Kiersten's Arc

Chapter 2 of 33

Kiersten walked home from Eduardo's porch with the closed door still ringing in her ears. The thread between them had loosened, but something had come through the gap before it sealed. A cold weight trailed her down the road, snagged to the back of her heel like a torn hem. Grief that was not hers. Eduardo's grief, or a piece of it, small enough to slip under the door and stubborn enough to hold on. By the time she reached her own gate, the weight had crawled up her calf. She could feel it as a low static across her tattoos. The spirit behind her eyes was trying to speak. She could sense the shape of the words forming, but the grief kept humming over them, drowning the sound the way a running faucet drowns a whisper. She went inside and sat on the floor. She pressed her palm flat to the tattoo above her heart and named what she felt. Not mine. His. She had spent years mistaking his sorrow for her own duty. The clean pain of that memory steadied her. A knock hit the door. Three quick raps. She knew before she stood. She opened it a hand's width. Eduardo stood on her porch in the same blue shirt, cap pushed back, eyes wet at the edges. He tried a small smile. "I left a shirt here," he said. "Last winter. The gray one. I just came for that." "You didn't leave a shirt." "Baby, let me look. Two minutes." He shifted his boot forward against the threshold. "I'll be out before you know it." "You can talk to me on the porch," Kiersten said. She stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind her. "You are not coming in." His face flickered. Surprise, then a softer arrangement of it. He opened his arms. "At least let me hug you. I'm sorry, Kiersten. For all of it. I mean it this time." She felt the grief on her shadow lean toward him, hungry to be taken back. She did not move into his arms. She looked at the space where he wanted her to stand and saw it clearly. The hug was a door. The apology was a key. He was reaching for access, nothing else. "No," she said. "Kiersten." "You can go." He stared at her. The wet edges of his eyes dried into something harder. He turned and walked down her steps without another word. His grief tore off her shadow as he left and followed him back down the path, called home by the body that owned it. She stayed on the porch until his truck was gone. The static under her skin quieted. Behind her eyes, the spirit spoke one clear syllable, close enough that she felt it in her teeth. She did not catch the word. She caught that she had finally heard it.