Blurred

“Mother fu—” I stood up, wiping my burning hand on my jeans, and stomped on the thing. I stomped until I couldn’t breathe. Until I was sure I’d smashed it to bits tiny enough to be blown away by the sickly sweet smell coming through the hospital vents. I stomped until two hands wrapped around my shoulders and jerked me back.

I looked up at Emma, breathing hard, and realized Finn had two fistfuls of my T-shirt. Everyone was silent, looking at me like I was that crazy guy who stood on the corner of Fifth and Elm and threw sticks at people’s cars.

“There was…” I stared down at the floor where the shadow should have been. Nothing. Just some off-white waiting room tile with a questionable stain.

“Mr. Cooper?” a hesitant voice said from behind me. Finn squeezed my shoulders once and let me go. I turned, not ready to hear what Finn already knew.

“That’s me.”

The doctor’s dark brown hair was plastered to his head with sweat. His glasses kept slipping down his nose. I stared at the blue scrub cap that was protruding between his clenched fingers. I couldn’t look at his eyes when he told me this. It was too much. If I saw the truth in his eyes, I wouldn’t be able to pretend this wasn’t real.

“Is he…?”

“Your father had a massive heart attack. I don’t think we could have helped him even if he’d been here on a gurney when it happened. We did everything we could. I’m so sorry.”

I nodded. I felt…empty. Hollow. Where was the pain? My dad was dead. Gone. There should have been pain, right?

“We have grief counselors you could speak with,” the doctor said. I held up my hand, shaking my head mechanically, and he stopped.

“Cash?” Emma’s voice. It sounded muffled. Off.

Nothing. How was it possible to feel this much nothing?

“Cash, answer me.” Emma again.

“Stop it. Just give him some room. Let him breathe,” Finn said. Breathe? Was that even possible? I felt like I was suffocating.

“Cash!”

Something inside me snapped at the sound of Emma’s voice. It was the sound. That same rawness

I’d heard in her voice the day her dad had died. I’d never understood what that sound meant. But hearing it now, in this place, forced me to.

Everything came rushing into me all at once. The wall I’d built up around myself after Mom left, decimated. The wound that would forever replace my father, ripped wide open. And it…hurt. Oh, God did it hurt. Just a stinging at first. But before too long it was throbbing. Burning with things I should have said. Things I should have done. I shouldn’t have shut him out. I shouldn’t have been such a moody little prick to him all the time. I couldn’t even remember what the last thing I said to him was.

Shit! What did I say? What was it?

“It’s gonna be okay,” Emma whispered against my neck. “I promise.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head against her shoulder. I couldn’t catch my breath. Couldn’t stop shaking. “I said…we’re out of bread.”

“What?” Emma pulled back, her blue eyes full of questions. I stared over her shoulder at the wall and swallowed the lump in my throat.

“That was the last thing I said to him,” I said. “We’re out of bread.”

Emma opened her mouth but stopped when Finn crouched down beside us and stared at the blank spot on the wall with me.

“He won’t remember that,” he said. “He’ll remember the good parts. Where he went…the good parts are all that exist.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. He was someplace better. That should count for something, right?

“Um…Cash, sweetheart,” Emma’s mom, Rachel, stepped up behind me and touched my shoulder.

“Is there anyone we can call? Any family? Someone you could stay with?”

I shook my head. The only living family who still talked to us was Aunt Sara, and she lived in

Germany on a military base. No way was she making it back. No way was I moving there.

“What about your mom?” she asked, hesitantly. I shot her a look that could’ve cut through steel, and she winced. The mom I hadn’t spoken to since I was six? The mom who hadn’t even bothered to send a birthday card in eleven years? The mom who had made damn sure I’d never find her? Hell, I didn’t even have her phone number.

“He’s staying with us,” Emma spoke up. “He can stay in the guest room.”

“Emma, honey, I’d have to talk to Parker—”

Emma stood up and pinned her mom with the stare that had shut me up more than once. “He’s staying.”

Rachel looked at me like I was a dog in the pound about to be euthanized. “You’re right. Emma, take him home to grab some of his things. I’ll get the guest room set up for him.”

Funny how she talked to Emma like I wasn’t even there. I wondered if that’s how I looked. Vacant.

It’s how I felt. Like part of me had checked out. Gone south for the winter. Emma grabbed one of my arms, Finn grabbed the other, and they pulled me to my feet. But I didn’t want to be on my feet. I wanted to be on the floor with the shadows. In that empty moment…I wanted to let them have me. I watched one of them, a black silhouette of death, slither from one side of the hall to the other. Never stopping. Never taking the hollow holes that were its eyes off of me. Its shape changed as it moved.

Sprouting wings, tentacles, arms and legs. It melted into the dark shape of a man, reached its dripping hand out to me, and I felt my grip start to slip from Emma’s.

“Come, ” it hissed. That hiss melted through me, burrowing deep. Somewhere in the back of my mind, someone was saying, It would be so much easier just to go…

Emma jerked on my arm and forced me to look at her. “What is it?” she asked.

“They’re here for me.” I swallowed the broken sound down my throat and took a shaky step forward.

“Don’t even think about it,” she whispered, tightening her grip on me. “I’m not letting you go.”

Chapter 12

Anaya

Every moment of my existence revolved around death, but I hadn’t been to a funeral in a thousand years. Now I remembered why I hated them so much. I closed my eyes and fought off the memory threatening to claim me. Tarik. My father. My mother clutching my hand as the sea blew wind and salt and hair into our eyes. The awful, hopeless feeling flowing through me, knowing they were never coming back. Knowing the two most important men in my life now belonged to the sea.

Each of the cold graves surrounding me represented a soul gone from this earth. A lifetime of kisses, laughter, and love now just dust and bones and memories. That’s what Cash’s father was now.

To this earth, he was just another memory.

I lingered on the outskirts of the crowd of quivering bodies all cloaked in black. I kept my eyes on the stone fixture that was Cash, praying with everything in me that I didn’t get called away now. The only parts of him that moved were his hair and the ends of his burgundy scarf, tossed around by the wind. His steady brown gaze was focused with a desperate intensity on the closed casket being lowered into the ground. A slightly off-key woman in the corner of the bright blue tent sang a haunting hymn that echoed across the cemetery. The hollow sound moved through the headstones like smoke, leaving an imprint of sadness wherever it went. Cash’s dark brows drew together as if he thought he could force the tears to stay inside. He didn’t look right like this. All buttoned and ironed without one of those ridiculous T-shirts. He looked…broken.

A memory sparked. I tried to fight it off, but it rushed back anyway. Something about seeing Cash like this,