Ch47

Well. What a complete, fucking disaster, she grieved

The change of scenery was supposed to give him peace and rest. Instead, it’d nearly killed the both of them.

They didn’t talk for the entire morning and instead drank their coffees and watched the horizon grow golden with autumnal tones. The rocks around them warmed and made them both exhausted and heavy-lidded. Neither of them had rested adequately in days, it seemed.

They adventured about the immediate terrain, walking strange paths, peeking after scuffling tiny noises in the brush, and even drawing on the large boulders with bits of wood singed from the fire pit. She’d sketched some charcoal crows, and Dex sketched a profile portrait of her whilst she did so. Throughout the entire afternoon and early evening, they were silent. Occasionally, he’d share with her the ghost of a grin, but still said nothing. They needed the quiet, its safety. Its time to think of everything or nothing.

In solace, Norah walked the trails with her collapsible binoculars, scouting blue nuthatch birds skittering up the bark of trees like insects with their quick and fevered movements. Her feet carried her half a mile off course further than expected, and by the time she returned to Dexteras beneath the massive stone archway, he was clutching another cup of coffee against his mustache. Likely his fourth or fifth of the day.

They kindled the fire back to life and she warmed a can of chicken and rice soup beside it patiently. Still, they did not speak and only exchanged small, fragile smiles and deep sighs. She ate her soup beside him at the fire, watching papery moths chase the flame’s rays that bounced off surrounding stones. She drank one, two, three beers. Dexteras denied her every offer for his own.

Drastic, ghostly shadows stretched behind their crouched forms before the fire as they watched the sky bleed into cotton candy hues.

The entire time, some part of Norah touched Dexteras. Whether it was her knee against his, or their elbows brushing. Or, as the sun fell low and the world turned cool, her tired head against his shoulder.

I can’t lose him. Please, don’t let me lose him, too.

Her gut flipped and flopped within her. She’d nearly been entirely alone all over again. There were no proper words to describe the cramp of anticipatory grief that had bent her in half. And selfishly enough, it wasn’t just the agony of never having coffee with him or waking to him on her roof again. It was the deep ache to have a semblance of family after difficult days. After amazing days.

A deep, ancient fear flickered in the dark cove of her chest. A fear that reminded her, in the end, everyone would leave her. They always did.

Her chest swelled and stitched tight, remembering their ache. Recalling just how much of her insides that anxiety had rotted away of her.

She couldn’t beg him to stay for her sake. She couldn’t ask him not to chase the answers he craved. She could only rest her head on his wide shoulder and let her drunken, sloshing, thoughts numb her into a restless, twitching sleep.

a+2

“Jay Bird. Just wanted to say I’m sorry for everything that’s

happened. I love you and I always will. Thank you, honey. Bye.”

a+2

Norah jolted awake, limbs tight and trembling. Her face and chest were impossibly hot as though she’d abused a bottle of cheap wine all on her lonesome. She wiped her eyes and found tears there, cold by the breeze, some old and dried, others fresh and pouring. A fevered, hot anxiety simmered beneath her skin that reminded her of being eight years old again.

“Thank you, honey. Bye,” echoed the warbled voice in her skull, distorted, old, and antiqued as though it’d croaked from a radio dredged from a shipwreck, garbled with seawater and deteriorating hardware. It made her shiver and feel suddenly very alone.

Dex.

She needn’t look far for him. Dex was still beside her, watching her with wide, watering blue eyes. His hand was in hers, clutched so tightly, his bruised knuckles were white. Their palms were sticky and taut from the hours of holding one other.

Disheveled hairs had fallen into his face, framing his parted, bruised lips. He, too, looked as though he’d been awakened from a horrid nightmare. But he now beheld Nor with pity. The pity she was certain she wore once, after reading his file. A pity she’d never seen him wear around her. His fingers squeezed hers gently in affirmation.

“Bye,” teased the warped voice again in her skull. It turned her blood cold.

And with the sobering clarity of a pumped shotgun at her spine, Norah tore her peeling hands from Dex’s and backpedaled onto her feet. She stared down at him as though she’d never seen him.

His outstretched hand remained open, reaching for her. It was the palm that was scarred and tattooed. The understanding of what had happened drowned her in nausea.

Their matching scars had been touching whilst she slept.

What had he seen and heard amidst her unconscious, untethered thoughts? Her nightmares and dreams?

Her backward steps were trained and unfeeling like those of a schoolchild in a fire drill. Her head ached with the pressure of the deep ocean, all the while, a high-pitched ringing squealing in her ears like an unnatural violin note. She winced.

“Love,” Dex mouthed softly, a sweet, careful note that begged her to come back to him.

But her face was ablaze and trembling with dismissive shakes. No. No.

Oh God, what had he seen?

“Nor…” he whispered so gently, it barely rose above the crackles of the fire. Still, his fingers reached for her.

She could hear very little above the shrill ringing that reverberated in her skull. Its screeching, blinding pulse pressed at the back of her eye. The therapist heard her own voice mutter worlds away, as though buried underground.

“I-I-I can’t...”

His eyes blanketed her in a tragic hum that seeped from him and the surrounding stone with such viscosity, it threatened to suffocate her. Her heart thundered in her chest like an oncoming train. He made the smallest motion to stand, his bones popping loudly.

Dex’s eyes searched her with eyes that had sought her for millennia, and she was certain they’d never truly seen her until this very moment. Not fully. Not quite this broken and pathetic. His great tattooed hands rose and reached for her as though she were a feral animal about to take off running on a broken leg.

A brief, nauseating compulsion to embrace him lit her blood. She wished to be squeezed by him until her ribs shattered and her lungs flapped with sharp gasps.

He knows. He knows. He knows.

But she knew not even the large man’s immortal strength could hold her pieces together. She’d only slip through his fingers like crushed crystal, and the pain of weighing him with her grief would only make hers seven-fold.

She shook before him, uncertain how her entire world had just come to an end in mere seconds.

You can’t fix this. You can’t fix this. You can’t fix this, her eyes warned him.

He steadied on a crackling knee and dared again to reach towards her, eyes softening and understanding as if to say, I know. I know, amica mea.

But she was still shaking her head, answering his endless, unspoken questions.

Those blue eyes narrowed, begging her not to do what she did next. Hoping she’d deny the deep animalistic want of her brain’s amygdala that shook her limbs.

But still, she ran.

She spun and sprinted, flinging cloudy plumes of the campsite’s soft earth in her wake. She climbed and leaped atop the towering, defensive boulders. She skittered into the tree line of snatching, scraping branches and crackling limbs and leaves, skittering against the dewy earth.

She felt she was conquering miles in her breathless bounds, wheezing, gasping, and tightly wound as if she were stuffed with springs. Shrubbery and plant life were crushed in each merciless stride. Not a single thought could catch up to her skull in her chase. Albeit the occasional:

“Bye.”

She slipped and skidded on her heels and rear down endless, dark embankments, pushing off of scratching bark and the sappy arms of pines. She dug through dense greenery and dark honey locust bushes teething with thorns, trudging until she was swallowed by invasive plant life in all directions. Reaching, leggy vines and needled burs clutched at her clothes.

She stopped suddenly, radiant hills of golden leaves and pine needles arching before her. She gasped, feeling that pressure in her gut, her chest, and her throat catch up. It left her clutching her splitting throat as though she were about to erupt with sobs, prayers, and screams.

That’s when the flashbacks began. Vivid memories skipped across her vision with the jarring scratch of a vinyl record. With each, the hairs on her arms raised and her breach dropped to her gut like a stone.

She saw her mother. Smiling. Golden, curly permed hair, wearing a thick, stitched sweater. They laughed at something on TV.

She and her mother sang loud songs in the car with warbling notes. They were lying in Robin’s king-sized bed, reading novels, exchanging scoffs and quotes with time.

She hadn’t thought of these scenes in ages. They’d been buried and unheard. Armored with a bulletproof fence and razor wire.

Nor took off sprinting once more.

Amongst the aimless stumbling, a cord of cockled brambles wound at Nor’s knee, shredding her leggings to threads. She caught herself on the corrugated bark of a nearby Hawthorn tree before tumbling to the woodland floor, palms flayed and bright with dirty blood.

She thought of Dex in the supply closet, fists clenched and shaking. She remembered the impossible divot he’d left in the dense wall.

A hot surge of energy made her snatch the briars from her bleeding leg, tearing the fibers from her pants. The stings of nettles primed her hunger to feel more.

She squared up to the old tree and pulled back a fist. With an ugly, breaking scream, she struck the bark, making contact with the wrong fingers first.

“Pointer and middle,” Dex had once instructed beside the heavy bag in his basement. “Not ring and pinky. Those will break and give you Boxer’s Fractures.”

But she didn’t care. She struck it again, begging to break. Her flesh made a pathetic thudding sound like that of a bug to a windshield.

“Fuck!” she cried, bones burning with agonizing regret.

How infuriating that her strength couldn’t match her rage.

Never enough.

It’ll never be enough.

Her bony fists continued bludgeoning the bark, filling her scraped knuckles with splinters. The meek sound of flesh on lumber made her hotter, more ravenous, more dissatisfied.

She struck harder and harder and harder until each digit was skinned and crimson, leaving the chapped flesh gnarled and shaking, dripping. She wanted to tear the bastard down from its roots, but its great wood never even groaned with effort. It never acknowledged her anger and remained apathetically.

She gasped for breath. More memories ambushed her.

Her mother’s hand was fragile and thin, bumpy with bony mountains and blown blue veins. That was before she was admitted to inpatient care.

Months after Leonard’s funeral, left alone in the dark, smoke-stained home, Norah was newly eight. She’d poured herself a plastic cup of whiskey as she’d watched her mother do countless times. She sipped and winced at the charred heat in her throat while Robin wailed from her own bedroom. The bottle in Norah’s hand had a silver horse on the logo, well-fitted to the hoof-like blows that assaulted her gut with each drink.

Don’t feel, don’t feel, don’t feel, it begged, tightening for hours, days, years. It won’t do you any good. It’ll only leave you hurting and worthless.

The widowed wife and the fatherless daughter grieved in their isolation and unspoken expectations, feeling as though the other should be their comforter and save them. They’d never been mother and daughter, but once another time, they’d briefly been akin to codependent sisters.

Norah struck the tree again with a messy, uncaring form. Her knuckle bones stung as she pulled away and fell against the Hawthorn’s flesh, allowing it to scratch her brow and cheeks and snag at her hair. Despite the abuse, no tears came. Nothing came. Instead, a maddening burn lingered in her chest and rose to her throat.

She heaved against it, regathering her breath, certain the fire in her heart could burn the forest to the ground if she gave it an inch. She gasped and whimpered, teeth grinding, limbs shaking beneath her in the cold.

She needed to feel like a weapon. She needed to feel dangerous, to know what it felt like to fold the world around her. She needed to feel powerful, like Dex. But she was too small to be feared or respected. She was helpless to this feeling and it didn’t care what she needed.

And then, a soft, wafting wind graced her cheek, piercing the deep, cold forest with an uncanny warmth.

She was on her feet like a spry bird and spun. Droplets of blood slipped from her fingers and pattered on dead leaves.

Dex stood several yards away, still like a crane, hands tucked into his pockets, silent and watchful. Clouds of thick hair swept his bruised and scarred features as though he’d run after her. His crimson and blue eye shone in the falling dark.

“How in the fucking hell did you get down here?” she managed between breaths, embarrassment swelling into tides of hot anger.

He eyed her bleeding knuckles. It was now the old man’s turn to take in his wounded fighter, eyes reading each inch of her like a medic. After a moment of silence, he snapped his fingers to reveal a rolled wad of clean white wraps in his grip.

“May I?”

“No,” she snapped, shaking her head. The pain was the only thing that came close to explaining, to validating the unnamable, inescapable thing in her chest. Emotion was moons away, but the pulsing drip of her blood and the searing pain in her fists was more intimate than anything else she had right now. She couldn’t risk veiling its sharp clarity.

With a flick of his wrist, the wraps vanished into a whiff of white smoke.

“No one can hear you, amica mea,” he muttered, eyes drinking her in with care.

“What?” she stated, daring him to comfort her. To respond. To fix her. To just fucking try his magical healing on her pain.

“No one can hear you up here. You could scream if you wanted.”

She scoffed, limbs trembling and armor falling. Somehow, he could hear the stifled bellow swallowed deep in her intestines. Somehow, he knew exactly what she needed.

His eye flickered to her bleeding hand again, the one burdened with old and new wounds. It likely screamed in his ears when she wouldn’t.

“What I want is a reason for this,” she gestured to herself in disgust. “This hate,” she exclaimed. “I hate them. I want to make them hurt like they hurt me.” Her face contorted with unbearable guilt. “But they didn’t leave any marks,” she gazed upon herself, wishing her father had struck her, that her mother had shoved her or slapped her.

You have no right to feel so self-righteous. So cheated.

“But they didn’t touch me,” she whispered, voice climbing. “So why am I so fucking angry?”

Dexteras dared not respond and only pierced her with his wise, narrow gaze.

“What did you see?” she snapped, angry at his passive quiet. Enraged that he looked so put together while she fell to pieces. “In my head?”

“Nor-”

“What did you see, Dexteras?” she cried.

He shook his head. “I didn’t see anything. I just heard a voice,” he promised. She could hear him begging, his words eager to reach her. His eyes searching for her own.

Norah only huffed and snatched the phone from her jacket pocket and found the eldest voicemail in her phone’s mailbox. She tapped its speaker and played it aloud for the entire forest to hear. The trees were nearly black with shadow and the sky was vibrant with the jeweled colors of sunset.

Then, the static of old audio clicked to life:

“Jay Bird. Just wanted to say I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. I love you and I always will. Thank you, honey. Bye.”

Honey. Never before had Robin Kestrel called her that. I love you and I always will. Norah couldn’t recall such an immense proclamation of her mother’s love shared prior. At least, not with the casual ease of the voicemail. It wasn’t used against her, with implications of guilt, or as a sentence, a manacle, a bribe.

Dexteras’ eyes never left Nor’s as he listened. When the old voicemail clicked and finished, he nodded but said nothing.

Norah gave a manic chuckle and threw the phone somewhere into the leaves beside her.

“That,” she muttered, pointing after it, “was the last thing Mom ever said to me.” A violent hiccup seized her throat. She shrugged and chuckled again like a mad woman. “She died,” Nor snarled, “right after that.”

Dex’s eyelids fell with a slow, reverent comprehension. Norah watched the truth weigh him from head to toe. Robin Kestrel had been dead the entire time he’d known her.

Of course.

“Where were you, love?” he whispered. “When you received that?”

She chewed on her inner cheeks and lips and shook her head. The fusion of a smile and a sob twisted her mouth.

“Session,” was all she could say. “The day I met you,” she breathed. “On the roof. That was right after I got her voicemail.”

“Oh love,” Dex’s shoulders sagged. “I-”

“The day before, they told me she’d taken a turn. Her cancer had been spreading, I should’ve known. But I…I thought I had more time...” her voice faded into the whispers of the forest. She clutched herself, cold and alone.

“It’s not your fault that you weren’t there, love.”

“I was a floor below her!” Norah cried, hands smacking her sides. “And even after the fact, they offered to keep her body for me to see.” She shook her head, eyes wild and watering. “But I never went to see her, even then.”

“It’s not your fault that you weren’t ready, love. You don’t have-”

“I’m the fucking coward!” Norah yelled, irritated by his compulsion to fix her. “So why am I the one who’s so angry at her? At him?” her voice broke into shards. “And I let him die too, did you know that?” she added.

“The night of the fire. He was trapped in that room, and he couldn’t get to the door because of...” she began, shaking her head. “I could’ve opened it, but I didn’t,” she said, voicing her heavy guilt for the first time in decades. “I didn’t or I couldn’t, but I was too weak. So he died,” Norah scoffed, covering her mouth before more horrid truths could tumble out.

Dex was shaking his head with vigor, eager to speak, to stop her, to correct her.

“But I’m fine!” she exclaimed, arms spread in disbelief. “I’m the one that did wrong by them. And neither of them laid a hand on me. And yet, I feel like…” she screamed in the drum of her throat, clutching her short hair and squeezing, certain it would tear from their roots. “They didn’t touch me! They didn’t do anything!”

It was as if she prayed a repressed memory would rise to the surface and burst with trauma so devastating, it’d fill and validate the endless pit she’d dug for herself. It would give her a reason to hate them both.

You wanted for nothing. You were a spoiled, entitled brat. An only child with nothing better to complain about.

Dexteras took one confident step towards her, eyes trained on hers.

“But they should’ve done something, amica mea. You were their child. They should’ve touched you. They should’ve held you tighter than anything they’d ever held to,” he stated, hands reaching at his sides as though yearning to hold her in their stead.

Nor shook her head as though it were swarming with wasps.

“Yes,” he retorted. “Yes. Yes, you deserved to be held,” he said simply. “Despite the consequences of their actions, despite how they lived, or how they died, you were still hurt, Nor. They hurt you in a way that doesn’t leave marks. But you have every right to be full of rage. To want their love. To want them to feel what they did to you. To understand.”

He took another slow step as though approaching an orphaned fawn. It was an accurate deduction.

“But they didn’t know,” she blubbered. “They didn’t know how angry I was. I didn’t know how angry I was,” she scoffed, gesturing again to her shaking limbs.

“But children are supposed to care about what their parents think of them, Nor. To want them. You were not the dysfunctional, broken ones in that equation.” Dex bent low onto his knees, leaves crunching undertow, tendons crackling. “You don’t need permission to feel what you need to feel,” he said, looking up at her. “It’s going to be there whether you hold space for it or not. You need to let yourself feel it. It’s safe to, out here. No one can hear.” He offered this gift with the casual notion of sharing a stick of gum.

Norah swallowed the coerced scream back down her throat, scolding it for its eagerness. She thought of her mother’s last breath creeping from her atrophied throat, disappearing into the ceiling tiles as Marchos had. No one was there to hold either of them in their final, miserable breaths.

Every muscle and tendon in her limbs trembled, begging to quit. She tipped her chin to Dexteras with a final effort.

“Do we really owe all of ourselves to the people who gave us life?” she begged, voice breaking. “Even when it really fucking hurts?”

He found her eyes and held them in his, gentleness folding his soft features. “No. No, love. You do not owe anybody everything. And the right people would never ask everything of you.”

She shook with tempted tears.

“But you owe yourself your anger. It deserves a place to go. Tear the whole forest down, love,” he nodded to the darkness around them.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“Why aren’t you allowed to be not okay?” he challenged, voice strong and paternal.

Her jaw locked tightly enough to fracture forged steel.

“There’s no one to make better. To heal. No one to be strong for. Take your mask off, Norah Kestrel. Feel everything you need to feel. You can scream as loud as you want out here.”

It was as if she were fearful she’d morph into a ravenous werewolf and consume the world with her insatiable appetite if she let it go. A howl felt tempting, like the guiltiest, most indulgent pleasure she could imagine, an unthinkable luxury.

Her eyes snapped to him, searching and hungry. He’d known the devastation she’d known. The homelessness. The lovelessness. He’d been tortured by the people he’d served. He sought his only remaining family for decades, only for them to lock him in cages for death matches.

“What about you? Aren’t you mad?” she challenged, eyes filling with hot salt.

His jaw drooped slack with want. His eyes widened and his fingers clenched. He swallowed and licked his whiskered lips. His chest swelled with the cold.

And then, he screamed.

His scream tore apart seas and skies with thunderous rumbles until tears squeezed from his crow’s feet and his limbs bent with all their worth. He screamed birds from the forest and into the hazy skies until his chest shook and his fingers clenched and stretched and clenched shut again with waves of effort. It was a raw and chilling roar that was beautiful in its ugliness. Its honesty.

He screamed until he was on his knees, electricity crackling from his fingertips and zapping the dead leaves around him. They burned and circled him in smoke as though he were a dying star that’d touched earth. He slumped to the forest floor, gasping and weeping for oxygen. But his eyes were wide with life and fire.

Nor craved his pain, his fury, its violence. Thus as Dex was engulfed in his crumbling, she claimed her own.

She spun in the leaves to face the dead valley of forest below and followed suit, screaming with a piercing, blinding cry that could shatter glass and cochleae alike. She was certain the folds of her trachea would vibrate themselves bloody and that her tears were hot enough to blind her. Her lungs spat their flames until they were dry like bone, gasping for mercy. Her fingernails clutched at tree bark until she, too, fell to the cold ground, sacrificing even her leg muscles to pay tithe towards the overdue wail. Tidal waves broke from her until she fell limp.

When the forest fell silent, their eyes found one another, gasping and gaping.

Dexteras smiled at her, mouth ajar and eyes sparkling.

His calm infuriated her, but it also made her feel free, free enough to lose her sanity beside him and let out whatever had been caged behind her bones since she was a child. Her face contorted, sensing another inward gush of madness.

“They left me, and I didn’t get to feel any of it,” she wept, winded and wheezing. “They got all of me, and I got none of them. But I had to be one that was okay,” she muttered. “I don’t know how they didn’t see…” she lamented, eyes glassy on the forest floor.

“What didn’t they see?” asked Dex.

“That I was so…tired. Because what I was expected to hold for them and hold for myself wasn’t-isn’t staying down, and it hurts so bad.” She squeaked, scraping at her chest and clutching her throat.

Dex’s fingers flexed with want again, but he waited.

“I always held them. They were allowed to cry and be pissed and hate each other and grieve, and I had to hold all of it,” she forced, breathless. “I wasn’t supposed to…I couldn’t, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I’m so tired. I’m so fucking tired, Dex…” she begged, eyes shifting to him, blurred with boiling oceans. She attempted to stand and slosh through the leaves toward him, but everything weighed so much more than she’d remembered. Her insides were leaden and immense beyond her strength, and she sank like an anchor to the forest floor.

Dex met her in an impossibly quick stride and swooped her into his arms. They collapsed onto the cold ground as Nor wept with injustice.

Dex’s massive arms wrapped around her and held her firm, even as she shook.

And she was right. He couldn’t keep her pieces from pulling apart. But he loved her in a way that celebrated her exactly how she was, nothing more. Somehow, it felt as though he loved her in all of her shattered bits. Especially her shattered bits.

“You were hurt. You were hurt. You were hurt,” he whispered into her hair, rocking the adult child in his arms. “You deserve to be angry. You deserve to tear the earth and skies into pieces.”

She sobbed, unable to recognize her own voice. “I’m alone, I’m all alone. It hurts, it hurts,” she moaned, clutching at her chest. A hot, clawing scraping raked beneath her breastbone. To let it go on would be to let it kill her. It was cranking her throat shut like a window on an old car, squeaking with effort. If it won, she’d rupture, she’d be sick. To succumb didn’t seem possible.

You’re an orphan. An orphan.

“But you still deserve love, Norah. You deserve love. To be held and seen and touched and loved.”

Her fingers raked at his thick arms, clawing at his shirt and squeezing its fabric.

“Let it hurt, let it hurt love. Please stop fighting it, stop fighting.”

Then, through the brush of his beard, beyond them both, she saw a dark form through the trees, puddled on the forest floor. She made minimal effort to see the sorry sight, knowing full well who it was.

A seven-year-old girl was cast to the dirt in a black dress. Her collar was soaked with tears and snot as she bawled with open-mouthed, ugly sobs. Juvenile, hyperventilating gasps tore from her without relent.

To be fair, the child had never wept for anyone before that day. Not even for Leonard. She hadn’t been allowed to. Thus, a lifetime bucketed down her crimson cheeks. Her salt finally seeped into the earth that had buried countless Kestrels.

Adult Norah remembered that the child in the dirt wasn’t pitiful. She wasn’t submissive or weak. She wasn’t to be coddled and ignored. The girl was a quiet beast that could tear down the oaks with her bare fists if given the time. Her screams could flatten mountains.

And she was allowed to if needed.

She was allowed.

a+2

Helplessness washed upon waves of guilt. Guilt crashed and sputtered against anger. Anger bubbled along the shore and sunk into the sands of grief. And it was there she was thrown onto its beach like a dead fish.

Dex’s strong body still sat upon the cold ground, encompassing all of her as though she were a gift to cling to. He didn’t speak or expect her to. They simply remained.

Nor’s stretched her headspace to feel the gaping holes in her future where her parents would never tread. Where their arms would never hold her or escort her down the aisle. Where their hands would never wipe her tears or hold her children. Where no loving word would empower her. Where instead, there were Leonard and Robin-sized craters torn from her timeline, leaving black, irredeemable voids. The future was corrupt with the eternal coldness of corpses. Their absence was more immense than the galaxy, and she’d never allowed herself to notice it until this very moment.

Dexteras brushed bits of crushed leaves and twigs and earth from her dress clothes and hair.

Norah Kestrel had always been alone, and now that would never change.

a+2

I thought I had more time.

a+2

What felt like hours later, Dex plucked a cigar from her limp hand and snapped his fingers, rekindling the bright cherry in a crackling pop of lightning. He took a pull until intricate, twirling smoke twisted from his whiskered lips to form a gray Blue Jay. It flapped to Norah with ghostly wings in slow, sweeping motions before it was distorted by the wind.

She’d smoked through two and a half large cigars until her tongue was numb and peppery and her stomach was nauseous with nicotine.

“I needed her,” muttered Nor. “And when she couldn’t be there for me, I tried to fix her. To make her happy. And even though I never could, she let me keep trying.”

“That should’ve never been your responsibility,” Dex bellowed with a stern brow, propping his spine against the tree trunk that’d been bearing them.

“I-I wanted to tell her how I felt. Why I hated being around her. All the things she owed me. I’d planned to tell her one day, but now…shit. Oh, God.” Norah wiped at fresh tears with irritation. Her face was taut and stiff with dried salt. She bent over her knees, attempting to regain her breath.

“I couldn’t even talk to her...I…”

Dex wrapped a large, warm arm around her like an unfolded wing.

“Love, even if she was here, if he was here, they’d never be able to pay the debt owed to you. Your childhood was too valuable. Too precious.”

She pulled at her neckline, heart racing in her throat. Her weeping eyes were sore, but they still found the old man’s.

“How am I supposed to heal then?” she croaked.

His blue and crimson eyes paced between hers. His lips parted, but he rolled the words on his tongue like a marble, uncertain if he should give them to her.

“When it comes to unpayable debts, we can either invest our energy in awaiting repayment, or we can forgive and grieve what’s lost,” he whispered.

Norah’s face crumpled with a multitude of emotions. Fury buckled her brow, followed by exhaustion. She’d given an honest question, and he replied with an honest answer. She whimpered like a tired child who’d been encouraged to keep walking after a long journey. She just wanted to sleep in the woods and be left alone.

“There’s so much I needed to say,” she whispered.

His eyes grew distant and starry as though he were excavating the skies for answers.

“I don’t think,” he began, “it’s ever too late to say what needs to be said, love.” He graced her cheek with a thumb, its warmth easing the muscles of her jaw.