Page 115 of Phantom Mine

She smiles fondly, wrapping her arms around her legs and tucking her chin on her knees. “I remember how big her smile was, somehow bigger than her crazy hair. She ran up to me, grabbed my hand, and showed me her dolls. She took me home and gave me a home. Shesavedme. She saved me when I didn’t know I needed saving.” Valentina tilts her head to the side so her face comes to rest on her knee and looks at me. “And then she was taken from me. She was taken from me on a day where all she wanted to do was sit outside and have a picnic, but we couldn’t because it started raining. I hate the rain,” she adds almost as an afterthought.

The urge to fistfight the rain comes back tenfold. That’s why she was at the park during a thunderstorm.

It’s impossible to describe the emotion that hacked at my chest watching her cry under that tree. I’d been sitting in my heated car, staring through my windshield, outwardly comfortable except for the fact that I was being torn to pieces by every tear that ran down her cheeks. I couldn’t handle watching her suffer from a distance.

“Grief isn’t pretty. It’s heavy and ugly. It comes in waves like a looming and retreating tide lapping at my feet and pulling me under.” She sniffles loudly. “I see Adri in every sunrise and every sunset. I see her in the turn of the seasons; in the amber leaves floating gently down to the ground as they fall from the trees, in the first snowflakes as they hit my cheeks, in the bloom of colorful flowers as winter turns the corner into spring. She’s everywhere. She’s everywhere I look and yet I can’t find her.” Valentina blows out a sad, tremulous breath. “I can’t describe how crushingly lonely it makes me feel. It’s an emptiness that noone can fill, no matter how full the room I’m in is or how much time goes by. It means that we could be eating lunch together and outwardly everything looks normal, but in all actuality I couldn’t be further from you. I’m a thousand miles away, deep in my memories, being tortured by all the things I should have done differently. By all the things I remember.”

Her features don't move but a tear slips down her cheek and off the side of her face. I cross the room and sit at her feet on the bed just as she sneezes into her elbow.

I get to work massaging the tension from her calves.

“I reached a point where I started to cling to one hope—that one day, I wouldn’t remember anymore. Surely that would make the grief easier to bear, right? It had to.” Her gaze is faraway, like she’s not in the room with me. “But then I got what I wanted and my memories started growing less clear, less vivid. The edges were fuzzier, the details softer, and I realized that time doesn’t care about grief because it kept moving and life continued regardless and both were dragging me forward with them and further away fromher, because suddenly she was someone left in the past and not a part of my present. I feel guilty for wanting to live without the constant torture of my memories because I realized not having them is so, so much worse. It feels like losing her all over again.”

“That’s what grief is to me, Matteo. A constant battle between wanting to forget and needing to remember, a battle that I’m no closer to winning today than I was almost two years ago. The grief triumphs, every single time. Except—”

Valentina pauses, like she’s deciding whether to continue. I remain silent, working the tense muscles of her calves, hooked on every word tumbling from my girl’s lips.

Finally, I want to scream to the heavens,Finally she’s opening up to me.

I don’t think she realizes that makes her mine in a way no one will ever be. In a way I want no one else to ever be.

“Except when I’m with you,” she confesses. “For brief moments in time, you shield me from the onslaught of the pain. You soothe my battered heart. You bring my mind calm. And you bring me…peace. A quiet, unshakable inner stillness that grounds me in today, stopping the waves of the past from pulling me under.” She looks down and away, avoiding my gaze. “I trust you, Matteo. In spite of who you are, in spite of who I a—” Her lips press together for a second like she catches herself about to say something she shouldn’t. “In spite of who your family is,” she finishes. She laughs, but the sound comes out forced. “The reason I didn’t tell you is because this isn’t veryfun, is it?”

Her eyes lift back up to mine and I see a whole universe in her gaze. An entirely different path and life she would have lived these past two years if her sister hadn’t been murdered by my brother— every hope, every dream, every laugh, every small, manageable heartbreak, all of them reflected in her gaze right beneath the ever present pain.

I reach for her, pulling her into my lap, into my warmth, and wrap my arms around her tight enough to never let her go. She comes willingly, settling and melting into my chest like she knows this is where she belongs.

“Tell me about her then,” I ask. “Give me your memories and I’ll hold them for you so that they never grow fuzzy.”

Valentina glances up at me. “Matteo…”

“I told you we were in this together now. You need to grieve her so that you can finally put the guilt you’ve been carrying to rest and learn to love those memories instead of running from them.” I lean and press a kiss to the top of her head, my lips lingering as I breathe in her scent. “Let me help you keep her alive in the way that I can. Tell me about her. What was she like?”

Gratitude flashes in her eyes before they flutter closed. Her lips part, pausing as she seems to think of where to begin.

“We drove three hundred kilometers to see a full solar eclipse once. The entire roadtrip was a mess, which was so typical of us—we got a flat tire, we took a wrong turn into a village where we were nearly adopted by a council of localabuelitas, and we ended up meeting a chef who showed us his extensive vegetable garden.”

“That better not be a euphemism,” I grumble, the jealousy immediate and hot.

Valentina laughs and her whole face brightens up. For a moment, the world pauses, every living organism held captive by her raw magnetism.

“Adrilovedplants, she studied botany. The second he mentioned his vegetable garden, we were gone. But that’s always the sort of thing that happened when we were together—we’d inevitably veer into some sort of ridiculous side quest.” She smiles. “When we finally made it to our destination, we realized we’d only brought one pair of eclipse glasses and I’d sat on them during the trip and cracked one of the lenses. We ended up having to put our heads together and squeeze one eye shut each as we attempted to look through the one lens left.” She shakes her head, laughing. “I don’t remember seeing much of the eclipse, but I do remember laying in the flatbed of the truck, talking all night and making wishes on shooting stars.”

My hand weaves through her hair to the base of her skull, massaging it lightly. She tilts her head back into my touch, a soft moan leaving her lips.

“Keep going,cara,” I whisper.

“I accidentally gave her mono once after she drank out of my water bottle. Our brother told everyone at school she got it because we kissed each other. Stupid brother stuff,” she says, rolling her eyes. She sneezes loudly once, then a second time.“We chased him around the house and beat him up with our bedroom pillows until feathers rained down everywhere around us.”

“Did he apologize?”

She smirks. “Not until we switched to the living room pillows. Those were much harder. Less give. He sang his apologies then.”

“You got your revenge.” My hand closes around the back of her neck. “Good girl.”

She blushes, her fingers twiddling absentmindedly with a loose thread on my shirt. “When we were twelve, we were too lazy to go the usual, and longer, way home from whatever wandering adventure we’d been on, so we decided to cut through a different valley back to the house. We’d always been warned not to go that way, we assumed because there were snakes there, but we thought we could outrun them.” She laughs again, her eyes distant, deep in her memories. “When we emerged on the other side, we’d seen no snakes, but we werecoveredin poison ivy rashes. Everything burned and itched, it was awful. We bought every available bottle of apple cider vinegar we could find, poured it in the bath and got in. No amount of scrubbing could get rid of that smell—it followed us around for a full week after.”

She turns her face to look at me, her eyes twinkling, and I’m not quite prepared for it. Not for how the world seems to stop spinning in that moment, not for how the air shifts, turning threadbare. Not for how my heart starts to slow, each beat a little less frantic than the last. And not for how it then suddenly swells, abruptly full to bursting at the seams with an emotion that’s too terrifying to name.

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