Page 147 of Remember Us This Way

It’s been a week of hell.

The second Zoey faded away, the agony grasped hold of my heart and refused to let go, but something told me that it would only get harder from there. The first night was excruciating, going to sleep alone and rolling over to hold her, to pull her against me and whisper sweet nothings in her ear, only to find her no longer there.

Who’s supposed to hold me up? Whose eyes am I supposed to search for to pull me out of the darkness? She was my whole universe. We were entwined as one, formed together as part of the same soul, and having to slice that down the center, it feels like part of me died with her.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to survive. Is it even possible?

Zoey’s funeral is due to start any second, and despite knowing I need to be in there, my feet feel glued to the pavement. Once I go in there, once the funeral starts, I’ll be forced to say goodbye, and it all becomes too real.

I’ll have to face the fact that I’m never going to see her again, never going to feel her touch, never going to see the way those beautiful eyes light up when she smiles at me.

Her smell. Her warmth. The way we made love.

I try to tell myself how blessed I was to have her in my life. I had the chance to love her so fiercely, so purely, even if it was only for a little while, but it does nothing to take the sting away from the fact she’s gone.

“You going in?” I hear a small voice beside me, and I glance to my right, finding Hope, looking just as broken as I feel.

I shrug my shoulders, my gaze sailing back to the church. “I know I should, but I can’t bring myself to move.”

She nods. “I know the feeling,” she says. “This is my fourth attempt to get through the door.”

I glance toward Hope, a small smile on my lips. “You were a good friend to her,” I say. “I don’t know how much she ever told you about high school, but you showed up right when she needed you the most, when I couldn’t be there for her. Especially during those last few months. You made her smile, even through the hardest times. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you for that.”

“There’s no need to thank me,” Hope says. “Because when it comes down to it, she was exactly what I needed too. Without her . . . I was heading down a bad path, and she opened my eyes to the important things in life. It’s me who needs to thank her. She was like the sister I never had.”

I nod, both of us gazing back toward the church. “We’re going to regret it later if we don’t go in,” she finally says before letting out a shaky breath. “Come on. We’ll go together and then after, we can get wicked drunk.”

Fuck, that sounds good.

I blow out a heavy breath, feeling unsteady, and as Hope takes a step toward the church, I walk with her, somehow feeling as though there’s an invisible hand in mine, pulling me along.

Hope sits beside me in the pew with Mom and Zoey’s family on my other side, and when the funeral starts, Hazel shuffles across the pew and squeezes in between me and Mom, clutching on to my hand like her only lifeline, and it’s that touch that keeps me together.

The ceremony is beautiful, classy just like she was. A few songs that Zoey had chosen are played, and fuck. They hit me right in the chest, especially as In The Stars by Benson Boone plays through the church.

I somehow find the strength to stand up and read the words I’ve written, each one of them describing the life we had together, the love we shared, and the rare friendship that became so much more. Then after another song that destroys me, Hazel stands up, and holding her father’s hand with tears streaming down her face, she says a few broken words, telling Zoey how much she’s going to miss her.

Once the funeral comes to a close, I take off, forgetting all about Hope’s offer to get drunk. I know I’ll end up that way by the end of the night, but as the funeral finished, and I was forced to face reality with the undeniable excruciating grief closing in on me again, I needed to be alone.

I find myself back at Zoey’s house, pushing through the door of what’s now one of the loneliest places I’ve ever been in. Mom stayed with Zoey’s parents, preparing for her wake this afternoon, but I just don’t know if I have the strength to stand around a bunch of people who didn’t really know her, telling me how sorry they are for my loss.

Instead, I make my way up to her room, needing to feel that closeness, to smell her, to feel her around me, and the second I walk into her room, I do just that. It’s as though she’s right here, her arms wrapping around me, only this time, there’s a gaping hole right where my heart used to be, leaving nothing but a hollow emptiness.

My gaze shifts around her room.

I’ve spent so many hours in here growing up. Chilling out on her bed while teaching her how to play video games, pretending the way my leg brushed against hers was nothing more than an innocent accident, pushing her up against the wall in her closet and really kissing her like I’d been desperate to do for years.

Dropping down on her bed, I take her pillow and hold it to my chest, breathing her in, when I notice an envelope peeking out from within the pillowcase. My brows furrow, and I curl my fingers around the edge of the paper, pulling it out to find Zoey’s neat cursive writing across the front.

My name stares back at me, and my heart starts to race.

This is my letter, the one she spent the last few days of her life agonizing over. I sat with her as she wrote her letters for her family and Hope, but when she turned to a new page and scrawled my name at the top, she sent me away.

Over the past week, I’ve wondered if I would ever see this or if she even finished it. But now that I have, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s like one final piece of her, one final gift, and after I open it and read the words she’s left for me, that will be it.

But these words . . . God. They’re going to crush me, no matter how sweet they might be.

Flipping the envelope over, I slip my finger beneath the flap and break through the seal before taking the letter out. My hands shake as I open the papers, seven full pages of blue pen, smudged with the stains of her fallen tears.

---