The Dead Romantics

I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.

But I was wrong.

Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.

Every person has a secret. Every secret has a story.

“What would this scene be like?” I began, hope making my chest hurt, knotted tight. I might’ve just been that weird girl who gave him a cactus and a book, but maybe—just maybe—I was more. “A refined editor from a prestigious romance imprint and—”

“A chaotic ghostwriter who takes graveyard walks at midnight and shouts in the rain and unironically orders rum and Cokes and bites her thumbnail when she thinks no one’s looking.”

“I do not,” I lied, my voice cracking, as he stepped closer still, and suddenly he was in front of me, and cupped my face in his hands, the
recognition in his eyes blooming like dandelions, and the ache in my chest turned into something warm and bright and golden.

“I knew you once,” he said so ardently, it made my heart flutter.

“I think you still do,”