My mouth grew dry, and I didn’t know what to say. If I said,You’re welcome, would he disappear in a sparkle of dust? Would the wind carry him away into the afternoon?
“I’m sorry I have to go,” he said softly, guiltily, “but I promise that not all of your companions will be ghosts, darling.”
I’d heard that before. “Not even the ones I want to stay,” I replied. My heart was breaking.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and gave me a sad sort of pleading look. It twisted my gut. “I want to be with you—but not likethis. I want to grow old with you. I want to wake up every morning and see you on the pillow beside me. I want to cherish every moment of our lives and—”
“We can’t,” I interrupted. “I know.”
Something inside of me gave then. Not hope, exactly, but the small thread of happiness I had this past week, because it couldn’t support me. I was balancing precariously on a string that snapped, thinking it was made of sturdier stuff.
“Florence—” he began, and winced again. He clutched his chest. “I—I want to stay but I...”
He couldn’t. He was begging me to let him go.
I took a deep breath. The good goodbyes were what you made of them. Elvistoo crooning The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” in the background, Mom laughing through her tears as Seaburn spun her through the grass.
I turned back to Ben, and I smiled the only kind of smile I could muster. It was sad and broken, but it was mine. “Thank you, Benji Andor, for letting me live in your grandmother’s world for a few years. And thank you for wanting to live in mine.”
All I wanted to do was take his face in my hands and kiss him, but as I reached out to try, his eyes widened. He sucked in a short breath.
As if he saw something past me. Something I couldn’t see. Something I never would.
And then he was gone.
Forever this time.
34
Ghosts in the Floorboards
IN THE CORNERof the Days Gone Funeral Home, beneath a loose floorboard, there was a metal box full of my deepest dreams and my smutty fanfic. When you grew up in a family where everyone knew everyone else’s business, you had to find ways to keep your secrets. Carver hid his in the backyard. Alice wrote poetry and stashed it in a tree somewhere on the Ridge. And I hid mine beneath the floorboards.
“I’m gonna fix myself a drink. Do you want anything?” Alice asked, hanging up her coat and heading down the hall to the kitchen. I had excused myself from the gravesite soon after Ben disappeared, and Alice asked if I needed company. I think she sensed something was wrong.
Something beyond burying Dad, anyway.
“Whatever you’re having,” I replied, and headed into the red parlor room. I knew exactly where the loose board was, hidden under an end table, and wedged a fire poker between the planks of wood, and pried it up.
I took out the box and dusted it off.
Then I opened it.
There was a letter on top, written in that familiar loopy hand. Dad’s handwriting. He must’ve found it while cleaning the parlor—stepped on a loose floorboard, and pried it up to see what was underneath.
Or maybe I was never that sneaky.
Maybe he always knew I hid my secrets here.
I’m so proud of you, buttercup.
And stapled to the bottom were receipts. A sob caught in my throat. They were sales from the bookstore in town.A Rake’s Guide to Getting the Girl,The Kiss at the Midnight Matinee, andThe Probability of Love. He had bought them. And he knew they were mine.
He knew.
I hugged the note to my chest.
And if he knew, then that meant—when the bar owner interrupted Bruno. The half-finished sentences about my writing. Ann Nichols’s new books in the window...