Page 85 of Veil of Death and Shadow

“About nine years, give or take,” I said. “She died on my tenth birthday. And then I ended up in a group home and foster care. That’s where Sora and I eventually met a few years later.”

If I believed in such things, I’d think Amto Amani had sent her to me—like she knew I’d need someone to hold onto when she was gone, someone too stubborn to let me isolate myself entirely.

“I’m glad you had her,” he said, his expression soft, the hard edges from earlier erased entirely. “And I’m sorry that you lost her so young.”

“Thank you.” I swallowed; my throat tight with the loss of her. “I don’t talk about her much.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Sometimes it’s hard.”

“I get that.” He nodded, his lips lifting into a small smirk. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger you’ve only agreed to hang out with twice.”

I snorted. “Precisely.”

But it was also more than that.

After Amto Amani died, I didn’t speak about her very much. Partially because, at first, I didn’t know what wearing the grief of her loss would feel like. The more I grew into it, the less I felt equipped to unpack it, to put it on display for people—even Sora, which was absurd, because she would have understood better than most. But she held her own pain just as closely, like a second skin.

In some ways, it was easier to dance around the other’s pain, a silent promise that we knew that it was there, that it festered—neither of us able to look the other’s loss in the eye, because if we did, we might have to let it go.

And we both understood the truth—that letting go of that pain was the only thing more heartbreaking than feeling it. That pain was the final tether we had to the people we’d loved the most. It had to be guarded, protected, at all costs.

The days after Amto Amani died had been easier in some ways. People treated me with understanding, their eyes soft, their voices quiet as they ripped me from the only home I knew, placing me in a different, colder one, where I was untethered from any connection to my life before then. Still, while their words were filled with false sincerity and wishes for my wellbeing, they didn’t fight back against my tears, didn’t tell me to toughen up or get over it.

In those days, my grief was a deep wound, an incision I could point to, that they could all see and understand, on some level. But as the days turned to months, and then years, that wound closed, becoming nothing more than fading scar tissue to those viewing it from the outside.

What they didn’t see or understand, was that though invisible to them, the ache left by Amto Amani’s death festered beneath my skin, growing and rooting into my veins and bones, cocooning me completely. Where grief had been acute and sharp before, it had morphed into a gentle—though no less painful—throb. One I couldn’t escape. One that became like a second heartbeat, as necessary to me as my own breath.

The loss engraved in me by her death was so much more than just the loss of her person. She’d been the only anchor I had to myself. With her, I lost my community, my culture—the frail connections to family and blood were completely eviscerated. With her gone, I didn’t know where boundaries of myself startedand ended. I didn’t know who I was without her. Without the one person in the world who understood me, who’d seen me—through me, down to the core of who I was.

I knew it was the same for Sora, after Rina died. Perhaps that was why we never spoke about it. Both of us recognized the echo of a pain we tried desperately to cover in the other. It was the sort of agony that only multiplied when you looked at it, like speaking it into the world would only infect the other’s wounds, make them worse—impossible to feign recovery from. If we tried to wrap up each other’s grief, we’d be left sitting on the discarded paper, drowning in it.

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat and shoving the weight of loss back into the recesses of my mind where I usually kept it covered, “this is Seattle.”

The already-wide canal opened up into Lake Union, the large lake that traced the skyline.

Something about the immensity of it here, existing in the middle of it, made me feel so small. But not in a bad way, just one thing that reminded me how very full and exciting the city really was outside of my small world.

Behind us stood Gas Works, an old Industrial plant that had been repurposed into a public park in the sixties. It was such a strange mix of nature and industry, the large metal structures were still on display, though they were ruins now, as grass and plants reclaimed the area surrounding them. There was a giant hill that tourists and children climbed, their kites soaring like birds through the sky.

As cool as the park was on its own terms, it was generally visited because it looked out on one of the best views in the city.

In front of us, tall and looming, as sea planes took off and landed around us stood the Seattle skyline—the famous Space Needle on the right, closest to where we were floating.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Breathtaking,” he said, his voice almost reverent as his eyes held mine.

14

MAREENA

Present Day

Instinct had me resisting everything about Kieran and this little midday field trip, but I pushed all of my energy into ignoring it. If this was the only way to stop being haunted by his presence, it was best to just get on with it.

And, honestly, a nice cool dip might be just the thing to keep my slutty little thoughts about our hook up last week from overheating.

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