Chapter 133
The rest of the day passed in that strange, weightless way where everything felt louder and softer at the same time. Like someone had peeled back a layer of silence I didn’t even know I’d been living under.
The note and the photo stayed on the counter beside my sketchbook. No one touched them without asking. No one hovered. The space around them felt sacred. Untidy but important.
Torin made lunch even though Rook swore he wasn’t hungry and then ate half the pan himself. Tannin complained about needing more sleep and then stayed awake for five more hours just to make sure Reif didn’t disappear on us again. Jess came and went, muttering about paperwork and police incompetence and how none of us better call him past midnight unless someone was literally bleeding. Reif hovered in the corner like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to belong here but wanted to anyway.
Late afternoon sunlight slanted across the loft, turning everything honey-gold. I sat on the floor by the coffee table with my sketchbook open in front of me. My pencil drifted across the page in slow, uncertain strokes. I wasn’t drawing anything recognizable yet. Just shapes and lines that felt like they were coming from somewhere older than memory.
Torin dropped onto the couch behind me and ran his fingers gently through my hair. “Mind if I watch?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It helps.”
He leaned forward and rested his chin lightly on the top of my head. “What are you drawing?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But it feels like it wants to be something.”
He hummed quietly. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
I kept drawing. Halfway through a curved line, I paused. Something tugged at the edge of my awareness.
A memory? A feeling? A ghost?
“I keep thinking about her,” I admitted softly. “Not in a painful way. More like…she was a person once. Someone with a life. A voice. A heartbeat. Someone who made choices, even the wrong ones.”
Torin slid his hand down my arm. “You’re allowed to feel everything about her. Anger. Love. Loss. Confusion. All of it is real.”
I nodded. “Skye kept so much from me. Lies on top of lies. But this… she didn’t choose to walk away from me. Not really. He made her.”
Torin’s breath brushed my ear. “And you survived him.”
“We both did,” I said.
My eyes lifted to Rook across the room. He sat in the armchair with his feet propped on a crate, scrolling through something on his phone, pretending he wasn’t watching me every few seconds. When our eyes met, he lifted his chin in that quiet, steady way that meant I wasn’t alone.
“You okay?” he called.
“Yeah,” I said. “Getting there.”
He nodded and went back to pretending not to listen.
Tannin dropped onto the couch near him. “She’s fine,” she whispered loudly. “You’re the one who looks like you’re trying to solve advanced algebra.”
Rook glared. “I can solve algebra.”
“No, you can’t,” she said.
“Yes, I can,” he argued.
“Then what’s twenty percent of eighty?” Tannin asked.
Rook opened his mouth. Closed it. Then said, “Shut up.”
Reif laughed so hard he snorted.
Jess walked in with two bags of groceries and sighed like he had been doing difficult math all afternoon. “Please tell me we’re not teaching each other fractions,” he said. “I do not have the emotional stamina for that.”
The loft settled into soft laughter. Warm. Ordinary. Alive.
Torin’s hand slid around my waist and he pulled me gently between his legs, my back against his chest. “We’re going to get through this,” he whispered. “One piece at a time.”
“I know,” I said. “It just feels like new information keeps changing who I am.”
“No,” Torin said, voice low and certain. “The information doesn’t change you. It just gives you more of yourself.”
I turned my head slightly to look at him. “Do you really think that?”
“I do,” he answered. “You’re becoming more Marlowe. Not less.”
Something soft cracked open inside me.
I rested my head on his shoulder. “I love you,” I said.
His arms folded around me. “I love you too.”
Reif made a gagging sound from across the room. “You two are killing me.”
Jess tossed a sock at him. “You’ll survive.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe we all would.
The sun lowered, turning the sky outside deep amber.
I looked again at the picture of my mother on the counter. Her face was gentle. Her smile soft. Her eyes full of a life I would never know but felt connected to anyway.
I wasn’t ready for closure. Not fully. But I wasn’t drowning in the ache of it either. It felt like the beginning of healing. The beginning of the next chapter of my life. And for the first time in a long, long time, I didn’t feel like I was running from ghosts.
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