by Melody Grace
It was Kelsey, of all people, who finally dragged me out. She kicked my door down one bleak afternoon and yanked the drapes open, flooding sunlight, too bright, in my bloodshot eyes.
“I never took you for your father’s son,” she said, standing over me, and I couldn’t even ask how she knew.
This was what I was becoming. This was how I failed Claire, every single day.
So I clawed my way back to the world, one broken, empty moment at a time. I made up hours and papers, finished out the year, and took a leave of absence, bought that beat-up old car with five hundred bucks in cash, and drove it to the one place I’d been avoiding. The room I knew would break my heart all over again.
Her studio.
Her parents hadn’t asked; it was hell enough for them to pack up her old apartment and ship a hundred pieces of her life back home. Now, I stand in that doorway and try not to crumple all over again remembering the look on her face when I showed it to her. The luminous excitement, the pure, bright disbelief.
You got me a studio? I can’t believe you got me this!
I take a breath and open the door, and it hits me all over again.
She’s everywhere.
Every brushstroke, every blazing canvas. Propped on every surface, and piled on every patch of floor. Claire’s spirit, as vivid as the day we first met, shimmering there in the dusty sunshine like she’s about to step out of the shadows with a paint smudge on her cheek. It’s still wet, she’ll tell me, beaming. But you can see it, can’t you? I think I got the light just right.
But she’ll never look at me like that again, or tug me closer for a sweet, hungry kiss. I’ll never unwrap her body inch by yielding inch, and lose myself in the constellation of her smile.
She’s gone.
The loss rolls through me, and I can’t stop the tears this time. I slip to the floor, and weep for her like it’s the first time. All these months hiding, all this time trying so hard to forget.
She’s gone, and the world keeps spinning.
She’s gone, and it will never be the same.
I remember her talking once about everything she lost when Hope finally slipped away. She said every death left a wound on the surface of the earth. Someone’s heart broken, a space in the fabric of existence that could never truly close. We patch it up, and smooth down the ragged edges in time, but those scars always stay there: an indelible mark of the life that was left behind.
“We’re not supposed to forget them,” she’d whispered to me, tracing circles on my ribcage, a flutter against my beating heart. “We’re just supposed to honor them, any way we can.”
So I honor her today, carefully rolling each treasured painting up and packing them in the backseat of the car beside my jumbled duffel bags. It takes me hours to disassemble the world she built, but finally, the walls are clean, and there’s only one thing left: a small gift-wrapped square I find buried in the back of all her canvas rolls. My name is lettered neatly on the sea-blue tissue, and it punches a jagged hole through my heart when I realize: this is her Christmas gift to me, the one I walked away from when I first learned the truth.
I could lose another lifetime hating myself for those lost, empty weeks. The time I wasted running from her, those months in fall I tried pushing her away. If I could stop the world and spin it back on its axis I would, a hundred times. I would kiss her the very first day I saw her. Hold her tightly, and never come up for air.
But those are seconds long since gone. I peel off the ribbons and slip the last painting out into the light. A small square canvas, stretched across a delicate frame; lines in oil and bright, sharp colors. The criss-cross of rooftops, rolling down to a river blue.
I know this scene. It’s the view from the rooftop, that Halloween, when it all began. Every moment, every slant of sunset light, captured here by memory. A first, gorgeous chapter in our story, a gift for me to remember, because she knew one day she’d be gone.
I finally lock up the studio, and get back behind the wheel of my car. But for the first time since I felt her hand slip out of mine in that surgical hallway, I feel Claire with me again. Every painting, every last sketch, it’s all right here around me. She made herself immortal, the only way she knew how. The glimpses we shared with each other, the best and worst scenes of all. Our love is all around us, and it will be, as long as I’m here to tell our story.
I made her a promise, and I won’t fail her yet.
So I drive west.
Choked, snaking freeways, and wide-open country roads. Mile by mile, state by state, the country opens up in front of me, swallowing up my limitless grief. I was scared I’d lose her, straying too far from our familiar streets, but the farther I get from Boston, the more I feel her, curled up beside me in the passenger seat. She has sunglasses on and her toes painted red, propped up on the dashboard as she trails a hand out the window in the breeze. She wanted to see the world, and now I’m showing her, in my way. Gas station rest stops, and old, broken down motels. Forests and riverbanks, desert plains, and more. I don’t know where I’m going, and some days, I drive just to get lost, and spend another few hours with her, sleepy at my side. The weeks bleed past, summer blazing on every street, until I cross the border into Texas, and realize there’s been a destination to this escape all along.
Her parents meet me on the front steps and help me carry everything inside. “Are you sure?” her father asks me, looking older than I remember, battle lines on his face, and that sagging, empty gaze I recognize every time I look in the mirror. “You should keep something, whatever you want.”
“I have a few things,” I say with a nod. That rooftop painting is in the front seat, and her sketchbooks, too—a hundred idle scenes that drifted through her mind, a journal of those weeks and months in Massachusetts, from the very first day until the last. “But she’d want you to have them. And maybe Hope’s parents, too.”
Her mom hugs me tightly and tries to make me stay, but I’m itching for the road again, and the solitude with Claire beside me. “Thank you, though,” I say. “I’ll call when I get to California, and maybe I’ll stop by on my way back in the fall.”
Susan trails me outside, and pauses on the sidewalk. “I found something of hers in one of the boxes. I think she’d like for you to have it.”
A small red notebook, too ordinary for words, but I know the minute she passes it to me that it’s the most important thing Claire left behind.
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“It’s yours,” she insists, pressing it into my hands. “They’re just words to me, but you know the story. She’d want you to remember.”
So I drive west again. And somewhere outside El Paso, in a faded old Mexican diner booth, I pull my laptop out of my bag and start a new page.
And I write.
I write for days, through New Mexico and Arizona, through the desert and into the golden California plains. I write because she’s fading now, with every passing mile, and I need to capture her, freeze it quick, before she disappears forever. I write the story she drew, in a hundred fleeting frames, the secrets she told to me, and the days I can only dream. She whispers in my ear with each new chapter, and curls up in my arms every night, and even though it breaks my heart to think of ever finishing, I can’t stop. It’s bigger than me now. I drive and write and dream of her until I reach the ocean, and then I lock myself in a beach motel for days, living off black coffee and late-night donuts until one night I type the final words, and rest my laptop closed, and just like that, it’s over.
Our story.
This story, right here.
The sun is rising as I stumble out into the motel parking lot, blinking and bloodshot from too long in the dark. The beach is just across the street, ocean stretching in a midnight band. Once, a girl ran naked into the water, and I watched her go, and swore I’d love her forever. But the beach is empty today, and nobody turns a head as I keep walking, down the shore and out into the waves.
The water swells u
p over me, cold and crystal clear. I’m crazy, dressed and wet and empty with grief, but as I stand there, I know it’s time to let her go.
I look to the waves, and I feel Claire here beside me as the dawn breaks and the world comes alive. She found a way to begin again, and somehow so will I.
I made her a promise, a long time ago, and I’m going to keep it, with every day of my life.
Promise me you’ll live.
THE END
Acknowledgements:
This book has been a labor of love, stretching over several years, and I want to thank everyone who played their part. To the friends who have given me such love and support in challenging times – to Elisabeth Donnelly, and Elizabeth Little; Corinne M, and the rest of the Squad. Thank you to Anthony C., Cheryl A., and Yuval R. for priceless counsel, Melissa Saneholtz for appearing in my life exactly when I needed her, and as always, my mother, Ann, for everything.
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Take a trip to Beachwood Bay: the small town where passion and romance are making waves…
Each book is a stand-alone romance following a new couple, but you’ll enjoy reading the whole series and seeing familiar faces return.
THE BEACHWOOD BAY SERIES:
BOOK 1: UNTOUCHED (Emerson & Juliet’s story begins - novella)
BOOK 2: UNBROKEN (Emerson & Juliet’s story)
BOOK 3: UNTAMED HEARTS (Brit & Hunter’s story begins - novella)
BOOK 4: UNAFRAID (Brit & Hunter’s story)
BOOK 5: UNWRAPPED (Lacey & Daniel’s holiday novella)
BOOK 6: UNCONDITIONAL (Garret & Carina)
BEACHWOOD BAY: THE CALLAHANS
BOOK 7: UNREQUITED (Dex & Alicia begin – novella)
BOOK 8: UNINHIBITED (Dex & Alicia)
BOOK 9: UNSTOPPABLE (Ryland & Tegan)
BOOK 10: UNEXPECTEDLY YOURS (holiday story)
BOOK 11: UNWRITTEN (Zoey & Blake)
BOOK 12: UNMASKED (Ash & Noelle begin — novella)
BOOK 13: UNFORGETTABLE (Ash & Noelle)
*
OAK HARBOR SERIES:
1. Heartbeats
2. Heartbreaker
3. Reckless Hearts (July 2016)
4. This Heart of Mine (November 2016)