Page 54

My knees hit the cold earth, mud soaking through my dress as a sob raked through my chest. Grim did this .

The tombstones were fresh, as if they’d been carved this morning, only wet with the morning rain.

Their dates inscribed below, and under that, “ Fiercely loved, they live on through the heart of a star.”

It was too much.

Whether their bodies actually laid at rest here or not, it wasn’t about their bones, but about the sword I felt I could finally lay down. Could I have been wrong about him ? Judged him too harshly? This was more than I ever stood to deserve.

I couldn’t speak, didn’t dare move. Because my grandmother’s quiet stone meant that it was really over. The Tempest women existed now.

Not just in pain. Not just in murmurs. In history . In granite. In memory.

Somehow, in that stillness, I felt her—my grandmother. My mother . Alice …

Every woman who never got the ending they deserved.

I would live for all of us.

I felt it in my chest first. Not a pull. Not a sting. Just… stillness. Like my ribs had been carrying some invisible weight for so long, I forgot what it meant to breathe without armor.

Laying down beside my family, his familiar scent clung to me. Salt and oleander. Even if he wasn’t here, the markings of him were never far.

A cemetery would be the closest I’d come to Death.

I flicked through every letter, each sloppily scribbled as if he couldn’t get pen to paper fast enough.

They didn’t possess his usual measured patience.

They were the same as my own diary entries, filled with moments between us over the century. His memories of us, of me…

Setting them out around me, I pulled my own notebook from my bag, thumbing to a fresh page. I was close to finishing. My memories filled seven notebooks already. What’s left, not yet written.

I chose a dry patch beneath a yew tree, its dark limbs drooping low, brushing the earth in solemn bows like mourners at vigil. The air was hushed beneath its canopy, the world muffled as if holding its breath.

Words did not come as easily as they once had. I had saved the chapters about Death for last, knowing that speaking his truth would be the undoing of mine. To write it down was to admit it had happened, all of it. That he had happened. That I had loved him. That I still did.

I worked in silence, save for the occasional rustle of pages or the quiet tremble of a breath.

A tear would slip now and again, swept away with the back of my hand.

I referenced his own account, quoted lines I knew by heart, pausing only when the weight in my chest became too heavy or the ache in my wrist too sharp.

Sometimes, I’d rise to stretch my legs, wandering between moss-covered stones, trying to walk off the sorrow that clung to my spine.

The cemetery was still. The kind of stillness that hums. Only the soft crunch of autumn leaves disturbed the quiet, falling like whispered farewells from the copper trees above. Time blurred.

It wasn’t until the sky sank fully into dusk and the light had long since faded that I realized how dark it had become. My hands were stiff. The ink smudged.

I gathered my things with care, brushing the soil from the hem of my dress. And as I stood, I turned to the graves and blew a kiss toward the stones that bore my name, the name he’d once spoken like it meant something holy.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I promised softly.

For the first time in years, it felt like I was no longer running from my past. I was stitching it, finally, into the shape of my future.