The Dead Romantics (68)

Ben never stopped fascinating me. “You believe in dandelion wishes?”

“Statistically, one is bound to come true with all of these dandelions, so yes.”

“And if you only made one wish? On all of them?”

He tilted his head, actually debating the question. Finally he decided, “It depends on the wish.”

What kind of wish would that be?

I plucked a dandelion and twirled it around between my fingers. “Then set the scene,” I began. “What would a refined dead editor wish for? He’s walking with his chaotic author. It’s midmorning—well, probably afternoon now—and there are hundreds of thousands of dandelions to wish on. What would he wish for?”

The edge of his lips twitched. Then he bent down close to me, and my skin prickled at his nearness, and he said in a soft rumble, “If he tells her, then it won’t come true.”

My breath caught in my throat. “She won’t finish her manuscript on time.”

“He wouldn’t wish for that. He knows she’s perfectly capable of it on her own. She just needs a little more faith in herself.” His ears started turning pink. “Because even though she can’t see how talented she is, he knows she’ll figure it out someday.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Maybe that’s what he wishes for. That she does.”

I quickly looked away, my cheeks burning in a blush. “That’s a terrible wish,” I forced out. “Wasted potential—my editor would circle that and tell me to recast.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Fine, then what would the author wish for?”

“World peace,” I replied smartly because I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth.

That I’d wish that this moment in the field would last forever. That we never had to leave, that we could freeze time and live in this moment where the sun was high and warm and the sky was a crystalline blue and my heart beat bright in my chest and he was here.

I wanted a moment that never ended.

This moment.

Standing there in the middle of the dandelion field, looking up into Ben’s soft ocher eyes, I began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe. I still believed in that—I saw it in my parents, in my siblings, in Rose’s unabashed one-night stands looking for some peace. It was why I kept searching for it, heartbreak after heartbreak. It wasn’t because I needed to find out that love existed—of course it did—but it was the hope that I’d find it. That I was an exception to a rule I’d made up in my head.

Love wasn’t a whisper in the quiet night.

It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.

Ben took a breath. “In truth, I’d wish for—”

A roar of wind swept across the trees, and when it hit the field, it plucked up the white fluff of dandelions like a roiling wave on the ocean. It swept across the field and rushed toward me in a whirl of seeds that looked like snow. I shielded my face as the wave splashed against me, over me, around me, and carried the dandelions across the rest of the field and up into the crystalline sky.

I whirled around and watched them go. “Holy shit, talk about spring winds. Right, Ben?” There was no response. “Ben?”

But he was gone.





27





Ghost of a Chance


WHEN I REACHED the bottom of the Ridge, Carver’s blue Ford pickup truck was parked in the lot. He dipped his head out of the open window, a John Deere hat flipped backward on his head, and waved me over. He had a beautifully carved wooden birdcage in the passenger seat that he’d made himself, strapped in for safekeeping.

I let out a low whistle when I saw it. “Is that mahogany?”

He scoffed. “Hell no. It’s cherrywood. What do you think I am, made of money?”

“You do have a steady high-paying job in tech and can take all of the vacation you want while working from home so, like, yeah, I do,” I replied.

He playfully slammed me on the arm. “Shush. Just wait until you sell the next Harry Potter. Then you’ll be rolling in the dough and everyone’ll want you to be their best friend—perhaps with benefits, if they’re lucky.”

I rolled my eyes. “No one will sell the next Harry Potter. It hit a zeitgeist that’ll never be re-created, and because there is so much to choose from now, it’s near impossible to predict the next publishing trend—”

“Okay, okay,” he groaned, “I get it! Uncle, I call uncle!”

I stuck out my tongue, and then nudged my chin toward the birdcage. “What’s that for, anyway?”

He grinned then. “I got an idea for a part of Dad’s will.”

“You were thinking about that?” I asked, surprised.

“Of course I was! What do you take me for, a nonmeddling middle brother?”

“Touché.”

“Okay, I say we feed the little fuckers who keep stealing the squirrel food, trap twelve of them, and let them go during the funeral.”

“Those are going to be some mad crows . . .”

“So? What’re they going to do? Shit on my windshield?”