Ben stood and tilted his head toward the far side of the cemetery, where we sat a few nights ago, and as I thanked the people for coming and accepted their condolences, he patiently waited under the oak tree.
“The flowers are beautiful,” I told Heather, who agreed in that I told you so way of hers, and I found that I really didn’t care. She came through for me when I needed it most, and that counted for something. Not everything—I could forgive her, but I wasn’t going to forget how she made me feel in high school.
But she wasn’t worth any more of my time, either.
I didn’t manage to make my way over to the bench until Elvistoo was on his second glass of champagne and had devolved into singing anything the crowd shouted, so he was currently howling through “Welcome to the Black Parade.”
“I can honestly say I’ve never been to a funeral this fun,” Ben said when I finally sat down beside him. “People are literally dancing on graves.”
“Well, around graves. It’d be disrespectful to dance on them,” I corrected, and noticed that his hands were white-knuckled fists on his knees. “Are you still hearing them? The voices?”
He nodded. “They’re louder. And it’s—getting harder. To stay here.”
A chill crept over my skin. “But I haven’t worked at all on the book! You shouldn’t be going anywhere,” I replied in alarm.
To which he swallowed thickly. Pursed his lips. And admitted, “I don’t think it’s about the manuscript, darling.”
“It has to be. That’s the only reason you would be here, haunting me, and—”
“It’s not,” he interrupted resolutely, and winced in pain.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why? What haven’t you told me?”
He shook his head. He hadn’t been able to meet my gaze since I came over to the bench. Why was I just noticing this? He couldn’t meet my gaze because he knew I’d see the truth if he did. “I . . .”
“Ben.”
He clenched his jaw.
“Benji.”
“It’s a long story,” he began, staring down at a patch of dying grass by his left loafer, “but I think I need to tell you. I think I should have told you from the beginning.”
I clenched my fists. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. If he wasn’t here because of the manuscript, then . . . what else could there be? “Okay. What is it?”
“Ann Nichols was my grandmother.”
I forced a laugh. Really? “Ben! C’mon, I know you love her. She was like the matron saint of romance to all of us—”
“I don’t mean like that.” Slowly, he drew his eyes to mine. They were glassy and wet. The world slowed. Oh no. “She was my grandmother.”
There was a lot of information in that sentence that could have surprised me. The fact that he hadn’t told me the myriad of times we talked about his grandmother. The slant of his nose that perhaps looked a bit like hers. The sharpness of his jawline. How much he knew about Ann Nichols. How he always called her Annie.
No, it wasn’t any of that. What surprised me was one simple word: “Was?”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “She passed away five and a half years ago.”
Five . . . and a half years? Just about the time when I met her, when she sat down across from me and offered me a job. I was shaking my head vehemently. “That—that can’t be right. No, we met at that coffeehouse . . .”
“She couldn’t have,” Ben replied gently. “She had been bedridden for at least a year prior while she was writing her last book—The Forever House. We had a quiet funeral. She wanted it that way, because she had an idea. There were four books left in her contract, and she wanted them written, but she didn’t want the cloud of her passing to define them. So she laid out a plan to find a ghostwriter and finish those books. She also told me not to notify her publisher.”