Page 37 of Crown of Thorns (The Initiation #3)

NOAH

T he coffee in my hands is lukewarm, but I grip it anyway. It’s something solid, something to keep me grounded. Melody sits beside me on the stone bench, a quiet presence in the drizzle.

“I’m glad you called this morning. I didn’t know if you'd want to visit them,” she says softly. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want company.”

The graveyard stretches out around us, slick with drizzle, heavy with cloud.

It's the kind of spring day that feels more like November, raw, grey, and bone-deep miserable.

Wet gravel clings to our shoes. Cold wind sneaks under my coat collar.

Melody wraps her arms tighter around herself, her curls damp with mist, and sips from the takeout cup in her hands.

“Thanks for the girlfriend, by the way,” she adds with a crooked smile. “Charlotte’s a lot.”

“You’re welcome. She’ll keep you from setting your whole studio on fire.”

“I’m serious, Noah. I thought I’d sworn off love.”

“You hadn’t. You’d just forgotten what it looked like.”

Her hand bumps against mine on the bench. For a second, neither of us speaks.

“What was it like living on the streets?” Her voice sounds softer than usual, more vulnerable than usual. And I know she’s holding on for dear life, just like me.

“It was cold,” I say, my voice rougher than intended.

“Not just the weather. Everything. People. Pavements. Even the sky felt colder. Once, someone poured beer on me while I was half-asleep. Just laughed and walked away. It was tough. I didn’t think it would be.

I thought Mom would come looking for me. ”

“Noah…”

“No, please. Just, don’t. A lot of years have passed since Melo. I got out, enrolled in university, found a place to stay. I’m no longer that broken boy.”

“I know that. I just…it’s hard, sometimes. To know that you were there and we were here. That I was here. But you’re right, I get it. Anyway… Let’s go?” She grabs my hand.

The cemetery is abandoned from any other living soul when we get there. But I can feel them, the dead, when we slowly make our way past the gravestones. All around us, names are carved into eternity. Even the air is thick here, filled with regret and heartbreak.

I have moved on. My brain has, that’s not a lie. But my heart is slow to pick up.

Pride.

I wish I’d called home, beg Mom to come for me.

Conditional love.

I wish Dad could have loved me unconditionally.

“There they are.”

Rest in peace, dear parents and grandparents. Bernard, Paula, Georges, and Marie Martin. Two generations resting side by side, loved and remembered.

Until we meet again.

Melody places the white roses on their grave. For a dragging moment we just stand there, lost in our own thoughts.

The rain drips gently on the petals. A breeze rattles the leaves in the trees. I stare at the names carved into the stone, tracing them with my eyes as if memorizing every letter might bring them back. My hand finds Melody's, and she squeezes it once. No words.

“They would’ve been proud of you,” she says quietly. “Of us.”

I nod, throat too tight to answer.

We stand there until the ache becomes too heavy. Until the cold begins to bite again. Until memory loosens its grip, just enough to breathe.

“Are you good to go?” she whispers into the stifled air. I reply by pulling her with me, and together we leave the dead behind us.

We walk a while in silence, our steps muffled on the damp gravel path, until the headstones are behind us and the air feels lighter.

“Wow. That was intense. But I’m glad we could do this together, brother. It won’t bring them back, but you and I…” Her green eyes are wet, but she smiles.

“We’re blood. Je t’aime . Now, go and enjoy your time with Charlotte. I’m glad I could help you two find each other.” My nose inhales her sweet perfume and those messy curls that are so identical to mine.

I watch her leave, then tighten the straps of my bag, needing a moment alone with my thoughts.

I didn't mean to bring the whole box with me, but I did. Letters, memories, even the cloak and mask. I tucked it in my bag this morning like a fool needing proof. Proof that I’m not losing my mind.

That Granddad’s letter isn’t a dream. That Mom wrote me.

That this family, this land, still has room for me. There’s a lot.

Instead of heading back through the dripping streets, I wander up the hill to the little stone church that overlooks the cemetery.

The door creaks when I push it open, the smell of old wood and candle wax greeting me like a half-remembered dream.

The air inside is cool and dim. I slide into a back pew, the one I used to sit in with Mom and Melody when I was still small enough to believe in stories that promised salvation.

My coffee cup is still clutched in my hand, gone cold now, but I don’t let go. Not yet.

The silence settles like dust.

For a long time, I sit there. Letting it all rise and fall inside me, the letters, the grave, the ache. Not asking for forgiveness, just needing to feel something that won’t slip away.

Eventually, I close my eyes and breathe.

Mom wrote to me each month for fifteen years.

"I still set a place for you at the table on Sundays, hoping this will be the day you come home," she writes in one of her letters.

I used to flinch at those words. Now, I read them as a lifeline as proof that even when I ran, she never let me go.

Her last letter was dated two weeks before they had that fatal accident.

Through her eyes, she shares what life was without me.

Her words have me weeping, have my heart shattering, have me smiling through my tears.

There are so many things I didn’t know, so many things Melo and I haven’t talked about, for the simple reason we don't want to ruin a relationship that is so fragile.

Mom mentions the rumours after I’d left. How Saint-Laurent reacted to a sixteen-year-old teenager who disrespected his family by picking up his bags and leaving them alone. The ungrateful brat. She even added some newspaper clips, local ones, that were dedicated to my departure.

I’ve always wanted to bury my past. But reading all her words makes me want to reconnect to them. To us.

I imagine her, at home with a seven-year-old Melody, both her son and her husband far from home. I wonder what it must have been like when she received that phone call to announce Dad’s death. In the name of our country.

She writes about it. But the words, well-chosen and sensible, don’t cover the way she must have been devastated. She writes about Dad, about how they’d been high school sweethearts.

Once upon a time, the house had been filled with laughter.

With hope. But over the years, their love had collapsed.

Little by little, until the rug had been pulled out and they’d been caught in a freefall.

They had crashed into a void, sealed by that fatal attack on the French army that took his life.

Through Mom’s letters the world evolves. Melo grows up in ink, from primary school to Art Academy. Her letters share her fears and quiet joys, though always shadowed by my absence. She and Melody would think of me on my birthday, lie on my bed just to breathe me in, wonder where I was.

It’s almost too much to bear. My eyes sting, throat tight, heart twisting with emotion I can’t name.

Grief and hope, tangled like ivy in my chest. It’s painful to read.

Flickers of the past accompany her words, my own recollections wanting to jump in and be recognized.

I hate to acknowledge that we were happy before that day when I was 16.

We were happy. I was happy.

The church door opens, bringing in some of the daylight. I’ve been sitting here for hours, alone. Now it shuts with a loud thud and the priest passes by, welcoming me with a dip of his chin. “Son.”

“Father.” He steps up to the altar, preparing for service.

I watch him work his routine, both the knife and the key feeling heavy in my pocket.

They are symbols of everything I’ve inherited and everything I’ve tried to outrun.

One opens doors I’m not sure I want to enter. The other reminds me how I survived.

I don’t go home.

Not yet. Not to Louis, not to that bed, not to his warmth. I can’t. Instead, I let the church swallow my silence. I let the candlelight flicker over my fingers, my coffee cooling in the pew beside me. He’s probably asleep by now. Or waiting for me. Probably wondering. Probably hurting.

I want to stay away from Louis, not with anger, but with silence. With absence. With the distance I hope will protect us both. There’s a kind of cruelty in withdrawal, but also clarity. Maybe I just need space to think.

But the fantasy doesn’t let go. It seeps in, laced with memory, with hunger I’ve never learned to name.

The thought crashes in: Louis in the chapel, biting my lip until I bled. Louis in the steam of my bathroom, slick hands on my hips. Laughter, heat, reverence. I miss the way he made me feel alive. Wanted. Seen.

I want to erase the memory of his perfect, sensual smile, but it lingers. The long curve of his neck, his sculpted sternum, the dip of his stomach. The things I once explored now haunt me. And maybe that’s the price for letting someone in.

He stole my heart. Tore it wide open and left me aching in ways I didn’t know I could feel.

And even now, surrounded by the heaviness of my past, I miss his light.

He represents the present and god knows, the future.

I quickly draw a cross. I’m not a religious man, but I’m superstitious and cautious. Better be safe than sorry.

B y the time I leave the church, it’s late. I don’t remember the walk back, just the pulse in my ears and the trees swallowing me whole. When I reach the edge of the forest, I stare at the castle walls. They are lit up in the shape of a crow.

I think of Granddad’s letter. Of its implications.