Elena Gilbert's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

That night, Elena couldn't stay in the house. The graveyard had given her one page of truth, but home gave her nothing but silence. She stood in the kitchen and stared at her mother's empty chair. The porch light still worked. The coffee maker still hummed at six each morning, though no one drank the coffee. Every room held a shape of her parents. She couldn't sort her grief here. She couldn't even breathe. She grabbed her journal, the bundle of purple flowers, and drove back to the cemetery. Dawn hadn't come yet. She sat on the cracked stone path with a flashlight and opened to a clean page. Out here, at least, the silence belonged to her. Nobody watched her from a doorway. Only the crooked headstones and the marble angels kept her company. Then wings snapped above her. A black crow dropped onto her mother's headstone and folded its feathers. It didn't fly off when the light hit it. It tilted its head and studied her with one pale eye, calm and steady, like it had come on purpose. Elena froze. Birds didn't sit still like that. "You picked a strange spot to grieve." Stefan's voice came from the iron gate. He walked toward her, careful, his hands loose at his sides. He glanced at the crow, and his jaw tightened. He knew this bird. She could see it in the way he stopped moving. "I can't be in that house," Elena said. Her words rushed out. "Everywhere I look, they're there. Her chair. Her flowers. I keep waiting for her to walk in. I needed somewhere that's just mine." She pressed the vervain to her chest. "This is the only place I can think." Stefan crouched beside her. He didn't touch her. "Then you shouldn't do it alone in the dark," he said. "Not here. Not now." His eyes moved back to the crow. It hadn't blinked. "There's an old crypt through those trees. Dry, quiet. My family kept it. You could keep your journal there, out of the rain. Somewhere that's yours." Elena studied him. She'd pushed him away once and regretted it. "Why do you want to help me so much?" "Because you shouldn't carry this alone," he said. "And because I don't like that this place has stopped feeling safe." She followed him past the marble angels to a stone door under the trees. He pushed it open. Inside was dry and still, a shelf worn smooth, dust on the floor. It was quiet in a way the house never was. Elena set her journal on the shelf. She placed the flowers beside it. For the first time in four months, she'd made a space that was only hers. Behind them, the crow lifted off the headstone and vanished into the dark. Stefan watched it go, and he didn't tell her whose eyes had just been watching her.