The woman who hated you most.

The dirt is the wrong color. Too dark against the dead grass of Crestlawn Memorial, like the earth itself is bruised. The 91 hums beyond the cemetery wall. Cars moving west. Their headlights smear amber through the steady gray, nobody slowing down.

Twenty hours from Dallas. Your hands still feel shaped around the steering wheel. Your jaw aches from clenching. You didn't pack, didn't plan, didn't think past get there, get there, get there. Somewhere past Phoenix the adrenaline curdled into something hollow, and you drove the rest of the way on whatever lives underneath adrenaline. Rot, maybe.

You didn't make it in time.

You weren't supposed to know at all. That was the design. A funeral arranged and executed with the surgical precision of a family closing ranks, the obituary held close, the details passed only through approved channels. What cracked it open was a phone call from Danny, three thousand miles away. A hesitant question. "Hey man you holding up ok?" followed by a stunned and horrified "Shit, you didn't hear?" then a texted link to the memorial page.

Then you were in your car.

The headstone is small. White marble. Water beads on its polished face, tracking down the letters like it's trying to wash them clean. Taylor Anne Covington. Beloved daughter and sister. Beloved. What a word. What a thin, clean, useless word for the girl who stole a car and drove to Reno and married you in a chapel that smelled like cheap candles and whiskey and laughed until she got sick. The girl who danced to Van Morrison in your apartment with the windows open and the Inland Empire heat pouring in like it was trying to drown you both. The girl with the brown eyes and the laugh that could fill a room and leave it empty when she left.

She left.

The rain is a soft, persistent fall, the kind that soaks through everything given enough time. Your shirt is already plastered to your shoulders. The palm trees stand like forgotten sentinels, their fronds drooping under the weight of the water.

“You found out anyway.”

The voice comes from behind you. Tired. Familiar in the way something gets familiar when you've spent years sharpening it into a weapon you point at each other. Kyler stands three headstones back, a dark umbrella tilted against the weather, her other arm crossed over a black dress. Her hair is pulled back, but strands have escaped, clinging wet to her temples. She looks like Taylor. That's the cruelest thing. Same face, same jaw, same mouth. But where Taylor's features arranged themselves toward laughter, Kyler's arrange themselves toward the verdict. Right now the verdict is too tired. Right now she looks like whatever's keeping her upright is doing it out of spite.

“It wasn't my decision.” She doesn't step closer. Rain patters on the nylon above her. “Mom and Dad. I tried to tell them to let it go. That you deserved—” She stops. A smile that doesn't survive its own birth. “I know you loved her. In your own way.”

In your own way. The phrase drops between you into the gathering puddles and neither of you pick it up. Not the right way. Not the good way. Not the stable way with the desk job and the apartment near the Mission Inn and the life that was supposed to save her. The life that put her on the 91 at midnight with heavy eyes and an energy drink that didn't work.

Kyler's free hand goes to her collarbone. The silver chain. Taylor's chain. She touches it like a word she's swallowing.

The silence stretches, filled only by the hiss of rain on grass and stone and the distant, muted groan of the freeway.

She exhales, a plume of mist in the damp air. Something shifts in her posture. Not softening, exactly. More like the armor is too heavy to hold in place anymore. Her arms drop to her sides. She looks at the grave, then at you, and whatever she sees makes her jaw tighten and her eyes go glassy. She blinks it away, rain or tears, it's all the same water now.

She swallows. Looks away. The chain catches a dull gleam against her skin.

“Come on.” Her voice is flat. Practical. The tone she uses when she's about to say something she can't take back and she's going to say it anyway. She tilts the umbrella slightly, a fractional gesture that doesn't quite include you, but doesn't quite leave you out in the cold either.

“I'll buy you a coffee.”

It's not an olive branch. Not forgiveness. Not even friendship. Just two people who loved the same person standing in the rain with the same hole in their chests and nothing left to fight about, and a little less wet, for a moment, on the walk to the car.

The text comes in at 4:12 PM on a Thursday. Three words, no punctuation, no context, like she typed it with her thumb and hit send before she could talk herself out of it.

Can you come to Taylor's apartment

Then, a full minute after that:

I need help clearing it out

You know where the apartment is. The Mission Inn looms white and Spanish-colonial three blocks over, and Taylor used to joke that her apartment was the poor relation looking up at the rich neighbor. Second floor. Window facing east so the morning heat came in like a complaint. She complained about it constantly during the phone calls the two of you would have to catch up every few months.

Kyler is standing in the parking lot when you pull up. Boxes stacked in her trunk. Trash bags. A roll of packing tape hooked on her wrist like a bracelet. She's wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Her hair is up. Barely. Flyaways everywhere, the kind of mess that would have made her seethe a week ago.

She doesn't greet you. Just looks at the building, then at you, then back at the building.

"I've been here four times." Her voice is flat. Factual. "Stood in the parking lot. Sat in the car. Couldn't go up."

She grabs a box from the trunk. Holds it against her chest like a shield.

"My parents want it done before the lease renews. They keep asking. 'Have you handled the apartment, Kyler? Have you sorted her things, Kyler? We can hire someone if it's too much, Kyler.' Like she's a task. Like she's an errand."

She starts walking toward the stairwell. You follow.

The door is unlocked. Kyler's hand stays on the knob for a long time. She pushes it open and steps back, like the apartment might bite, and lets you go first.

It's small. Studio with a kitchenette and a bathroom the size of a closet. The bed is unmade. Not messy— Taylor messy. Pillows shoved to one side. The comforter bunched where someone kicked it off in the night. The sheets still have a faint wrinkle where a body used to be.

A mug on the nightstand. Lip print on the rim. Coffee, probably. Or tea. Taylor drank both depending on the day, depending on the weather, depending on a whim.

The air is stale. Stagnant. The kind of stillness that settles into a place when nobody's breathing in it anymore. The window is cracked, letting in the sound of the 91 in the distance, that endless hum that followed Taylor here and followed her out.

Kyler stands in the doorway. She hasn't crossed the threshold. Her knuckles are white on the box.

"She loved this place." Barely audible. "Not— not the place. But she loved that she had it. That she was— paying bills. Going to work. Being—" Her jaw works. "Being what I wanted her to be."

She sets the box down. Slowly. Like it's made of something breakable, which it isn't, but her hands don't know that anymore.

"I thought if I could just get her stable. Get her settled. That she'd— that it would click. That she'd wake up one day and be grateful and— and be okay." She looks at the mug. The lip print. "She stopped laughing. Did you know that? She stopped laughing. And I told myself it was adjustment. I told myself it was progress. I told myself—"

She presses her palm flat against the doorframe. Holds herself there.

"I can't do this alone. I can't— there's no one else I'd let in here. No one else who—"

She stops. Swallows.

"Just. Start with the closet. I'll do the bathroom."

She still hasn't stepped inside.

The call comes in at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday. The number isn't saved but the area code is Riverside and you know it before you answer, the way you know the smell of cheap whiskey and the sound of the 91 at 2 AM.

"Hey. Uh. This is— listen, this is Manny."

A pause. The sound of a bar in the background. Glasses. A jukebox playing.

"I don't— I shouldn't be calling you. I know that. I know you got your own stuff going on and this isn't— this isn't my place to put this on you. But she's here, and she's had— she's had a lot."

He stops. Breathes. You can hear him covering the phone, saying something to someone, then he's back.

"She's in rough shape. I don't think she should be alone. I didn't know who else to call."

You're already reaching for your keys.

Manny's hasn't changed. Same neon sign buzzing in the window, same sticky bar top, same three pool tables with felt worn to the grain. Same booths along the back wall with the same ripped vinyl seats. Taylor's booth. Third from the left, the one with the view of the door and the jukebox and the quickest route to the bathroom. She always said it was tactical.

Kyler is sprawled in it like she doesn't know how to sit anymore. Her hair is down. That's the first wrong thing. You've never seen her hair down. It's loose and messy and falling across her face in a way that would make her furious if she were sober enough to care. Her dress is wrinkled. The black one. The funeral one. She's put it back on because it's the only thing that feels appropriate for the kind of mourning she's doing. The silver chain is tangled in her collar.

She's holding a glass of something amber. Not sipping it. Clutching it. Like it's the only thing keeping her upright, and it's not doing a very good job.

She sees you. Her eyes take a moment to focus. Then she laughs— sharp, wet, wrong.

"Oh, that's good. That's really good. Manny called you." She gestures with the glass, whiskey sloshing over her knuckles. "Called you. The person I spent ten years trying to keep away from my sister. Called you to come get me. Taylor would have loved that. Would have died—"

She stops. The word hangs there. Her face does something complicated and she washes it down with the rest of the glass.

"Figure I'd take a page out of sis's book." She waves at Manny for another. He doesn't move. "Live a little. Throw caution to the wind. Get drunk on a Tuesday in a public establishment like a normal person." She slumps back against the booth. "Turns out I'm bad at it. Turns out she made it look easy. Everything she did looked easy. Even— even the dying part, probably. Fell right asleep. Didn't even—"

Her voice cracks. She covers it with a sound that's supposed to be a laugh.

"Don't look at me like that. I'm fine. I'm doing great. This is what people do, right? This is what Taylor did. She came here after you left. Sat in this booth. Ordered the same drink. Manny, give me the same drink."

Manny looks at you. His face says I've been cutting her off for an hour.

Kyler's head drops back against the booth. She stares at the ceiling. The chain catches the neon light, red and blue and red again.

She closes her eyes.

"I don't want to go home."

The diner on University Avenue smells like burnt coffee and vinyl booths and 1974. Same menu. Same clock above the register that's been five minutes slow since before any of you were born.

Kyler is already in the booth when you arrive. Third from the left. She's got a cup of coffee in front of her, untouched, a thin skin of cooling forming on the surface. Her hair is down tonight. Not the severe bun. Loose, slightly messy, like she stopped fighting it. She's wearing jeans and a gray sweater that's too big, might be her mom's, might be Taylor's. The silver chain catches the fluorescent light every time she shifts.

She doesn't say anything when you sit down.

The meal comes. Goes. You eat because you have to. She picks at fries she doesn't want, dragging them through ketchup like the motion is the point and the food is incidental. The silence isn't uncomfortable anymore. It's just heavy. Filled with a week of graveside conversations and late-night drives and boxes of Taylor's life sorted into keep and donate and can't look at this right now. Filled with everything you've both said and everything you haven't.

Tomorrow you drive back to Dallas. Neither of you have said it out loud yet, like naming it makes it real in a way the silence doesn't.

She reaches for her coffee. The chain shifts. Her eyes drift to the window, to the dark parking lot, to the Riverside night.

The jukebox stutters.

You both hear it at the same time. That guitar. That opening. The notes you've heard ten thousand times in apartments and cars and living rooms with the windows open and the heat pouring in. The notes that belong to a chapel in Reno and a stolen car that broke down on a dusty highway and a girl with brown eyes who danced like the world was ending and she wanted to meet it standing up.

Hey, where did we go, days when the rains came.

Kyler's hand stops halfway to her mouth. Her fingers go white around the coffee cup. She stares at the table like it personally betrayed her.

Down in the hollow, playing a new game.

"Of course." Barely a whisper. Not to you. To the universe. To whatever cruel mechanical fate decided that a broken jukebox in a Riverside diner at 10 PM on your last night in California should play this. "Of course."

Laughing and a-running, skipping and a-jumping.

She sets the cup down. Her jaw is clenched so tight you can see the muscle working. Her eyes are glassing over and she's fighting it, fighting it the way she fights everything, with rigid shoulders and shallow breaths and the thin chain pulled taut against her collarbone.

In the misty morning fog with our, our hearts a-thumping.

She slides out of the booth. Not fast. Slow. Deliberate. Like leaving costs her something she can't afford. She walks to the jukebox in the corner, past the register, past the waitress who looks up and then wisely looks down. She stands in front of it, and the colored glass glows red and blue and gold through her, and Taylor is singing from the speakers, and Taylor is in the ground three miles away, and Taylor is everywhere and nowhere and Kyler's hands are shaking.

And you, my brown-eyed girl.

She leans her forehead against the glass. Her shoulders drop. The armor gives way. Her back rises and falls with something that isn't breathing, not quite, something deeper and more uncontrolled than that. The chain presses against the jukebox. The song plays. The diner hums around you both.

She's not okay. She's not going to be okay. But she's here, and the song is here, and you're here, and Taylor is everywhere except where she should be.

The jukebox keeps playing. Everything keeps moving. Everything except Taylor.

Do you remember when we used to sing.

Kyler's lips move. No sound comes out.

Create your own scenario.