was in Paris, sitting at a cafe, speaking in French that was learned through more than just a textbook, drinking an espresso and eating a pain au chocolat. But Rency—I’ve been dead for almost a hundred years. It’s not my fate to experience those things.

“I’m still human—I can tell myself to not want, but in my soul, whatever scrap of it is left in this veiled, in-between realm, it still yearns for things I cannot have. I can’t cry anymore, but I can feel that pull of longing still. For deep conversations with heads tilted close together, and for the feeling of the wind in my hair. For”—and now, his voice hitches and he looks away, just for a second, and when his eyes return to my own, they are pleading—“for love. Real love. I don’t know if I have learned to be a better man in my hundred years of death, but I think I’ve learned what love is. It’s wanting the highest good for someone. And Rency, your highest good is not with me. I have nothing to offer you: no future to build with you. I can touch you, but you can’t bring me on dates. I can dial 911 for you in an emergency, but I can’t tell them what’s wrong with you. I can’t give you a child or a family or drive you to the doctor. And… you could try on wedding dresses, you could wear a ring bought just for you, but we could never celebrate the way you deserve. I can’t ever be enough for you.” Henry’s voice is laced with pain, with a sharpness of emotion that I feel too, in whatever limited measure my mortality allows me.

I want to say I don’t care. I want to lie and tell him I never wanted kids anyway—never thought about creating new life with the person I’m in love with, about building a family together. I want to tell him that no, he is my highest good—who could be better? That he would be enough for me.

But I don’t.

And maybe it makes me a coward—that I don’t tell him how much I love him right here and now. How much I think about him and the way his hands felt on my lower back, my hips. The soft look in his eyes that I catch the tail end of before he grins at me or averts his gaze. The way my chest constricts when I think of leaving this town, this house, him in just a few weeks.

Instead, I nod.

“I understand,” I hear myself say. The words are robotic, remote even in my own ears.

“You need to leave here, just like you planned. You cannot change your life for me. I have nothing to give you.”

“Okay.” The words are chalky in my throat.

“We have two weeks left. If you want to spend that time helping me, then I won’t stop you. I’m not that selfless. I will take every moment with you that I can get. But you have to leave, as scheduled. You have to live your life the way you imagined it before you met me.”

“Okay,” I repeat, hating how the dryness in my throat is on the verge of becoming the tension that comes right before tears. How could I explain how dull life was compared to this? How it was filled with safe passions for events of the past, not focused on building something beautiful for the future? It’s cosmically unfair that the person I’ve fallen in love with is someone trapped in that past, unable to join me fully in the unknown of the future.

“Promise me, Rency,” he pushes. He’s leaned in, his russet hair falling over one eye just slightly. I’m nodding, but he shakes his head. “Out loud, Rency. Promise that you won’t put your life on hold for me.”

“I promise.” The words feel like my own curse.

Henry’s serious expression doesn’t change, but he sits back on his heels, some of the tension gone from his shoulders.

“Good,” he says, lightly placing his hands on my knees. I wonder if he craves the connection like I do, if he’s reassuring himself that, even though he’s told me to go, I’m here now and not something ephemeral, something haunting him.