Chapter 16: The Last Week

## Emily

December 15th–20th, 2021

Six days.

That's what we had. Six days between the night he told me and the morning he left. Six days to pack a lifetime of love into a container that might not hold, to memorize each other so thoroughly that distance couldn't erase us, to build something strong enough to survive whatever was coming.

We didn't waste a minute.

---

December 15th. Monday.

Grey made coffee at 5 AM. I heard him moving in the kitchen — quiet, deliberate, the way he moved through everything — and I came down from the loft wrapped in his blanket, Sirius trailing behind me with the offended dignity of a cat whose sleep had been disturbed by human emotions.

"I have a request," I said, sitting on the counter.

"Name it."

"Read me the letters."

He went still. The coffee pot gurgled into the silence. "Emily—"

"The leather notebook. The letters you've been writing since July. You said they were for me. I want to hear them."

He looked at me for a long time. The pre-dawn light was blue and cold and it turned everything in the apartment into shapes that existed halfway between shadow and substance.

Then he went to the loft. Came back with the notebook. Sat on the couch. Opened it.

And he read.

The first letter was from July 8th. The day after the gas station.

Emily,

I met a girl tonight who has no faith. She was buying gummy worms at midnight and she smelled like vodka and cheap shampoo and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who has been drowning for so long that she's forgotten she was ever above water.

I gave her a paper rose because I didn't know what else to give. I called her Snowflake because the word appeared in my head the moment I saw her and wouldn't leave. I don't know her name. I don't know her story. I know that she carries grief the way soldiers carry ammunition — close, heavy, always ready to fire.

I am supposed to be here for Malachi. For the mission. For the network that is poisoning this campus and the children on it.

But all I can think about is the girl with the gummy worms.

I think she might be the most important person I've ever met. And I think that terrifies me more than anything Eris could do.

— G

He read eleven more letters. Each one a dispatch from the front lines of falling in love — measured at first, then desperate, then tender, then raw. Letters about watching me in class. Letters about the alcove. Letters about the night on the bathroom floor, which was the longest letter, four pages, his handwriting deteriorating from controlled to frantic as the memory overwhelmed the pen.

The last letter was from November 3rd. The night we first slept together.

Emily,

You showed me your scars tonight. You held your arms out in my lamplight and dared me to look. And I looked. And what I saw was not damage — it was courage. Every line, every mark, every scar was a moment where you chose to survive something that was designed to destroy you. Where most people would have broken, you bled. And then you kept going.

I kissed every scar because they deserve to be kissed. Because the body that carries them deserves tenderness. Because you, Emily Glass, are the bravest person I have ever known, and bravery should be met with reverence, not pity.

I am in love with you. Not the version of love that exists in poems or the novels on my shelf or the romance manuscripts your mother left behind. The version that exists in the dark. The version that costs everything. The version where two people who have no business finding each other — a girl with no faith and a man with too much blood on his hands — look across a gas station parking lot and recognize something in each other that the rest of the world missed.

You are my collapsing star. And I will spend the rest of my life watching you burn brighter than anything I've ever seen.

— G

By the time he finished reading, I was crying. Not the delicate, cinematic kind — the ugly kind, the kind that wrecked your face and soaked the blanket and made Sirius leave the room in offended protest.

"You wrote that the night we—"

"Yes."

"While I was sleeping?"

"I couldn't sleep. I was too busy being terrified."

"Of what?"

"Of how much I meant every word."

I crossed the room. Climbed onto the couch beside him. Took the notebook and closed it and put it aside and then I put my hands on his face and I looked at him — really looked, the way you look at a painting in a museum, not for the technique but for the truth.

"You're coming back," I said.

"I'm coming back."

"You have to. Because I am not finished with you, Greyson Navarro. I have not finished reading your letters or eating your terrible pancakes or being woken up by your cat at 4 AM. I have not finished writing my novel or laughing at your surveillance instincts or watching your face when I read my sentences out loud. I am not finished. And you are not allowed to be finished either."

He kissed me. Hard. The kind of kiss that said goodbye and hello at the same time, that tasted like coffee and salt and the desperate, ferocious refusal to let go.

---

December 16th. Tuesday.

We went to the alcove. One last time.

The stained-glass window was winter-dim — the light that came through it was thin, watery, the ghost of the golden kaleidoscope that had painted our shared silences for three months. The radiator ticked. The windowsill was cold.

I sat in my spot. He sat in his. Five feet of stone. Our usual distance, our usual positions, as if the geography of the alcove could preserve us even when the people changed.

"I want to give you something," I said.

I opened my bag. Pulled out a stack of paper — not typed, handwritten. 200 pages of my novel, printed and annotated, with margins full of notes and arrows and the specific mess of a writer in the act of building something from the ruins of herself.

"The manuscript," Grey said.

"The whole thing. Every page I've written since the night you told me to write my title. I want you to take it with you."

"Emily—"

"I need you to have a reason to come back. Beyond me, beyond Sirius, beyond paper roses. I need you to have the novel. Because you're the one who made me write it. You stood in a classroom and said 'writing is the act of opening a vein and bleeding onto the page,' and I opened a vein, and the pages are yours. They've always been yours."

He took the book. Held it the way he'd held my mother's notebook — with reverence, with care, with the understanding that he was holding not just paper but a person's soul rendered in sentences.

"I'll read every word," he said.

"I know you will."

"And I'll come back and tell you which sentences are perfect and which ones need work."

"Mostly the ones about you need work."

"The ones about me are the best ones."

"The ones about you are the most biased ones."

He almost smiled. Number ninety-something. I'd lost count. "I'll add it to my list. One manuscript to read. One woman to return to. One cat to feed."

"Don't forget the cat."

"Nobody forgets Sirius. Sirius doesn't allow it."

I looked at the stained-glass window. At the woman with her book, preserved in coloured glass, frozen in the act of reading for eternity. I wondered if she was lonely in there. I wondered if she had someone who'd read her letters and kissed her scars and told her she was collapsing and rebuilding at the same time.

"Grey."

"Yeah?"

"When you come back — and you are coming back, that's not negotiable — I want to finish the novel. And I want to publish it. With my name on it. Emily Glass. Not a pseudonym, not a pen name. My real name. Because I'm done hiding behind other people's versions of me."

His eyes were bright. Not tears — something deeper. Pride, maybe. The fierce, protective, expansive pride of a person watching someone they love become the person they were always meant to be.

"Your mother would be proud," he said.

"My mother would be crying and eating pancakes."

"Then she and I have more in common than I thought."

---

December 17th. Wednesday.

Ash came over. With Syn, and a bottle of wine, and the kind of energy that meant she had prepared a speech.

"I need to say something," she announced, sitting cross-legged on Grey's couch with Sirius in her lap and her dimple piercings catching the lamplight. "And I need you both to listen without interrupting, which I know is hard for you" — she pointed at me — "and impossible for you" — she pointed at Grey.

"Go ahead," Grey said, leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed.

"I hated you for six weeks." Ash pointed at Grey. "When Emily told me about you — about the professor thing, about the age gap, about the guns — I made a list of reasons to destroy you. It was twelve items long. Syn proofread it."

"It was very thorough," Syn confirmed from the armchair, wine in hand.

"But then Emily moved in here. And she started sleeping. And she started eating. And she started laughing — really laughing, not the fake laugh she's been doing since Charlie died. And she started writing again. And she stopped wearing long sleeves indoors. And she looked at you the way my mom looks at my dad, which is the way people look at the one thing in the world that makes every other thing make sense."

Ash paused. Her eyes were bright. "So I burned the list. Because you made my best friend alive again. And that's worth more than any list."

The room was quiet.

Grey uncrossed his arms. Crossed the room. Held out his hand.

Ash took it. Gripped it hard. "You come back to her," she said. "Or I will find you. And I don't have a criminal organization, but I have determination and an internet connection, and you'd be amazed what a bisexual woman with a grudge can accomplish with those two things."

"I believe you," Grey said.

"Good."

She let go of his hand, turned to me, and burst into tears. "I'm so proud of you, Em. I'm so fucking proud."

I held her. My best friend since second grade, who had never stopped trying to pull me out of the dark, who had offered her couch and her floor and her grandmother's spare room, who had noticed every bruise and named every silence and refused — stubbornly, loudly, lovingly — to let me disappear.

"I love you," I whispered.

"I love you more."

"Not possible."

"Very possible. I'm a very loving person. I have references."

Syn appeared behind us, wrapping her arms around us both. "I also love you," she said. "And I brought cupcakes."

We ate cupcakes and drank wine and watched terrible television and Ash told stories about our childhood that made Grey laugh — actually laugh, the sound rare and deep and startling — and Sirius ate frosting off a cupcake wrapper and vomited on the rug and Syn cleaned it up because Syn cleaned up everything, always, without complaint, because that was who she was.

At midnight, Ash and Syn left. At the door, Ash turned back.

"Emily."

"Yeah?"

"Halfway out of the dark. Right?"

I smiled. "Halfway out of the dark."

She left.

---

December 20th. Saturday. The last day.

We spent it in bed.

Not entirely — we ate, we walked Sirius to the bodega on the corner where the owner knew her and gave her treats, we sat on the balcony in the December cold and watched the city do what cities do. But mostly, we spent it in bed.

His arms around me. My head on his chest. The leather notebook on the nightstand, closed now, its letters delivered. The manuscript in his bag, packed and ready.

"Tell me about Sirius," I said. "The real story. Not the version you told me on the phone that night."

He was quiet for a moment. His fingers were in my hair, tracing patterns I couldn't see.

"I was sixteen," he said. "The year Malachi found me. Before that, I was... nowhere. My parents were dead. Foster care was a series of houses that got worse instead of better. The last house — the one where I got the scar" — he touched the line through his eyebrow — "was the one I ran from. I lived on the street for three months before Malachi's people found me."

"And the cat?"

"The cat was behind a restaurant in the alley where I slept. She was starving. Missing most of an ear. Feral in the way that animals become feral when every human they've encountered has been a threat. She wouldn't let anyone near her. She'd hiss, scratch, bite. The restaurant staff wanted to call animal control."

"But you didn't."

"I sat. Every night, after the restaurant closed, I'd sit in the alley and I wouldn't move. I wouldn't try to touch her. I wouldn't talk to her. I'd just... be there. For weeks. Sirius would watch me from behind the dumpster, and I'd watch her, and neither of us moved."

"And then?"

"And then one night — it was raining, I remember, the kind of cold rain that goes through your bones — she walked up. Slowly. Like she was testing every step. And she pressed her face against my knee. And I put my hand on her head. And she purred."

His voice had gone soft. The voice he used in the dark. The voice that existed beneath the professor, beneath the operative, beneath every version of Greyson Navarro that the world had created.

"That was the first time I understood that trust wasn't given," he said. "It was earned. Through patience. Through presence. Through the willingness to sit in the dark and wait for as long as it takes."

I lifted my head. Looked at him. "Is that what you did with me? Sat and waited?"

"I folded paper roses and waited. Slight variation."

"Significant variation."

"I'm a man of many talents."

I kissed him. Slowly. The last-day kiss. The kind that memorized the shape of his mouth and the warmth of his breath and the way his hand found the small of my back and pressed me closer, as if the laws of physics were the only thing preventing us from occupying the same space.

"I'll wait for you," I said.

"I know."

"Not patiently. I'll be furious the entire time. I'll text you constantly. I'll send you pictures of Sirius and angry voice memos and pages of the novel that you have to read immediately or I'll lose my mind."

"I look forward to all of it."

"And when you come back—"

"When I come back."

"We're getting a bigger apartment. With a balcony. And a second cat."

"Sirius won't tolerate a second cat."

"Sirius will adapt. She's resilient."

He almost smiled. The last almost-smile before the mission. I memorized it — the exact degree of the lip-twitch, the crinkle around his eyes, the way it transformed his face from dangerous to human.

"I love you," he said.

"I love you more."

"Not possible."

"Everyone keeps saying that and everyone keeps being wrong."

He held me. Tightly. The way you hold something precious in a world that takes precious things and breaks them.

"Halfway out of the dark," he whispered.

"Halfway out of the dark," I whispered back.

And we stayed in bed, and Sirius purred between us, and the city hummed outside, and the paper roses on the nightstand caught the last light of the shortest day, and I committed every second to memory — the warmth of him, the weight of his arm, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against my ear — because memory was the only thing that distance couldn't take.

Not the bad kind of memory. Not the Jordan kind, the grief kind, the bathroom-floor kind.

The good kind. The kind that sustained you. The kind that kept the wire singing even when the song had no audience.

The kind that brought you home.