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Henry, it’s astonishing. This plain little country girl, so painfully awkward and dull—“Okay, wait, keep reading,” Mazzy said—might be the greatest artist I’ve ever known. She puts my work to shame. Your work, I’m sorry to say, love, as well.
She looked at me for a few seconds, and I knew she was repeating the phrase in her head. I could hear every single syllable inside her mind, the entire utterance, because I knew what it sounded like so clearly.
Because of this old man who did end up dying five months after he retired, which made me cry all over again, his kindness before he disappeared from my life, which was not how people usually left me or I left them.
There was always talk of a TV series or movie, but it never quite happened, which was fine with me. I didn’t want it to be that real.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I lived in the world.
That thing we’d created together. I guess it was mine alone now.
He seemed happy, and I was overjoyed, sincerely, to know this. I hadn’t ruined him. He hadn’t ruined me. We’d stayed alive in this world. I didn’t want that to change.
I promised myself that it would be a good place. I would make it. I’d keep making it. I said the line to myself, and it sounded so right. I had made that. I loved it.
We went into the house, the three of us, and we left the front door wide open, completely unprotected, because nothing would hurt us. Forever and forever and forever.
And I had, of course. I had told her every night, the only person I could tell, and I’d whisper it to her, the words piling up, but I said them so softly, underneath the sound machine, an ocean, which filled the room. But she had remembered.
I lay in that bed, breathing, alive.