The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

LOCAL GIRL SOLVES MURDER WITH GHOSTS

Here was the truth: Lee Marlow flunked out of Yale. His parents lived in Florida, and his sister was married to a librarian in Seattle. He never chased a master’s at Oxford. He never interned at the Wall Street Journal.

Well, who he had once been. I paused. “Benji . . . Andor?” And he was most definitely dead.

On shit

when most normal people were either asleep or getting down to business (to defeat the Huns). (Sex, I mean sex.)

I began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe.

She told me that you don’t ever lose the sadness, but you learn to love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And, eventually, you’ll pick yourself back up and you’ll find that you’re okay. That you’re going to be okay. And eventually, it’ll be true.”

“She couldn’t have,” Ben replied gently. “She had been bedridden for at least a year prior while she was writing her last book—The Forever House. We had a quiet funeral. She wanted it that way, because she had an idea. There were four books left in her contract, and she wanted them written, but she didn’t want the cloud of her passing to define them. So she laid out a plan to find a ghostwriter and finish those books. She also told me not to notify her publisher.”

“But she didn’t. She asked me herself. After she died,” I realized, and sighed. “I took a job from a ghost. Never had that on my bingo card . . .”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and gave me a sad sort of pleading look. It twisted my gut. “I want to be with you—but not like this. I want to grow old with you. I want to wake up every morning and see you on the pillow beside me. I want to cherish every moment of our lives and—”

He knew. I hugged the note to my chest.

“Who told you that lie? It’s never easy. It’s also never really goodbye—and trust me, we’re in the business of goodbyes. The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched. There is no happy ending, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can. Or whatever. Metaphor-metaphor-simile shit.”

Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.

“I’m not your rival, Lee Marlow,” I told him, shaking my hand because it hurt. “You’re not even in my league. But you better watch me,” I added, and grabbed my suitcase handle again, “because I’ll be the writer you will never be.”

She didn’t want a loud life. She just wanted a good one.

Your zoom-zoom juice might backfire on the flight.”

“Oh, I am going to be even more ridiculous when I demand to put googly eyes on all six of those abs—”