“You don’t,” I murmured, sitting up as she stood. “Even if we can’t change anything…you’re allowed to grieve. You told me that, and you were right. I just…don’t want you to torture yourself forever with questions we can’t answer. Especially with everything we’re dealing with right now.”
She gave me what looked like a painful smile.
“Come to bed with me?” she asked, and I nodded. In bed, I held her close again, but she stayed rigid and quiet. I had only one thing left to offer her.
“Claire?”
“Yes?”
“I love you,” I murmured. “I know it doesn’t make anything better…but I do.”
At last, I felt the angles of her body soften against me.
“I love you too,” she whispered back, laying her head in the pocket of my shoulder. “It doesn’t make it better…but it makes it bearable.”
Part V: Bluebird
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.
-“The Lady of Shalott”, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Chapter 36
John
Over the next month, the growing season kicked into full swing. We were planting like crazy, tending to crops, and brewing liquor. I taught Claire how to drive the tractor, how to brew whiskey, and how to fuck against the back wall of the barn. She seemed especially keen on the last lesson, and I wasn’t complaining.
Like she had at our camp, Claire thrived on learning, and it was a welcome distraction from the shit show we’d been dealing with recently. She seemed to put Neil’s letter out of her mind, and I was thankful for her. She really was embracing her new life here, and it was beautiful to watch her grow.
I still visited my grandparents’ grave every week, but at the start of May, I noticed a small bouquet of flowers left on their grave. The next week, they’d been replaced with fresh ones, and the week after that, the same.
“It’s nice that you left flowers,” I said to Kimmy one afternoon. “I always forget.”
She chuckled. “That wasn’t me. Claire does it, every week now that we have flowers again.”
An unexpected lump formed in my throat. She loved this place like I did, and she honoured people she’d never met because they mattered to me. And she didn’t even tell me, because she didn’t do it for praise. She did it because she cared, and that was the core of who Claire was. Kind, and good, and more than her piece-of-shit family ever deserved.
Christ, I’m so fucking gone for her. This wedding cannot come quickly enough.
That evening, I showed Claire the rose garden, where our wedding would be at the beginning of July. Guarded by a white fence, the garden was neglected, but she immediately loved it, and we got to work restoring it. She dug into the dirt to plant tulips, happy as a clam, and I couldn’t help chuckling at how far she’d come from that day on the rooftop.
Her birthday was at the start of June, and I was going to make good on my promise to take her to the spring festival. It was already a beautiful spring morning when I got home. Since it was her birthday, I’d let Claire sleep in while I went to visit Nimkii at Whitefeather. I dropped off my bag at the door, carrying a brown paper package into the kitchen. Asha sat at the table eating breakfast, which surprised me, since she was so rarely home. Not that I was complaining.
“Morning,” she said to me, and I raised an eyebrow.
She never talked to me unless she had to.What’s the occasion?
“Morning,” I answered, a little wary as I set the package on the countertop. “You just get back from scavving?”
She nodded. “I decided to stick around for today.”
“Why’s that?”
