I don’t know if I arranged my next meeting with Rosie or not. I didn’t actively try to find her, but I didn’t try to avoid her, either. I knew where she lived, and where she worked, and where she shopped; I knew all her friends and her relatives. These things and more were the cold remnants of a life that wasn’t mine, but that didn’t make them any less prominent in my memory. I could have gone to her gym, but I didn’t; I could have followed her on her runs through the park, but I didn’t. I’m not a stalker. But we shopped at the same grocery store, and I didn’t change this habit, and sooner or later, perhaps inevitably, we met again.
She spoke to me this time, in the pallid light of the bright fluorescent bulbs. “Hi.”
I looked up, not surprised or resigned or scared or sad but somehow all of them at once. I tried to hide it. “Hi.”
“Are you all right?” she asked. She was always so concerned about people. “I saw you in here last month.”
“I remember.”
“You looked . . .” She paused. “I don’t know, like maybe you needed help. Is there . . . anything wrong?”
Everything and nothing, I thought. I smiled, but only faintly, for I knew that everything I was doing was wrong. “That’s very kind of you,” I said. “I’m fine, though.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to pry, and I know it’s none of my business, but . . .” She hesitated. “Well, I just lost someone very dear to me, and when I saw your face, I thought . . . well, I guess I thought I recognized something.”
I clenched my teeth, biting down on the joy that threatened to burst up through my chest—that she knew me, that she remembered me—but I knew that couldn’t be true, and I waited for the next words that tumbled out in a helpless rush.
“I thought I recognized a little of myself,” she said, “of my grief, I guess you could say, and I thought maybe here was somebody else going through the same kind of pain I was going through, and maybe he had someone to share it with and maybe he didn’t, and I’m certainly not a poster child for quality grief management, but at least I have someone to talk to, I have my sisters and my parents and my in-laws, and maybe I’m completely off base with this and I’m seeing things that aren’t there, and you’re probably wondering who this psycho is that’s trying to dump all this angst on you right here in the produce section, and I’m sorry to even bother you—”
“I lost someone too,” I said softly. Not just Rosie, but a hundred thousand more. “I’m okay, though,” I said. “I’m not . . . whatever.”
“Are you sure?” asked Rosie. She could never stop herself from helping any sick neighbor or broken-winged bird that crossed our path, and I felt a sharp pang of guilt that I had somehow arranged this, that I had known her foibles and attracted her on purpose, even subconsciously.
I nodded. “I’m fine.”
She looked at me a moment, and I wondered if I had made it through another encounter without ruining my greatest love’s life, and if that meant she was going to leave me now, again, and I cursed myself for wondering which would be worse. Better to ruin my own life a thousand times than to hurt her any more than my death already had. But I didn’t move, and I didn’t speak, and then she did: “Who did you lose?”
“My wife.”
“I’m so sorry.” She put a hand on my arm, and I felt myself die all over again. I held myself still, as long as I could, but it was too much, and I pulled away. She looked at me with renewed pain in her eyes. “Do you have other family? Someone to talk to?”
“I get by,” I told her, but it wasn’t a real answer, and she knew it. She thought for a moment, pursing her lips in that way she does, so familiar I could wrap myself in the gesture like a warm, soft coat.
“I’m in a counseling group,” she said. “Like a group therapy thing, but not as hippy-dippy as that probably sounds.” She dug in her purse for a card while she spoke but found nothing and finally wrote the address on a scrap of an old receipt. “If you need to talk to someone, about anything, we’d love to have you. Everyone there is so nice, and I think it might—well, I know it’s helped me. It’s still helping me.” She held out the paper. “Please come.”
I had rules to follow. Traditions that had kept me safe, along with all the people I loved. The lives you take are not yours to live. The people you miss aren’t yours to miss. Don’t talk to them, don’t tell them the truth, don’t tell them anything. Remember them because you have to, but no more. Don’t follow them, don’t hurt them, don’t drag them into the hell of your own impossible life. But there was a killer in town, now—a Gifted, a Cursed, a Withered. I wanted to protect the woman I remembered as my wife.
I had followed these rules for thousands of years, but I would break them all for Rosie.
I took the address. “Thanks. I might.”