Chapter 23:

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The blood came quickly—faster than I expected, though I’m not sure what I expected, having never watched someone open their veins in a grave they dug for someone else. It pulsed from his wrist in dark, rhythmic surges that matched his heartbeat, pooling in his palm before spilling over his fingers and soaking into the earth beneath him.

Something was wrong. Not with the blood—the blood was doing what blood does when it’s been given permission to leave. Something was wrong with me. A feeling I couldn’t name, couldn’t place, couldn’t file under any of the categories I’d built for my emotions over these long, spectral weeks. Not grief. Not satisfaction. Not the cold vindication of watching karma arrive. Something more complicated. Something that lived in the space between all of those things, in the cracks where contradictions grow.

I don’t know if it was an illusion—ghosts are not reliable narrators of their own perceptions—but Dominic turned his head, and his eyes found mine.

Not the space where I was. Not the general direction of a sound or a movement or a shift in temperature. Me. His gaze locked onto mine with the precision of a key finding its lock, and something in his face—something deep, structural, foundational—lit up.

“Mare…” His voice was a whisper now, a thing made of breath and blood loss and the last reserves of a man who is spending his final words the way a bankrupt spends his last dollar: carefully, on the only thing that matters. “Finally. I see you. I missed you so much.”

A pause. His eyes—bright now, impossibly bright, burning with the particular intensity of candles in their final minutes—traveled over my face with the hunger of a man seeing water after weeks in the desert.

“If I had known I could see you before dying, I wouldn’t have waited so long.”

The sentence hit me like a hand against a bell. I vibrated with it. Every particle of my dissolving soul rang with the strangeness of being seen—truly seen, after weeks of passing through walls and hands and conversations like a rumor no one could confirm. I had spent all this time following Dominic, haunting Dominic, watching Dominic from a distance measured not in feet but in dimensions, and not once—not once—had he looked at me. Not at the chair where I sat. Not at the doorway where I stood. Not at the empty side of the bed where I lay beside him in the dark, listening to him breathe.

And now, at the exact moment he was leaving the world, he could see me. The cruelty of the timing was exquisite—the kind of cruelty that could only be authored by a universe with a very dark sense of humor.

“Won’t you speak?” Dominic’s voice was fading—not gradually, the way lights dim, but in steps, like someone descending a staircase into a room I couldn’t follow him into. “Is it because you still hate me?”

𝗡𝘦𝘸 с𝘩а𝘱𝘁𝗲𝘳𝗌 𝗲𝘃е𝗋𝘆 wе𝖾𝗸 oո gа𝗹n𝗼𝘷e𝗹s.со𝗆

He swallowed. The effort was visible.

“I’m so sorry, Mare. Truly. I shouldn’t have believed Celeste. But she’s already dead, and no one else will interrupt our life.” A ghost of a smile—if a dying man can be said to smile at a ghost. “Mare, I love you. Really. I love you…”

He tried to rise. His body refused. His arms trembled, his shoulders lifted an inch, and then gravity reclaimed him with the gentle finality of a parent putting a child back to bed. The light in his eyes—that sudden, blazing, impossible light—began to thin. A candle running out of wick.

“Mare, if there’s a next life, I’ll find you earlier. I’ll value you. I won’t make the same mistakes.”

A breath. Shallow. Wet.

“Mare… do you hate me?”

The question arrived like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples it created moved through every layer of me—through the anger, through the grief, through the indifference I’d cultivated like a garden, through the exhaustion and the bitterness and the love that I’d buried so deep I’d convinced myself it was gone.

I answered him by instinct. Not by choice. Not after deliberation or reflection or the careful weighing of words that the moment probably deserved. The answer came from the same place my breath used to come from—automatically, involuntarily, from a source deeper than thought.

“I don’t hate you anymore. But I don’t love you either.”

It was the truest thing I’d ever said. Truer than the vows I’d taken at our wedding. Truer than the denials I’d screamed while Celeste’s accusations rained down on me. Truer even than the I love you’s I’d whispered into his sleeping back during the good years, the early years, the years when I still believed that love was a door you could open if you just knocked hard enough.

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