“Yes. I mean no. Not whenever. According to Everett, leaving now would still mean death and spending eternity as a ghost. But anytime after December fifth should be fine.”
“I... Holy shit.” Charlie pulls away from her to rake his fingers through his hair again, no doubt transferring some dirt there in the process. “Gretchen.”
“I know. I’m never letting him watch TV again.” She pauses and kicks at the small pile of soil on the ground. “I’ll understand if you... if this changes things and you don’t need me—”
He shakes his head vehemently and says, “This does change things, but not that. I still need you to help me with the business. And... well, I also just needyou.” His hand comes to cup her cheek. “I will always need you, Acorn. And not for what you can do, but for who you are to me.”
“I promise I’ll try to be useful,” she says, trying to make a joke of this desperate need to assure him this will be worth it. That he isn’t making a mistake loving her.
“Why are you always talking about being useful, making yourself useful? Useful, useful, useful,” he says, exhaling in amusement as the word starts sounding like nonsense with repetition. “I’ve never wanted you because you were useful, Gretchen. I want you because you’re you.”
The way he says it is so earnest that she can’t find it in herself to doubt him. Gretchen bows her head, trying to hide the embarrassing wideness of her natural grin. “You were really willing to be stuck here for the rest of your life... for me?”
His responding smile drains some of the tension from his features. “I mean, I was hoping we would be able to make things work so that I wouldn’t be in it by myself, but yes. When I stoppedlying to myself about how I feel, I realized I don’t want freedom half as much as I want you.” He laughs. “Don’t look at me that way. Weren’t you willing to be stuck here for me too?”
Gretchen doesn’t know how to do this, to love and be loved without ulterior motives. It’s all so new and tenuous that she’s terrified already that she’ll break it. So when she kisses him, it’s soft, gentle, almost cautious. As if sensing her trepidation, Charlie takes her face decisively in his hands and kisses her back with an intensity that says:We can be rough with each other, imperfect and messy and ourselves, you don’t need to be afraid of losing me.
When they finally part and Gretchen’s eyes flutter open, they connect not with hazel eyes but the blue ones directly over Charlie’s shoulder.
“Oh, I do love a happily ever after.” Everett sighs contentedly. “I suppose you could say that without me, you two never would have wound up together at all. Hmm, it’s almost as if I did you a favor by lying... Almost like I left you off better than I found you... Something out of your own playbook, really. Which means you can’t be too mad at me, Gretch, right? Right?”
Gretchen buries her face into Charlie’s neck and groans even as a smile pulls at her mouth. It’s going to be a long, long seven months.
Epilogue
She can’t get over how quiet it is.
That’s the main thing Gretchen is having trouble getting used to. It’s December twelfth—one week since Everett went Up—and she can’t help but miss the ghost’s incessant chatter. There was a time (or many times, actually) she would have given anything to relax on the porch with a hot cup of tea and hear nothing but the softmehing of the goats huddled in the barn, an occasional bark from one of the dogs, the distant rumble of traffic on the main road. But now, doing just that, her ears near-buzzing with the relative silence, she finds herself wishing Everett would appear and give her a rundown of his latest television obsession.
They weren’t certain how it would all happen. Would it be right at midnight? Or in the afternoon, closer to when the newspaper article they found reported Everett’s time of death? And would he simply disappear, like when he poofed into the Nowhere, or would he slowly fade until there was nothing left of him?
Around ten at night on December fourth, soon after she settled into bed with Charlie, he leaned over and kissed her, then whispered, “Go. You should be with him tonight.” So Gretchen went into the guest room (which had once again become Everett’s space now that she shared a bed with Charlie) and lay down beside him.
Gretchen thought about the weeks immediately following Everett’s confession, and how her attempt to give him the silent treatment lasted barely four days before she started to miss his company. She hated that he’d done it, of course, but it was hard to keep her anger active. Especially when she so intimately understood both the loneliness that caused him to cling to the lie in the first place and the deep affection that caused him to abandon it. Things were back to normal between them, more or less, but the knowledge that this would be one of her last-ever conversations with him prompted Gretchen to say, “I’ve forgiven you, you know. For lying to me about the terms of the curse.”
“Thank you.” Everett hovered his hand over hers, just close enough to make her shiver. “I’m sorry I did it, you know. But I can’t say I regret how it all turned out.” He gently poked the small diamond engagement ring that once belonged to Ellen Waybill, taking great care to only allow his fingertip to go through the stone and not through to Gretchen’s skin.
“All’s well that ends well, I suppose,” she said with a sigh. Another few beats of silence later, she asked, “Do you think Aunt Lucretia knew it would go down like this? That you’d need to become a better person on the way to keeping the Waybills here, and that was the real goal all along?”
Everett touched his chin, considering. “Nah,” he said. “I think she just wanted me to suffer.”
Gretchen chuckled, then turned to face him. “Are you scared?”
“No,” he said immediately. “I’m... a bit sad, maybe? But not scared.” A wistful smile, still a little crooked, spread across his face. “You know, when I died, they had a little service here at Gilded Creek before they buried me in the family graveyard. So of course I hung around, wanting to see how people were taking my untimely and tragic death. Wanting to watch sweet little Betsy Chandler shed tears over my grave, hear the stories the boys I used to go into town with to raise hell would tell about me. But no one came. No one. Except cousin George, of course, who I suppose felt obligated, and Aunt Lucretia, who smiled evilly the whole time. It hit me then that I wasn’t a fella anyone was going to miss. Not really.” He rolled his eyes, showing more of the cloudlike whites, and sniffled, though he hadn’t had the biological capacity for tears in a very long time. “Listen to me, so maudlin! But I just wanted you to know that it means... well, it meanseverythingto me, Gretchen, that this time, there’s someone who might miss me.”
A tear rolled down Gretchen’s cheek. “Of course I’ll miss you, Ev. You’re a huge pain in the ass, and there have been times I have genuinely researched how to do an exorcism, but I love you. You know that I love you.”
“I do know. And I love you too.”
“Like a hot sister?” she asked with a laugh.
He smiled, then whispered, “Like a best friend.”
Everett’s reassuring chill eventually lulled Gretchen to sleep, and when she woke up sometime in the early hours of the morning, he was gone. She only realized later that it was a Thursday—perhaps a significant day of the week in the spirit world after all.
The sound of the front door opening and closing snaps herout of her memories, and Gretchen whips her head around. Charlie steps out onto the porch, holding his own mug of tea in one hand and the shawl he knitted for Gretchen’s birthday last month tucked under his arm. He places the mug atop the railing before carefully draping the soft lilac-colored fabric over her. It’s not perfectly symmetrical, but his knitting has much improved since he made the Frankensweater—which Gretchen still wears to bed on occasion.
“Thank you,” she says, smiling at him as he takes his usual spot beside her.
