Sweet Romance19 min read
Birthday Candles and an Unfinished Spring
ButterPicks10 views
I got two envelopes on my twenty-fourth birthday. One had glittery paper and a neat embossed name. The other smelled of disinfectant when I opened it in the bathroom and found the two words that made everything tilt.
"They sent me his wedding invitation," I told the sink like it could help, and then, softer, "and my diagnosis."
"You're joking," the voice on the phone said.
"It's not a joke," I said. "One says 'congratulations' for a life that's beginning. The other says 'we're sorry' for a life that's ending."
My feet were bare on the cold floor. The October air bit through the apartment. I liked the way the tiles felt—sharp and honest—and I liked the way my feet knew the truth before my head did. They knew, and they told the rest of me.
"Mariana," the nurse had said over the phone earlier. "You need to come in. This is—" She sounded like she wanted to use a softer word than the one on the page. "We can help. There's a protocol."
I put the invitation to Marcus Ashford on my left, the diagnosis on my right. They looked like two roads that both led to an end. I did what I always did when things threatened to split my heart in two: I made myself presentable.
"Why are you touching that dress?" Karl Ortega said from the doorway, folding his hands like a judge.
He was the company's vice president today, my temporary enemy yesterday, and someone who never missed the chance to look down on me. "Mariana," he said, "wear something that won't make the board uncomfortable."
"I wear what I want," I said. "And I don't come for sympathy."
He smirked and left. I wore the black dress Marcus gave me and a smile I practiced in the mirror until it felt like an armor.
At the party, the lights were soft and cruel. Forrest Becker, the birthday man, was a riot of laughter and bad jokes. "Mariana, you always make an entrance," he said, clapping me on the shoulder.
"Don't ever give me that honor again," I told him, smiling.
"Why?" Forrest asked, genuine. "Tonight's fun. Marcus is being Marcus."
"Marcus is being Marcus," I repeated, letting it roll off like a charm.
"You're sitting with him, yes?" Forrest grinned.
I hooked my arm through Marcus's as if it were a show people liked. Marcus smiled; his smile always folded the room differently. He could make a person feel like they were the axis of the universe for two seconds, and then he could break that world just as casually.
"She's mine tonight," Marcus said to someone behind me like it was a rare announcement.
"Really?" a voice whispered. Keilani Cunningham moved closer with small, controlled steps. She wore pearls and a look that had practiced disappointment. "Marcus," she said when she caught his eye. "We were supposed to—"
He didn't look away from me. Not then. I laughed, because laughing is cheaper than crying. "Keilani, don't be silly," I said.
He kissed a girl's cheek across the table to prove something. I left the room to excuse myself and my stomach betrayed me.
"Go take care of yourself," Marcus's hand landed on my waist on the way to the restroom like a tether. "Don't make a scene."
"I wasn't planning to," I said. "But I might make a scene later if I see you behave like that again."
He raised an eyebrow. "Don't be ridiculous." His lips grazed my ear. "Only you could make me feel off balance."
"Only I?" I said, soft. "And who makes you call me 'only'?"
"Don't be dramatic," he said. He always said it like I was the performer in a show I hadn't agreed to star in.
That night, in the taxi back to the car, I told him what I'd been building up to for months. "We should stop," I said.
"Stop what?" He looked genuine for the first time all evening.
"Stop pretending," I said. "Stop making it so you keep everything but keep me like a secret other people are allowed to guess about."
"We're clear about each other," he said. He was sharp when he wanted to be. "Don't choose showy moves to get attention."
"I'm not trying to get attention," I said. "I just want a life where I'm not always the apology."
He frowned then as if he'd swallowed something bitter. "Mariana, don't go dramatic on me."
So I went. I left the car in a fit of childish defiance and walked. The city was a rogue wind and my feet were stubborn. For a while I thought, maybe, if I keep walking, I can outrun how small I feel.
He followed. He always followed. He climbed out of the car and found me at the stairwell with my shoes in a trash bag and the taste of cheap cake in my mouth.
"Mariana," he said quietly, "why are you doing this?"
"Because it hurts," I said.
He watched me like he was trying to memorize something. He didn't kneel; instead he got back into his world of suits and corporate nights and left me on the curb with my shoes.
I made myself rest. I boxed the memories of that night and put them on a shelf like fragile glass. I started writing little letters to myself—funny, angry, practical—about what to do next. Because when the body starts to fail, the brain has to busy itself with lists. I made a list: check hospital doctor, finish leaving letters, pack a bag, tell no one my plans. I crossed things off like a person who didn't feel like weeping.
The next day, Karl Ortega's phone call came like a cold wind. "You can't leave the company like this," he said. "You have responsibilities."
"My responsibilities don't include swallowing my own dignity," I answered.
He laughed. "You're dramatic, but fine. The company has its interests."
"I never took it," I said. "You did."
He hung up irritated, and I wanted to put a shoe through the phone.
Then, in a restaurant that smelled of tea and old deals, I met Abel Bray.
"Nice to meet you, Miss Jaeger," Abel said. He had the syrup voice of a man who memorized compliments and never meant them. I had come to talk to a Mr. Chen—someone wealthy, someone who might have helped my family back when the world went sideways. Instead, I had been ushered to this closed room under the guise of courtesy. Abel introduced himself as someone with the connections I might need.
"Thank you," I said. I sat, and he offered me tea with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
Halfway through the conversation, the door clicked and the world narrowed. He moved too close with a smile that promised too many improper things.
"Abel," I said, trying to keep the tone neutral. "This isn't necessary."
"It's a small thing, Miss Jaeger," he said. "Just sit back and let me help."
"Help what?" I asked.
He reached for me. The first time it was a hand on my elbow. The second time his hand found my shirt. I slapped it away because the body remembers how to protect itself sometimes faster than the mind remembers to think.
"Hey!" he barked, and the room blurred.
I grabbed a bottle—one of the props on the table—and swung it like a woman who had nothing left to lose. It broke across his face. There was screaming. I was on my knees while he cursed me. He called me names, monstrous slurs that made my insides colder. He slapped me hard. I could feel my lip split. It didn't stop him. He kept on, his hands unclean and quick.
The door flew open. Someone—I don't remember clearly, just a shadow—I heard a voice. "Stop this. Now."
It was Marcus. "What did you do?" he demanded, his voice low and broken.
"I—" I wanted to die. "He attacked me."
"I didn't assault you," Abel wheezed, his shirt dark with red and his bravado turned into a slow, surprised fear.
"Get out," Marcus said. He sounded tired in a way that made my chest hurt.
Abel ran. He left behind blood, a chair knocked over, and a trail of humiliation that would not wash off in a sink.
I went to the hospital that night for stitches and for more than just the visible wounds. They checked my blood, and when I sat up in the weak fluorescent light and read the lab results, I stared at a long word—leukemia. My brain read it twice, then again. Words folded and blurred.
"How long?" I asked, because asking was what people did with horrible news. They were always supposed to say a number.
"For this type, it can be treatable with chemotherapy and sometimes a bone marrow transplant," the doctor said. "Early treatment will raise your chances significantly."
I made tea later and burned out a hole in the filter of my mind. Treatment. That word felt like an obligation of someone else. Later, when I lay on the couch with the lights off, I thought of all the moments I'd been wasting—waiting for explanations from people who didn't earn my patience. I thought of Jackson.
"Jackson?" I murmured to the dark. I thought of my brother who had been punished by a court for crimes that did not belong to him alone. I thought of the long, cold years he had spent behind iron bars. I thought of the way people turned their faces away.
He was in prison then, a fact that tasted like salt. He had been taken when the family fell and there was nowhere for us to run. He was the target, not the architect.
Dawson Ikeda found me the next morning. He had been my brother's friend for years, a man who knew which keys to turn and which doors to knock. "Abel was involved in something bigger," he said. "There's a paper trail."
"Abel?" I said weakly.
"Not just Abel," Dawson said. "Santiago Faure had his hands in the operations. Someone contracted Chen's camp; Abel was the dirty hand. It wasn't just corporate bullying. It was criminal."
"Who would do that?" I whispered.
"People who profit from other people's ruin," Dawson said. He reached out and squeezed my shoulder, old kindness in his fingers. "We can fight back."
"I don't have the energy to fight," I told him.
"Then let me," he said. "Let Jackson be the reason you fight. People will come to the truth."
I let him.
The days became a map of hospital visits and small mercies. Kadence Bryant, the little girl in the room next door, had a sunhat like a blossom and a laugh that made me ache with envy. She called me "Pretty Sister" at first and then "Brother's friend" when I told her I'm not anyone's everything. She liked my hair being braided. She liked me to read dull novels to her. Her family loved her like a fortress. It felt impossible to be jealous of something so pure.
"Your brother will come home," Dawson said once when the rain was like a sheet against the window. "We have proof. The man who falsified his evidence is close to breaking."
"Will I get better?" I asked because asking about one thing was easier than asking about everything.
"Yes," he said. "But you have to let us do something. You have to let Jackson try."
From the hospital bed, I watched a map of other people's faces. I watched Marcus from a distance, like someone studying a painting she used to love. He visited with an apology that felt like a whole weather system. "I was wrong," he said, palms flat on my knees like he was placing himself where weight could steady him.
"You hurt me, Marcus," I said. "You don't get to apologize and pretend it didn't leave a mark."
"I know." He looked lost, which is what he always looked like under his expensive coats. "I am trying not to lose you."
"I don't belong to you," I said. "Not like that."
"You belong to yourself," he answered unexpectedly. "But I… I can't lose you."
"Then stop being someone who is easy to lose," I told him.
He left. He came back. He sent flowers. I kept the flowers on the windowsill until their petals turned to thin paper. Each petal was a calendar day I didn't trust.
Dawson came with a plan: prove Santiago Faure orchestrated the collapse, expose Abel Bray's assault, show Karl Ortega's complicity in covering things up. He worked quietly, like a man pulling threads in a sweater until the whole fabric came apart.
"Can you confront him in public?" Dawson asked one evening. "At the gala. At the shareholders' dinner. Make them listen."
"Make them listen to what?" I asked. "That people like them push us down so they can step on us later?"
"Yes," he said. "And that some wounds are visible, and some are not."
I hated the idea at first. I hated being on a stage. But there was an ember in me that liked the idea of an audience for truth. Also, Jackson needed people to see his innocence like someone needs sunlight.
So we planned.
The night we chose was mercilessly cruel in its weather and its irony: a foundation gala that Santiago Faure was sponsoring. The ballroom had tall windows and chandeliers and people who moved like fish in a bowl, elegant and cold. Keilani wore pearls and more patience than a saint. Marcus stood nearby like a man who had walked through storms and couldn't dry his hair.
"Are you sure?" Marcus asked me in the alcove near dessert.
"Yes," I said. "They need to see them."
He looked at me like he wanted to argue. "You don't have to ruin yourself on their stage."
"It's not for me," I said. "It's for Jackson."
He didn't stop me.
Then I walked out.
"We're honored tonight to present—" the host's voice poured over a room full of polished smiles. "—the Faure Charity Endowment."
I watched faces turn to flex that look: interest sharp as knives. I stood near the dais where a camera's light found me. The man behind the camera held a lens like a judge. That judge's eye would see everything.
"May I say a few words?" I asked, because sometimes you have to borrow a microphone like you're borrowing courage.
"A few words?" someone hissed. "That's… unusual."
"Yes," I said. "Unusual is exactly what's needed."
They slid a microphone to me. I felt it like a small metal heartbeat.
"My name is Mariana Jaeger," I began. "You all know Santiago Faure. He is generous with charity tonight and ruthless with livelihoods in daylight."
A ripple ran through the room like water against glass. Cameras leaned in. Keilani's eyes widened like a frightened bird. Marcus's hand found the back of my chair.
"Two years ago," I said, "a company named Yao Holdings was ruined. That ruin came with forged invoices and planted evidence. My brother, Jackson Perry, was sentenced for crimes he did not commit. While he was in prison, someone transferred huge private funds into accounts that eventually benefited people in this room."
"Who are you to stand here?" Karl Ortega barked from the back, voice slicked with contempt. "Miss Jaeger, sit down. This is a charity."
"This is also a place with cameras," I said. "And cameras cannot unsee."
I had a folder in my hands full of bank records Dawson had found. I had an audio file. I had witnesses. The hush got thicker.
"What proof do you have?" Santiago said from the dais. "Accusations are cheap."
"They're cheap until you make them expensive," I said. "Dawson, play it."
Dawson pushed a button on his phone. The room heard a recorded conversation: Abel Bray's voice, a man laughing, then making arrangements about a fake invoice, about moving money "quiet-like." Abel's voice was clear. It was the same voice that had grabbed my collar months ago.
The cameras flashed. Everyone leaned forward. The host paled and then almost smiled like someone seeing a plot twist.
Abel made a face. "That was taken out of context." He swallowed like a man hydrating a lie.
"Here's the bank transfer," I said, sliding a paper across the podium to a waiting camera. "This goes from a shell company to an account name associated with Faure interests. It was moved again and again. Each layer hides the original theft."
"Santiago?" one reporter called.
Santiago's face didn't move. He was a man carved out of marble. "You have no right—" he started.
"I do," I said. "I have pictures of the meetings, and I have the names of the men who signed the falsified documents."
Karl opened his mouth and closed it. The air was full of whispers. Keilani's hands went white around her clutch.
Then, like a stone making a fountain, I told the room about Abel's assault. I had pulled together a string of messages Abel had sent, and the CCTV footage from the restaurant's hallway. The footage showed Abel's approach, his hands, his violent movements. The sound was muffled, but the image wasn't.
"It will be on record," I said. "Not as rumor. Not as a whispered slur. It will be on record."
Abel tried to lunge up, to deny with the same bravado he'd used in the restaurant, but the security's hands were suddenly very near him.
"I didn't—" he stammered.
"Everyone can see your face," someone hissed. "Smile if you mean it."
The room watched as a slow metamorphosis happened to a man: arrogance to surprise to denial to panic. His eyes darted to the exits. The press took his photo. Someone shouted, "Mr. Bray, will you apologize publicly?"
He tried to speak and found his voice stripped. It was worse than he deserved. "That's slander!" he cried, voice high and cracked. "You're lying!"
"Sit down," Marcus said in a voice that was quiet but hard. "Abel, step back."
Abel stumbled, as if someone had pushed him, which in a way, they had. Security took him toward the door. Cameras buzzed like angry bees.
But this was only the beginning. I had in my possession signed testimony that proved Karl Ortega had been informed of the falsified papers and had advised the company to "let them fall" for corporate advantage.
"Karl, you recommended ignoring the anomalies," I said. "And then you benefitted from silence."
His face became leaden. "You cannot—"
"Watch the list of transfers," I continued. "Watch the names of the shell companies. Watch who applied for the benefit after the fall of Yao Holdings. The room will know soon enough who profited."
Out in the hall, people were talking in sharp, surprised tones. Phones lit like stars. Keilani's lips trembled. "Marcus," she whispered, but he didn't answer.
"What do you expect?" Karl gasped, furious now. "You can't just—"
"I expect a public apology," I said, "and I expect an investigation. I expect every account to be open. I expect Mr. Bray to answer for the assault he committed. I expect the truth of who ruined a family to be broadcast."
A murmur of cameras rolled. A woman in a satin dress whispered, "This will ruin them."
"I will ruin what has been built on lies," I said.
Santiago Faure stood. He looked old all at once, as if some invisible weight pulled the years down on him. "You will regret this," he said, without shouting but with a voice like a verdict.
"No," I said. "You will regret having built a life on other people's ruin."
Then Marcus did something I'd seen him do rarely: he told the cameras what he'd been hiding. He walked to my side and put his hand on my shoulder. "We did wrong," he said simply. "We profited without asking questions. I am sorry."
Silence folded like paper. Keilani's jaw slackened. "Marcus—" she began.
Marcus looked at her the way people look at a picture they are tired of living in. "Keilani," he said, "I have been selfish."
For once, I saw shame on him in a way that wasn't dramatic—just human and simple. The room exhaled.
Then Abel tried one last trick: "You were paid by Yao Holdings!" he yelled. "You did this for money!"
"Dawson," I said, "play the text chain."
They watched his messages—to Abel, to Santiago, to Karl. They watched proof of orders and the dates of transactions. Abel's bravado flailed. He tried to scramble, then stopped. His career unraveled in a matter of moments.
The punishment was not a legal sentence in that moment. The punishment was worse, one that people like Abel couldn't stomach: public unmasking. Cameras cropping his lie into every feed, his name tagged with shame. Men and women in the room whispered. Phones were raised. "He assaulted a woman," someone said. "He conspired." People who had eaten at his table for years turned their faces away.
"Apologize," I said, and my voice was steadier than I'd thought.
He looked at me and then saw the rows of faces, the flashbulbs, the way his words bounced against unbreakable glass. He made a sound like a man breaking.
"I'm sorry," he croaked, but it was not a real sorry. It didn't reach his eyes. Cameras recorded the lie.
"Do you mean it?" I asked.
He fell silent.
Then a crowd gathered. People filed complaints. Lawyers arrived. Journalists took statements. The foundation called for an emergency meeting. Media outlets published the footage. Shareholders demanded answers. The board of directors, which had watched things happen for advantage, could no longer deny the evidence. Karl Ortega was asked to step down pending investigation. The Faure Foundation promised cooperation. Abel Bray was suspended and then escorted under the neutral gray eyes of security.
He tried to hide his face, then he lifted it, and I watched the change in him: smugness, shock, then a slow collapse into pleading.
"Please," he said, to the room, to me, to the cameras. "Please, this is—"
"It's on the record," someone said. "You made your choices."
Crowds outside the hotel took to their phones. People spoke the word "rapist" like a verdict. Abel's movements were tracked and his name splashed across screens. The punishment came with whispers, with social exile, with the collapse of invitations, with the overnight drying of friends' loyalty.
He ran to the parking lot. Reporters followed. He tried to call for help and found that his alliances were gone. He began to look like a small man in a stadium of people who had only recently called him a leader.
Finally, out in the light, he stopped gasping and looked at me. His face was wet and splotchy, not with makeup but with the acid of a life unwinding.
"Please," he said again.
"This is for Jackson," I told him, and the cameras ate my words.
That night the world watched an arrogant man reduced to a small animal. People who had once courted him now scolded him. Friends stopped answering. His name was trending for all the wrong reasons.
The next morning, the headlines read: "Corporate Dark Money Exposed" and "Assault Allegation Caught on Tape" and "Vice President Under Audit." Karl Ortega's resignation statement was terse and formal. Abel Bray's lawyers arranged meetings that would later dissolve into settlements and apologies that would never be enough.
When people say "justice" sometimes they mean a courtroom. Sometimes they mean a room full of mirrors that finally show you the ugliness you hid. Both happened. Jackson's lawyers used the evidence we produced. The transfer trail, the coerced testimony, the falsified ledgers. The wrongful conviction was reviewed. The thin veil that had covered a conspiracy was ripped.
I stood on the courthouse steps when they opened his cell door. Jackson came out, gaunt but present. "Hello, sister," he said in that small voice he uses when he wants to make a joke.
"You are free," I said.
"Mostly," he said. He reached for my hand. It felt thin and warm and real.
Santiago Faure's empire trembled in public. His philanthropic gala would be a footnote long after the investigations. He called me to his office once. "You ruined me," he said, like a man who couldn't quite place where the collapse had begun.
"I didn't ruin you," I said. "You ruined them. I just told people the truth."
He stared. For a long time he didn't look like someone who had known rage and thought it would be enough.
"I'm sorry for your family," he muttered, which was the strangest apology of all—half fake, half exhausted.
"Sorry doesn't build back what you took," I said.
He spread his hands, a theater gesture. "Everything is paid for," he said. "Compensation. Public apologies. But money doesn't heal every wound."
He was right and wrong all at once.
The punishment scene had a long afterlife. People who had once refused to look me in the face stopped calling me names. They simply didn't recognize me anymore. The cameras had shown everyone's mirrors; some people had to walk away. Others learned too late that the world called them out.
But punishment didn't always mean immediate sweeping justice. For Abel, the public unraveling meant losing contracts, dinners, his presence at elite tables. For Karl, it meant no more polite nods and a resignation letter. For Santiago, it meant turning his empire into a public casualty with investigations and hearings and a slow, torturous accounting of what had been done in his name.
Through it all, I was a woman standing next to my brother as he learned to breathe air he had been denied. Jackson sat on the bench outside a coffee shop and watched traffic like a man seeing movement he could own again. He let me braid his hair—something he never let me do as a child—and then he laughed in that small way.
"You're alive to old grudges," he said once lightly.
"No," I answered. "I'm alive to the future. We have to do many things now. Like fix things." I tried to laugh and almost did.
There were other consequences. Keilani left Marcus, quietly, like a season turning leaf. She didn't put on storms. She simply left. Marcus lost partners, lost some of his public shine. He lost the easy reverence he had thought was his birthright. He also lost his arrogance.
In private, he tried to make amends more than I wanted or needed. "I'm not asking you to forgive me," he said once. "I'm asking you to stay alive."
"Then act like someone more than words," I told him. "Prove it."
He proved it by staying and by helping dealers turn over ledgers and accounts. He proved it by standing in the cold rain with evidence and being a witness that could be trusted now. He proved it by changing, which was a small miracle and a long, slow work.
Kadence's bone marrow match came through. She got what she needed and lived on like a small comet. Her laughter returned to us like a small bell. I kept the small hat she had given me—it was a yellow ribbon.
There were days when I thought I could die quietly. There were times my hands shook and my breath came in small, throttled waves. The chemotherapy hit like storms; my hair fell like autumn leaves. I shaved it off before it looked like an accusation.
But there were also tiny mercies: Dawson bringing me soup at midnight, Jackson coming every day, Kiara Crosby, who would sit for hours with ignorant cheer and make jokes about my old office, and Marcus, who slowly learned how to be a person who could hold without owning.
"Tell me about home," Jackson would say, sometimes when the evening was a dull charcoal.
"I had a black forest cake," I would tell him. "I lit twenty-four candles. I wanted to see how many wishes would fit on one breath."
"Did they all go out?" he would ask.
"Some did," I said. "Some were stubborn as me."
Spring surprised me like a friend. One morning the window rim of my hospital room held the beginning of green—a hopeful bud on a ragged branch outside. I pointed at it with a shaky finger.
"Spring came," I whispered.
Jackson smiled. "You called it in," he teased.
No, I didn't call it in. But I watched it grow. The bud became a leaf and the leaf became a small branch of green that would not stop. I kept a dried scrap of it in a notebook because the little things keep you.
"Why did you come back?" Marcus asked me one night when I sat up and looked at the city through rain.
"I came back because Jackson needed someone," I told him. "Not because of anything else."
"But why him? Why not anyone else?"
"Because he's my brother," I said. "Because family is the kind of justice you can't buy."
Marcus took my hand.
"Will you let me stay?" he asked.
"Not to own me," I said. "To stand by me."
He nodded, and it was enough.
The worst day came when Kadence's small body couldn’t wait. The room smelled like ink and white soap. Her mother held her like a map of the world. I sat near them and tried to make my voice small and steady.
"Thank you for letting me braid your hair," I told Kadence when she woke and smiled.
She laughed once, a small bright thing. "Pretty Sister," she breathed.
She died later that afternoon, with a look like she was leaving a party early. The whole ward folded into a hush like an ocean that stopped its waves.
I vomited blood that night. The world slid. I woke later in a white room and Dawson's hand in mine. His eyes were raw, like someone who'd been up too long waiting for a wrong thing to stop.
"Don't let go," he whispered.
"I don't want to go," I said, and I meant it. When I said it, it felt like a stone that sank somewhere warm.
Jackson was there when I could finally sit up without falling. He held my hand and told me about the small conspiracies that had been unraveled. He told me about the way people came forward. He told me about the documents and the whispers. He told me, "We got them."
"We got them," I repeated, and it sounded like a prayer and a promise.
Soon a plane ticket came for a treatment that I had thought too grand to reach. England was the destination. A place with a name of research and hope. Jackson stood at the window with an expression like someone who had found his way out of a labyrinth.
"You go first," he said. "Fix it."
"No," I said. "We go together."
He studied me, the brother who had punished and loved me in equal doses. "We'll do it," he said. "For her—and for us."
When I was well enough for one last walk before the transplant, Marcus held my arm and walked with me in a park dusted white with the earliest snow. "I stood in the cold the night you left once," he said. "I begged you to stay."
"You begged me on my knees," I said, and he blushed like a man caught in private.
"I kneel for lots of reasons now," he said. "Not for power."
"Not all kneeling is honesty," I said.
"No." He laughed. "Then I will stand. I will work."
I went under the operation like someone handing over a treasure to be cared for. I woke with Jackson's hand clenched around mine and Marcus's thumb rubbing circles on my wrist.
"Spring came," I whispered, thinking of the first bud.
"Spring came," Jackson repeated softly.
The recovery was long. The hair came back in shy strands. The scars turned into lines that read like a map. People came and went, some because they had to, some because they wanted to. The world kept the mark of what had been done in order to survive.
One evening in late spring, when I could walk without gasping, I sat on the steps outside the hospital. Marcus found me and sat down, not right next to me but close enough.
"I'm not a saint," he said.
"I'm not asking for saints," I said.
"Will you keep the house?" he asked.
"I will. I will try."
"And Jackson?"
"He'll be okay," I said. "He will have to find himself again, like I've had to."
Marcus made a face like someone chewing a bitter fruit. "Do you ever regret—any of this?"
"Regret doesn't do much good," I said. "It only teaches. What I feel is tired and grateful."
He nodded. He looked at me like I was someone he didn't understand yet wanted to know.
"Do you think you'll be able to forgive me?" he asked.
"I think forgiveness is a small field for a long winter," I said. "It has to be earned, slowly, like spring that comes back after a freeze."
He smiled. "I'll earn it then."
The buds outside the hospital grew into leaves. One morning I pressed my palm against the small tree's bark and felt the pulse of new growth. "Don't die," I whispered to the plant because sometimes we tell plants how to be and they listen.
When summer came, the world smelled like heat and sweet leaves. I walked with Jackson and Dawson and Marcus and Kiara and Kadence's mother had come back to give me a small knitted hat she had made. We stood in the small yard behind the building, a circle of people who had once been separate, now wound together like rope.
"To spring," I said, and we all raised our cups.
The spring was mine in a way I hadn't thought possible. It was clumsy and slow and full of small wounds that never fully closed. But the leaf was green and stubborn, and we kept watering it.
The End
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