The Binding

The lilies were wrong.

Claire had hated lilies. She'd once ranted for twenty minutes about how they smelled like death dressed up for a date, how funeral homes had ruined them forever. She would have wanted peonies—blush pink, barely open, the kind that looked like secrets waiting to unfold.

But Claire wasn't here to complain about the flowers. That was the whole point.

I stood at the back of the reception hall after the service, watching strangers pick at canapés and speak in hushed tones about what a tragedy it was, how young she'd been, how sudden. Thirty-one. An aneurysm in her sleep. There one night, dreaming about her wedding; gone by morning.

I hadn't cried yet. Not on the phone when our mother called, her voice cracking into pieces. Not on the flight from Seattle, turbulence shaking the plane while I stared at the clouds and tried to make the words compute. Not at the viewing, where Claire looked like a wax figure of herself, her hair curled wrong, her hands folded in a way she never would have chosen.

I was waiting for it to feel real.

"Iris."

I turned, and there he was.

Marcus Reid looked like a man who had been hollowed out and stitched back together by someone who didn't quite remember where all the pieces went. His suit hung on him differently than it had at their engagement party six months ago. His eyes—those deep brown eyes Claire had written sonnets about in her journal when she thought no one was reading—were rimmed red and impossibly tired.

He'd been the one to find her. Woke up beside her, reached for her, found her cold.

"Marcus." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I'm so sorry."

The words were pathetic, insufficient, the same words fifty other people had probably said to him today. But he nodded like they mattered anyway.

"She talked about you all the time," he said. "I feel like I know you, even though we've only met a few times."

Three times. Claire's birthday dinner two years ago. Their engagement party. A video call where I'd waved from my apartment in Seattle while Claire showed off her ring and Marcus smiled in the background, looking at her like she'd hung every star.

"She talked about you constantly too," I said. "I probably know your coffee order better than my own boyfriend's."

The joke fell flat. I didn't have a boyfriend. Hadn't for over a year. But I'd needed to say something normal, something that pretended the world still made sense.

Marcus almost smiled. It was worse than watching him cry would have been—that ghost of the expression he must have worn when Claire was alive, now haunting a face that had forgotten how to hold it.

"Black with one sugar," he said. "She remembered that on our first date. Said it proved I had no imagination but...