The Dead Romantics (47)

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, once Seaburn and the mayor were out of earshot. “I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t expect you to, but don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does—”

“No, it doesn’t,” he interrupted, and placed his hands on the wrought iron fence, and leaned against it. “It doesn’t matter, Florence, it really doesn’t. Everything is in my will—I wasn’t a fool. I’m a thirty-six-year-old bachelor whose close relatives are all dead, and I share my apartment with a cat named Dolly Purrton.”

“You do not.”

“I do. She’s perfect. And my will was pretty straightforward in regard to her,” he added. “I had planned my entire life. How I was going to live it. What I was going to do, and when. Everything had its place. It was neat and orderly.”

“Like your desk.”

He gave a shrug. “I’m not great with surprises. I don’t—didn’t—take chances. I didn’t take risks. On anything—or anyone.” He hesitated, and then corrected himself, “Almost anyone. And I was fine with that life. I’d even planned on what would happen should I die before forty, I just . . . didn’t think it’d happen. I would’ve expedited a lot of my long-term plans,” he added, trying to joke.

I didn’t find it funny, for once. “You can’t plan for everything.”

“Trust me, I know that now,” he said, and there was this hardness in his voice that made me think that it was something he regretted a lot recently. “I thought, before I died, I would at least find . . .” He shook his head. “But of course not.”

“Find what?”

He slid his cool brown gaze toward me. “The one thing you don’t believe in, Florence.” Then he shook his head and said, “I guess if everyone found their big love, then the world wouldn’t be such a terrible place most of the time, eh?”

“Ben . . .”

“I don’t need your pity.”

“Pity?” I mock gasped, undoing the latch to the gate. “Whatever gave you that idea, Benji Andor? I was just going to welcome you to the Singles Club, it’s not so bad here. Some people even like it! I envy them.”

He snorted and walked through the gate. “I do, too.”

At the counter inside, Dana was reading a novel by Courtney Milan at the desk, and I waved at them as I passed up toward my room.

“Good night!” I called.

Ben said, “Sweet dreams.”

Dana said, “Night!”

I left up the stairs and went to my room and fell onto my bed.

That night, as the storm blew over Mairmont, I tried to listen to the dead sing through the trees, but as the wind bent the limbs and scraped across the rooftop, all I could hear was the rain. And all I could think about was Ben Andor in the bookstore, bending ever so slightly to me with a lopsided smile, thanking me for trying.

No one had ever thanked me for that before. For trying. Even though I was failing. Even though Ann’s expectations loomed over me like this huge, dark thundercloud. I didn’t want to disappoint her, and I was beginning to realize how much I didn’t want to disappoint Ben, either. But more than that, though, I wanted to finish that manuscript so he’d know that he wasn’t some empty Sharpie unable to leave a mark. He left them wherever he went, even if he couldn’t see them.

Even if no one told him, “Thank you for trying.”





18





The Undertaker’s Daughters


MONDAY MORNING WAS another breakfast with the family.

I missed it, weirdly enough, when I was in New York. And now that I was back, for however short a time, I’d sunk back into the well-oiled machine of my family like I’d never left. Alice and I didn’t even snap at each other when we sat down for breakfast, even though I was still salty from that last chapter. I’d tried to write again when I woke up but—it was the same problem. Jackson didn’t get struck by lightning this time, but I still didn’t know how to make Amelia stay.

Alice, on the other hand, seemed to be having some trouble of her own.

“. . . Never mind the wrong shade of concealer came in,” she was saying, spearing another egg. “Honestly—do you think one thing can go right for Dad’s funeral?”

That caught my attention, and I looked up from my first cup of coffee. The caffeine was beginning to fire off those synapses in my brain. “You ordered the wrong concealer?”

Alice glared at me. “No! The company sent me the wrong refill. And it’s stage makeup, so it isn’t like I can go to CVS and get a new jar. Ugh, this is a nightmare,” she added, putting her face in her hands. “First I ran out of embalming fluid last night, and now this.”

Mom patted her on the shoulder. “Murphy’s Law, hon.”

“Murphy can fuck off for this one funeral.”

Just as I always wanted to be a writer, my little sister always wanted to be a mortician. Ever since I could remember, she’d followed Dad like a shadow. She went to Duke for forensic chemistry, and on weeknights, just for fun, she got her mortuary sciences and funeral services degree online. A part of me always thought that it was Alice who should’ve inherited Dad’s gift. She would’ve been so much better at it, and I doubt she would’ve been run out of town because of it. She was the kind of person to tackle things head-on. Nothing frightened her. Especially after I solved that cold case, and everything got worse. She fought people on my behalf. Another reason why I wanted to leave as quickly as possible when I graduated high school—so she didn’t feel obligated to anymore.