Page 169 of The Truths We Burn

It’s ours.

She was right. Tomorrow the birds will sing, and they will continue to as long as we’re together.

“Because you were the only one worthy of keeping.”

Sage

I look down at the hole dug into the wet ground, filled with a chestnut-brown coffin and covered in a thin layer of flowers.

I thought it was a waste of money to bury a person who had already been cremated for free, but it was written inside of his will that he was to be buried in the plot he’d already purchased years ago.

Funerals are a place where you’re supposed to feel emotion. I’d felt broken and empty at Rosemary’s, so much sadness inside of me that I could barely breathe.

But today, I feel nothing.

It’s another Friday in Ponderosa Springs.

Maybe because my father had been dead to me far before he’d stopped breathing. I’d killed everything attached to him a long time ago, probably before I found out the deal he’d made.

Today, people cried for a man they thought was a hero. One who had died after falling asleep while cooking.

Today, the bad guy lost. Two of them.

But to the town, it was a tragic accident, one that Detective Finn Breck had bravely tried to prevent but had become trapped within the flames while trying to save my dad. Or at least, that’s what I told police when they showed up.

I said exactly what Rook told me, that my father had invited Finn over along with Cain who wasn’t able to make it, and I’d received an alert on my phone from the home security system that there was a fire detected.

We drove as fast as we could, but by the time we arrived, the house was engorged in flames. There was nothing we could do.

I was worried about what an autopsy might show, but apparently Doctor Howard Discil, our town’s mortician owed a favor to the boys. No record of blunt force trauma or stab wounds were ever reported.

I made my eyes water with crocodile tears and sobbed like I was going for an Academy Award for best picture.

I didn’t act today, I kept a passive look on my face the entire service as Rook stood beside me, holding my hand. To others, he was a supportive boyfriend, standing strong next to a girl in shock. I mean, I’d lost everything in their eyes.

My mother, my father, my sister.

They were all gone; they could understand my numbness. I was the girl who had nothing left.

But they were wrong.

Rook did not hold my hand for support.

I held his.

Because it felt good to stand in front of all the people who’d damned him and claim him as my own. Every broken, twisted piece. It was mine.

And yes, I had lost everything. But I had gained so much more.

“You okay?”

I look over at Briar and Lyra, seeing a friendship that I had desperately needed for so long. Two people who’d stood by me, who supported me. One of whom had stabbed a man in the neck. If that wasn’t proof of loyalty, I wasn’t sure what was.

I nod. “Are you alright?”

Lyra hadn’t signed up for any of this, and yet now she had blood on her hands, forever living with the fact that she had taken a life in order to protect the people she cared about.

“I barely blinked,” she mutters, biting the inside of her cheek. “I didn’t even think about it before I did it. I just—”