“I don’t understand why I’m so messed up right now,” I admitted. “I’ve said goodbye to so many people—shouldn’t it be easy now?”
Alice gave me a strange look. “Who told you that lie? It’s never easy. It’s also never really goodbye—and trust me, we’re in the business of goodbyes. The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched. There is no happy ending, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can. Or whatever. Metaphor-metaphor-simile shit.”
I bit my cheek to keep from laughing.
“And that goes for the ghosts you help, too. I think you’ll see him again.”
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “He’s gone.”
“Tell that to the wind.”
Maybe there was some truth in Alice’s words, though I didn’t really believe them yet. As I took out my fan fiction and leafed through my journals, there was a certainty in that teenage girl’s words, in what she wanted, in who she was, the parts that I clung to, the parts of my first book Ben loved. She believed in happily ever afters and grand romantic gestures and one true loves that stretched on beyond their canon endings. I wasn’t that girl anymore—or so I always told myself. But maybe I was.
And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.
Lee Marlow had said that romance was only good because you read it with one hand.
He was wrong. He had stolen my stories and rewrote them into some literary circle jerk with award potential, but I had the memories of my parents waltzing in the parlors, of Carver and Nicki kissing in the cemetery, of Alice pinning a wildflower in her hair when she thought no one was looking. He might have had the plot, but he didn’t have the heart.
Ben was gone, but Alice was right. He was still here, and I still had a book to write. And now I finally knew how to write it. I still didn’t know how to write Amelia and Jackson’s ending, but I knew that I could. I knew that I was capable.
I think knowing that would’ve made Ben proud.
“How did I get such a smart sister?” I asked her at last.
Alice grinned and punched me in the shoulder. “About damn time you realized how smart I am! You can call me Saint Alice if you please.”
“That’s going a little far.”
“Sage Alice—”
“Really?”
“And name your next book character after me.”
“Absolutely not,” I laughed, when there was a knock on the front door and Rose’s voice echoed into the foyer.
“It’s just me! And I so need to piss—oh my god, is that a secret stash?” Rose asked when she saw us sitting on the parlor floor with my box of secrets, but then she quickly hurried to the bathroom. Alice and I were still drinking on the ground when she came back out. “Wow, look at all this smut. Maybe your editor’ll take one of these for your next book,” Rose joked, glancing over an X-Files fanfic. “Ben doesn’t seem the Mulder-Scully type, though.”
I gave her a strange look. “Who?”
Rose said, “Your editor—I mean,” she said, and glanced at Alice, “Ann’s editor.”
Alice waved her hand. “I already know.”
“Rose, that isn’t funny.” Ben being gone hit me again, right in the stomach, and it made me want to puke.
My best friend took her phone out of her bra. “Erin texted me when I was coming back from the cemetery. He just woke up.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“What? No—I could’ve sworn I told you he got hit by a car.”