Page 252 of Haunt Me

She turns serious. “You have been one since the day you bound up my knee,” she says quietly. “I have known it since then.”

“Yes,” I reply. “Yes, you have. And you love me.”

Everything goes quiet as the truth of it sinks in. Peace spreads out around us like the calm waters of a lake.

“Let’s go,” Eden says.

I climb to my feet and take her hand. I get behind the wheel, Eden’s body curled around me, and as I close the door and put my foot on the pedal, I murmur to myself:

“You are never coming back. You are never coming back here as long as I’m alive. And afterwards.”

“Oh, now you’ve gone and done it with the ‘afterwards’,” Eden sniffles, her head nestled in the crook of my neck.

“You heard me?” I ask and feel her nod against me.

I press my lips to her temple as we drive away. We don’t look back.

…

I take her back to the hotel room she’s sharing with Faith. I call my assistant to tell her to delay my flight for another day. There is one more thing we need to do here. Eden is sinking fast into an exhausted sleep, but as drifts off, she says:

“I’m sorry I broke your heart, Isaiah.”

“Feel free to break it again any time you like, heartbreaker,” I tell her softly, my lips a breath from hers. “It’s yours.”

But she’s already asleep.

Faith is pretending not to watch us from the bathroom door, so I motion for her to get inside. She smiles at me, and then she comes over and kneels beside the bed. She closes her eyes. I know what she’s doing—but it takes me a minute to decide if I will join her or not.

And, in the end, that is how I find out the answer to my question: ‘Is it too late to believe in God?’ Apparently not, because here I am. Praying.

…

When Eden wakes up, Faith leaves the room to give us privacy. As if I know what to do. I barely stop myself from calling Faith back, but instead, I turn to Eden:

“What do you need?” That’s the simplest, most straight-forward way I know to solve this. By asking her.

“To write,” Eden says.

“Should I go?”

“Please stay.”

I watch her as she writes, and I see how the peace descends on her as she gets the thoughts out of her head and onto her laptop. I watch her fight the demons in her head. I wish I could fight them for her, but just as she can’t fight mine for me, I can’t fight hers. These ghosts have to be chased off by her own light.

Of course, as I watch her, the inevitable happens: The music descends on me. It comes to me so fast I’m afraid my head will explode with it if I don’t begin playing it in the next few seconds. Normally, that’s what I would do.

But this isn’t normally.

I don’t have any instruments with me—a rarity, but I left in a hurry—and also, an army couldn’t drag me out of this room, not after Eden asked me to stay.

I open the pentagram app on my phone and start writing the music there. I can transcribe it easily from what I hear in my head, it’s a skill I learned when I was really young.

I call Faith to tell her to come back, and she arrives ten minutes later, dragging heavy bags full of takeout food.

We stay in for the next few hours: Eden sits in front of the open window with her sister, me on the floor by her bed, both of us writing. Faith is reading. Not one word is exchanged between us—we don’t need to talk. We’re surrounded but nothing but the stillness of the hotel room, the tap-tapping of Eden’s fingers on the keyboard, and the chirping of the evening birds.

This, I think suddenly. Unexpectedly.This is what I prayed for.

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