But it seemed like that’s what happened to Amma. She was lapped right up, transported, transportated—all of it.

Did the universe, or the Lord and his lap, or the Greats expect me to feel happy about it? I had just been through hell to get back to the regular world of Gatlin—back to Amma, and Lena, and Link, and Marian.

How long did we have together?

Was I supposed to be okay with that?

One minute she was there, and then it was over. Now the sky was the sky again, flat and blue and calm, as if it really was just painted plaster, like my bedroom ceiling. Even if someone I loved was trapped somewhere behind it.

That’s how I felt now. Trapped on the wrong side of the sky.

Alone on the top of the Summerville water tower, looking out over the world I had known my entire life, a world of dirt roads and paved routes, of gas stations and grocery stores and strip malls. And everything was the same, and nothing was the same.

I wasn’t the same.

I guess that’s the thing about a hero’s journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to. I had changed.

I had come back from the dead, and Amma was gone, even if she was one of the Greats now.

You couldn’t get more changed than that.

I heard a clanging on the ladder beneath me, and I knew who it was before I felt her curling around my heart. The warmth exploded across me, across the water tower, across Summerville. The sky was striped with gold and red, as if the sunrise was reversing itself, lighting up the sky all over again.

There was only one person who could do that to a sky or my heart.

Ethan, is that you?

I smiled even as my eyes turned wet and blurry.

It’s me, L. I’m right here. Everything’s going to be okay now.

I reached my hand down and wrapped it around hers, pulling her up onto the platform at the top of the water tower.

She slid into my arms, falling into sobs that beat against my chest. I don’t know which one of us was crying harder. I’m not even sure we remembered to kiss. What we had went so much deeper than a kiss.

When we were together, she turned me completely inside out.

It didn’t matter if we were dead or alive. We could never be kept apart. There were some things more powerful than worlds or universes. She was my world, as much as I was hers. What we had, we knew.

The poems are all wrong. It’s a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper.

And sometimes gold can stay.

Anybody who’s ever been in love can tell you that.

CHAPTER 37

What the Words Never Say

Amma Treadeau has been declared legally dead, following her disappearance from Wate’s Landing, the home of Mitchell and Ethan Wate, on Cotton Bend, in Central Gatlin’—” I stopped reading out loud.

I was sitting at her kitchen table, where her One-Eyed Menace waited sadly in the mason jar on her counter, and it didn’t seem possible that I was reading Amma’s obituary. Not when I could still smell the Red Hots and the pencil lead.

“Keep readin’.” Aunt Grace was leaning over my shoulder, trying to read the print that her bifocals were ten strengths too weak to read.

Aunt Mercy was sitting in her wheelchair, on the other side of the table, next to my dad. “They best say somethin’ about Amma’s pie. Or the Good Lord as my witness, I’ll go down there ta The Stars ’n’ Bars and give them a piece a my mind.” Aunt Mercy still thought our town newspaper was named after the Confederate flag.

“It’s The Stars and Stripes,” my father corrected gently. “And I’m sure they worked hard to assure Amma is remembered for all her talents.”

“Hmm.” Aunt Grace sniffed. “Folks ’round here don’t know a lick about talent. Prudence Jane’s singin’ was looked over by the choir for years.”

Aunt Mercy crossed her arms. “She had the voice of an angel if I ever heard one.”

I was surprised Aunt Mercy could hear anything without her hearing aid. She was still carrying on when Lena began to Kelt with me.

Ethan? Are you okay?

I’m okay, L.

You don’t sound okay.

I’m dealing.

Hold on. I’m coming.

Amma’s face stared out at me from the newspaper, printed in black and white. Wearing her best Sunday dress, the one with the white collar. I wondered if someone had taken that photo at my mom’s funeral or Aunt Prue’s. It could’ve been Macon’s.

There had been so many.

I laid the paper down on the scarred wood. I hated that obituary. Someone from the paper must have written it, not someone who knew Amma. They’d gotten everything wrong. I guess I had a new reason to hate The Stars and Stripes as much as Aunt Grace did.

I closed my eyes, listening to the Sisters fuss about everything from Amma’s obituary to the fact that Thelma couldn’t make grits the right way. I knew it was their way of paying their respects to the woman who had raised my dad and me. The woman who had made them pitcher after pitcher of sweet tea and made sure they didn’t leave the house with their skirts hitched up in their pantyhose when they left for church.

After a while, I couldn’t hear them at all. Just the quiet sound of Wate’s Landing mourning, too. The floorboards creaked, but this time I knew it wasn’t Amma in the next room. None of her pots were banging. No cleavers were attacking the cutting board. No warm food would be coming my way.