What could have been will now never be.
That’s what hurts the most.
76
What Have I Done?
Hades scoops me up and sits on a huge leather chair, pulling me onto his lap, curving his body around mine as though to offer shelter. A stillness has taken me over.
Not numbness.
The pain is right here, eating at me. But I don’t want to move or speak, and I definitely won’t let myself cry. I know, somehow, it will get worse if I do.
“Lyra,” Hades murmurs. He strokes my hair softly.
I breathe. I try to breathe through it.
“Don’t hold it in, love.”
If anything, I clamp down tighter. I don’t want to feel this. I don’t want to let it in. But the one thing I can’t stop are the memories.
Moments of Boone over twelve years. Moments I’m seeing through different eyes.
That cocky grin taunting me from around every corner. The way he used to sidle up next to me in the food line, usually to snatch something off my tray. “Whachya working on today?” he’d say.
He had a particular craving for pancakes. I’ve never seen someone smother anything in that much syrup. And he’d laugh when he got in trouble for using too much—our den wasn’t big on condiments—so he’d just go steal some more.
The time he stole that damned painting from under Lakshmi’s nose is there, too, fresh in my mind after he brought it up the other day.
New memories as well. I’d like to be your friend, he said.
Even this morning, just having breakfast together.
He was with me this morning.
My throat clogs.
Breathe.
He didn’t share this part of taking that painting with the gods the other night, and at the time I thought he was just making fun of me, but now the memory might haunt me for the rest of my life. “I took it for you, Lyra-Loo-Hoo. Won’t it look pretty on your bedroom wall?” Was he trying to be my friend even then? How had he known that I secretly coveted the beauty of that scene? I never shared that with anyone. Then he pointed at another one he’d taken, too. “That one, we can fence.” Not that I believed him, and not that Felix let him keep anything.
Oh gods. I did this. He’s dead because of me. My humming alerted the automaton inside that room and…
“Lyra.” Hades’ voice has taken on a thread of worry.
“I don’t want to let it out,” I tell him, my voice as small as I feel.
“Why?”
“If I sit here and cry, if I give in to it, I don’t know if I’ll ever get up again.” And that’s not me. I’m the person who gets shit done, who never stops moving, who figures out a solution to the problem in front of me, because they never stop coming, and then the next and the next until one day all the problems will be solved.
Only I can’t solve this one.
Hades’ arms tighten around me, and we sit in silence. I don’t know how long. He doesn’t push me to let go again, and the memories are coming faster now. I can’t make them stop.
It’s like discovering the fabric of my past was sewn into a tapestry that I couldn’t see until I stepped back. A thousand different moments that I disregarded or wrote off because of my curse.
A thousand missed opportunities.
My mind goes all the way back to the scrawny kid who showed up when I was eleven and Boone was thirteen, all elbows and knees but with hints of the man he’d become. He took one look at me, grinned, and said I was too small to be a thief and maybe the Order should throw me back.
Gods, he’s such a tease.
Was.
Sorrow grips my heart and squeezes hard.
Boone was such a tease.
Not anymore.
How would things be different if I hadn’t put up the walls he said I built around myself? If I’d tried harder?
We’ll never know now.
Boone is dead.
