Page 114 of Love, Nemesis
“The joke is on me, isn’t it?” Lethe whispered. “Emma…” He closed his eyes. “How do I do this?” he asked, running a hand through his hair.
His hand rested over his face.
He could almost hear her words, Emma laughing as she said them.
Lethe, she’d said a thousand times,You have to believe there’s another way.
“You always said that,” he argued back, mumbling. “About everything.”
The Strike are obsessed with human beings. Maybe deep down, they’re looking for a way back.
“And look what they did to you.”
There must be a way back.
“Always the optimist.”
We can have these big family-style get-togethers. Make new holidays.
“I missed you so much,” he whispered, and with his eyes closed, he could see her again, clearly, for the first time in years. She sat at a wooden bench, a frustrated expression on her face as she tried to wrap an old cloth ribbon around an animal she’d made out of wood.
Ah, the foot broke off again. Lethe. She’s going to hate this.Emma ran two hands through her hair, long blonde waves that glistened over her shoulders. She propped one cheek up on her hand, the rows of names tattooed on her arm visible past her sleeve. Emma had been part of the first wave of ROSE, the ones who had protected people.
She nudged him with her foot. Lethe had been lying on the floor, his hat over his face, sleeping off the fatigue from a mission the night before. A light breeze drifted through the window.
Hey. You. Get up. Help me. Barlow is bringing her over soon.
“Jackie won’t care. She’s five. She won’t care. She’s five, all right?”
I need her to like me. I want to have kids and I can’t do it while the world’s like this. Think of this as adopting.
Lethe groaned. “Great, you’ve gone maternal.”
She said something back, something quick and sharp that had made him laugh, but he couldn’t remember it.
Why couldn’t he remember it?
He’d genuinely laughed.
The memory began to feel distant, and then it was on repeat, like a broken tape.
We can have these big family-style get-togethers. Make new—
She went silent.
“Emma,” he said. “Where did you—”
The memory of her sobbing in pain flashed into his mind, blood and sweat on her skin, Strike hovering over her, those red eyes in the dark. She screamed.
Lethe shot up, groaning as he rolled back onto his stomach, cursing as he pressed his face back into the dirt. He slammed his fist into the earth.
Then she was back again, lying next to him on a blanket in the grass. She ran her finger from his forehead down his nose, smiling mischievously as she stopped there. She pressed his nose and chuckled to herself.
“What are you doing?” he asked, moving his face.
He’d forgotten that memory somehow too, but the recollection of lying there beside her filled him with a deep sense of longing and freed a sorrow in him that felt old and frustrated.
Another conversation.
