Chapter 25: (END)

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“I hope Maren Holloway gets what she truly desires.”

His voice broke on desires. Not dramatically—just a small fracture, a crack in the foundation of a word that was holding more weight than it was built for. And I understood, with the sudden, total clarity that comes only at the very end of things, that this prayer was not a casual wish. It was a project. An engineering feat. The concentrated force of a man’s entire love, directed at the universe like a beam of light aimed at a very specific star.

I looked at the calendar on the wall behind him. The date preceded my death.

And then—like a lock clicking open, like the final piece of a puzzle sliding into place, like the moment you read the last sentence of a book and suddenly understand what the first sentence meant—everything made sense.

My soul hadn’t risen immediately after my death. It had lingered. It had stayed tethered to the world, bound to Dominic, forced to witness his grief and his guilt and his slow, wretched unraveling—and I had assumed it was a punishment. A curse. The afterlife’s way of making me watch the mess I’d left behind.

But it wasn’t my doing. It was Jasper’s.

His prayer—spoken before I died, spoken with the full force of a love that had never been declared and never been diminished—had reached whatever power governs the traffic between this world and the next, and it had made a request. Not for himself. For me. He wanted me to see Dominic repent. Wanted me to witness the love that arrived too late. Wanted me to have the thing I’d been denied in life: proof that I had mattered.

Jasper’s wish was for me to be loved. Even posthumously. Even by a man who didn’t deserve me. Because Jasper understood something that Dominic never did: sometimes the people we love need closure more than they need us.

My own wish, it turned out, was simpler. So simple it could fit in the palm of a hand, so small it was almost embarrassing to admit, given the scale of everything that had happened:

I wanted to live in peace. In a quiet city. With someone who would love me—not as a reflection of someone else, not as a placeholder, not as a project or a possession or a second choice—but as me. Just me. Maren. Until we grew old. Until the growing old was the point, not the waiting.

It was such a small wish. The kind of wish that most people don’t even bother to make because they assume it’s already included in the baseline package of being alive. A home. A person. A love without conditions or caveats or fine print.

𝖳𝗁𝘦 b𝘦𝘴𝗍 𝘳𝗲𝘃𝘪еw𝗌 𝘰ո 𝗀a𝗹𝘯𝗼𝘃𝗲𝘭𝘀.𝗰o𝘮

I never got it. But wanting it—knowing exactly what I wanted, saying it clearly, without apology—felt like its own kind of arrival.

The light was pulling me now. Gently, insistently, the way a current pulls a leaf. I let it.

But before I went—before the warmth swallowed me entirely and the mirror dissolved and the world I’d known became a memory even ghosts forget—I looked at Jasper one last time.

He was still kneeling. Still praying. His eyes still closed, his hands still clasped, his love still radiating outward like heat from a fire that refuses to go out. And I wanted to tell him— I wanted so desperately to reach through the glass and the light and the impossible distance between the living and the dead and say:

Thank you.

Thank you for carrying me out of that hospital. Thank you for the headstone and the ocean view and the cemetery on the hill. Thank you for remembering my favorite foods and my throwaway wishes and the small, forgettable things I said that turned out to be the truest things about me. Thank you for loving me in silence, for years, without ever asking me to love you back. Thank you for making my youth not so bad.

I hope, without me in your life, you can leave the past behind. I hope you find someone who sees you—really sees you—the way you saw me. Someone who stays. Someone who says thank you while they’re still alive to say it.

I couldn’t say any of it. The light was too bright. The distance was too far. And the words, like everything else in my life, arrived a moment too late.

But I like to think he heard me anyway. The way he always heard me. Not the words, but the meaning underneath. The quiet thing. The true thing. The wish whispered once and remembered forever.

The light took me.

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The End

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