Naomi end

Naomi lays the rose on top of the makeshift headstone and kneels down before the fresh mound of earth, head held low. She remains quiet for a very long time, and eventually my curiosity gets the better of me.

Grey
What are you doing?

Naomi
I'm praying.

Maybe I should have been able to guess it from her posture, but the response catches me totally off guard. Even though she isn't looking at me, she seems to sense my surprise.

Naomi
First time in years, of course. It was a little awkward... like calling a sibling you haven't spoken to in a long time. I've been thinking about how to approach it for a while now... it took me a long time to decide on what to say.

Grey
What did you say?

Naomi
You know me. I kept it simple.

Naomi
I said, "God, let's set aside our differences. Elly was a good person. If you're out there... if you're half the man her precious storybook said you were... she'll have a place to land when she gets to the other side. Give her the happy ending she always believed in."

Naomi
"...And if you don't... so help me you, I will find you, and I will cut you."

Grey
You threatened to cut God?

Naomi
I don't take bullshit from people I can't even see. God's gonna have to deal with it.

She stands up and brushes the dirt off her pant legs. Then she looks around the ruined church courtyard. I take a moment to do the same.

The sun is rapidly setting now, casting everything in a golden-orange gloom. Beyond the ancient crumbling gravestones, the church's roof has caved in on itself, and the clocktower is leaning at a precarious angle. Even still, its hands are keeping proper time. Clockwork amidst chaos.

I think about all the endless hours I spent on that tower roof with Naomi... and Bro... and Elly... sitting up there on the edge, shooting the shit, looking out for one another. Keeping our watch duty, just as regular as the clockwork itself. Because of the way the tower leans, I can see the roof from where I stand. If I squint-- maybe it's just psychosomatic-- but I think maybe I can make out words that Naomi and I carved into the paint on the railing.

Memento vivere.

There's a hole in the rubble that the light shines through. Straight from the front of the church and all the way through to the graveyard, where it hits the cross that marks Elly's grave and refracts across it.

On the other side of the church, where that beam of light is entering the ruin, are the steps where Father de Laurent discovered Elly all those years ago. The steps where, in some sense, she was born. Not twenty yards from where she is buried.

How fitting it is that she should be laid to rest here, where she spent her whole life. Beside this building that she dedicated herself to, heart and soul. Yet somehow it makes me angry. The injustice of it all. How little she lived. How much more she could have seen and done.

The way she died, brutally and in pain, all alone.

My hand in her death.

If I had never met her... if I had never brought the cancer that was Sara into her life...

Naomi
I haven't always lived in Denton.

Grey
Huh?

Naomi
When I was a little girl, my father and I moved way up north. It was right after my mother died. He was so torn up over it that he couldn't bear to be in the same town anymore. So he took this dead-end job at a police precinct out in the ass-end of nowhere. Cold as hell all the time. Snow like you wouldn't believe. I fucking hated it.

Naomi
Luckily, he hated it too. The shoveling, the wind... the fucking trudging. Can you imagine? Literally having to trudge everywhere you go. Who wants to trudge? So right before our second winter there, dad decided he'd had enough, and we came back to Denton.

Grey
No place like home, right?

Naomi
Maybe. There was one thing I did like about that place, though. The snow itself was beautiful. Pure and white. Unblemished. So soft... like holding powdered air. Ever since then, I've always said that the world would be perfect if it could be 70 degrees and snowy.

Naomi
I guess we really don't live in the best of all possible worlds. The truth is, if you want snow, you have to accept that it comes with cold.

Naomi
...And if you love... you have to accept that it comes with the promise of loss.

Naomi
I think I finally learned how to do that.

Naomi
I loved Elly as much as one person can love another person... she meant the world to me. But I never worked up the nerve to tell her. That's all she wanted to hear. Three simple words. I wish I could go back in time and punch myself for being so stupid.

Grey
Naomi...

I reach out to stroke her face as a gesture of comforting, but she slaps my hand away. Even in the dying of the sunlight and with her face cast in shadow, I can see the tears beginning to come.

Naomi
I'm not going to make the same mistake twice. I don't care anymore that we could be dead tomorrow. I don't care if it's meaningless, or silly, or if I don't deserve to be happy because of all the mistakes I've made. I can't live all mired in regrets anymore.

Naomi
What happened in the past is over... no matter how much I wish I could, I can't change it. Worrying myself sick about what will happen in the future is useless, too... no, it's worse than useless. It paralyzes me.

Naomi
The only thing that matters is that we're alive. Right now, at this very moment. Here in the world together.

Naomi
We /will/ lose each other someday. Maybe even someday soon. Like two ships parting ways in the night, headed for opposite ends of an inky oblivion. But that's all the more reason to cherish it. This moment is all we have.

Naomi
Grey Faulkner...

Naomi
I love you.