Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
She looks up at me, eyes already glassy, like she’s been waiting for permission to stop holding it all in. “I signed everything today. I didn’t even cry when I did it. Isn’t that awful? Does that make me a bad person?”
“No,” I immediately reassure her. “It means you got through it.”
Her mouth trembles.“She got sick so fast,” Savannah whimpers, voice thin. “One minute she was fine. She was making plans. Telling me I worked too much. How we wanted to go to Paris for her birthday. She wanted to come to New York City, order a stupid overpriced hot dog with me. Then suddenly it was doctors and appointments and learning how to say things like prognosis without falling apart.”
I move before I think about it, sliding out of the booth and sitting beside her instead. I reach for her hand slowly, giving her time to pull away. She doesn’t. Her fingers curl into mine like they’ve been waiting.
“I kept telling myself I’d come home more,” she whispers. “That I’d make time but there was always something. A deadline. A meeting. Another excuse.” Her voice breaks. “And then she stopped asking.”
That’s when she cries. That’s when, she finally, releases the weight she’s been trying to hold for so long.
I pull her into me, her forehead pressing into my chest, her shoulders shaking as she finally exhales everything she’s been holding back. Her hands clutch my sweater like she needs something to hold onto.
“I don’t even know who I am without her,” she cries into the fabric of my sweater. “She was my constant. My childhood. My adult life. She was… everything.”
I tighten my arms around her. “You don’t stop being her daughter just because she’s gone,” I remind her, gently. “You carry her. You always will.”
She shakes her head, breath hitching. “The house is empty, Erik. Everything’s gone. It’s like she never existed.”
“She did,” I say firmly. “I remember her. I knew her. She mattered.”
She pulls back just enough to look at me, tears streaking her cheeks, eyes searching. “The photos,” she manages through a stifled sob. “I found them last night.”
I freeze in place. I wondered what might happen back at the old Joy home, if Aunt Carol would have revealed everything.
“I don’t understand why you took them,” she continues. “Why you kept doing it… every year.”
“I took them for…”
Her phone lights up on the table.
I see it before she does.
A name I don’t recognize.
Jack
Hey. You disappeared again. Are you okay? I’m worried.
The screen glows between us, bright and unavoidable.
Savannah freezes.
I don’t look away. I don’t pretend I didn’t see it.
She swipes the screen dark with a shaky hand, face flushing, guilt and grief colliding in her expression.
“I’m sorry,” she panics. “That’s just…”
“You don’t have to explain.” I’m quick to respond and I mean it.
Something inside me still shifts and settles inside of me, a quiet reminder that there’s a version of her life I’m not part of and that someone else gets her when she leaves this place. Even so, she leans back into me, her forehead resting against my shoulder as if the interruption never happened. This moment still belongs to us, held gently and without question, and for now, it is ours.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next,” she whispers. “I go back to New York and everything just… keeps going.”
I rest my cheek against her hair.
“And what do you want to do?” I ask. “What does Savannah Joy want?”
She doesn’t answer.
Her fingers tighten in mine instead.
I sit there holding her grief, her silence, the weight of what’s coming. I tell myself this is enough. Her head on my chest. Her hand in mine. That this is all I get.
So I stay, still.
11
Savannah
Christmas Eve at Aunt Carol’s smells like garlic, tomato basil sauce and something baked too long because no one was paying attention.
The lasagna sits heavy and perfect on the table, layers sagging at the edges, steam rising every time someone cuts into it. There are mismatched plates, too many forks, glasses from decades ago that aren’t pretty but still clink together when someone bumps into the table. It’s louder than my mother’s house ever was, and somehow that makes it easier to breathe.
I haven’t done this in years.
Now I’m here, squeezed between my grandmother and my cousin Lucy, knees brushing, wine warming my fingers.
Grandma pats my hand like she’s making sure I’m solid. “You’re too thin,” she says, as if this hasn’t always been her opening line since before I hit puberty.
“I eat,” I promise. “Just not right now.”
She hums, unconvinced, but her eyes are soft, with pride, with sadness and with everything all at once. We don’t need to speak the words to know what we share between us.
Across the table, my uncle tells the same story he tells every year about the Christmas his car wouldn’t start and how he had to hitch a ride with a neighbor he barely liked. Everyone groans on cue. Lucy throws a napkin at him to try to get him to stop.