Chapter 21:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

Eventually, gravity won.

Both men collapsed—not at the same time, not with any coordinated grace, but in the staggered, undignified way that exhaustion claims people who’ve spent the last of their fuel on fury. Dominic went down first, his knees buckling against the dirt, followed by a sideways slide that left him flat on his back among the gravestones. Jasper lasted eight seconds longer—a small victory he’d probably treasure—before his legs gave out and he crumpled beside the overturned headstone, chest heaving, blood drying on his knuckles in dark, cracking patterns.

They lay there, three feet apart, staring up at the sky like two soldiers after a battle neither of them had won.

And the sky—I have to tell you about the sky.

It was obscene. Obscenely beautiful, I mean—the kind of sky that has no business appearing over a cemetery where two bleeding men lie in the dirt arguing about a dead woman. Stars everywhere, thick as spilled sugar, crowding the darkness with a light that felt almost aggressive in its loveliness. The Milky Way arched overhead like a question no one had thought to ask, and somewhere in the distance, the ocean whispered against the shore with the patience of something that had been doing the same thing for a million years and would continue long after all of us—the living, the dead, and whatever I was—had been forgotten.

It was, objectively, the most beautiful night I’d ever seen. Which felt like the universe’s idea of a joke.

Jasper moved first. His hand groped along the ground until his fingers closed around a stone—small, flat, the kind you’d skip across a lake if you were somewhere pleasant and not lying in a cemetery covered in someone else’s blood. He threw it at Dominic. Not hard. Hard enough.

“Why the hell,” Jasper said between ragged breaths, each word costing him oxygen he didn’t have to spare, “do you have to be here? Can’t you let Mare rest in peace?” He paused. Breathed. Continued. “She hated you more than anything in the world. How do you have the nerve to show up here?”

Dominic’s hand found its own stone. He threw it back with the stubborn, graceless defiance of a man who will not concede a point even while lying in a hole he dug himself.

“I already told you—Maren is my wife. Even dead, she’s still mine.” His voice was hoarse, scraped raw by dirt and grief and the particular strain of a man who keeps saying the same thing louder because he’s beginning to suspect it isn’t true. “Don’t think I don’t know how you feel about her.”

𝘙𝗲𝗮d 𝖿𝗋о𝘮 у𝗈𝗎𝗿 р𝗵𝗈𝘯𝘦 оn 𝗀a𝗅𝗇оv𝗲𝘭ѕ.с𝘰𝗆

Jasper laughed. It was the saddest laugh I’d ever heard—a sound with no joy in it at all, just the hollow echo of a man who has been asked to defend something that shouldn’t need defending.

“Did we do something wrong?” he asked, and the question was genuine—not rhetorical, not sarcastic, but the real, exhausted inquiry of a man who has spent years interrogating his own heart and come up clean. “We have no blood relation. Not like you and Celeste, who were never clear about your feelings. We’re clean of sin, Dominic. Don’t insult Mare’s memory.”

The words settled over the cemetery like a verdict.

I sat on my fallen headstone, legs dangling, and waited to feel something. Anger, maybe. Possessiveness. The hot, territorial instinct of a woman hearing two men argue over her as though she were a deed to a property rather than a person.

Nothing came. I searched inside myself the way you search a coat pocket for keys you already know aren’t there, and found only a vast, quiet indifference. Dominic’s words no longer had the power to wound me. His claims of ownership, his jealousy, his stubborn insistence that I belonged to him even in death—all of it bounced off me like rain off stone. Maybe I’d simply gotten used to his cruelty the way you get used to a noise in the walls: you stop hearing it, not because it stops, but because your brain decides it’s no longer worth the energy of registering.

Or maybe—and this was the possibility that felt most like the truth—I had simply stopped caring what Dominic thought. About me. About us. About anything. The opinion of a man who had never seen me clearly held exactly as much weight as a review from someone who’d never read the book.

Dominic fell silent. The fight drained out of him all at once, like water from a tipped glass, and what was left was something I hadn’t seen before: not anger, not self-pity, but a stillness so complete it looked like surrender.

He looked up at the stars. And two tears—just two, precise and symmetrical, as though even his grief had been rationed—slid from the corners of his eyes and disappeared into the dirt beside his ears.

“Why do I always do stupid things?” he whispered. The question wasn’t directed at Jasper, or at me, or at the sky. It was directed inward—a man finally turning the interrogation lamp on himself and not liking what it illuminated. “Why couldn’t I have been the one to die?”

Jasper sat up. His smile was not kind. It was the smile of a man who has waited years to agree with something and is not about to let the moment pass.

.

.

.