Grave Stories Novels & Stories

I was gone, and it wasn't as though they could speak ill of me now, not while my body was being buried in the ground. Even my mother-in-law came. She was already a frail, tiny woman, but seeing her there made her appear decades older. Grayson knelt before my gravestone, convinced he was performing some act of atonement. But to me, his presence was nothing more than repulsive. After the funeral, he returned to the small apartment. Alice, starved for three days, lay there, barely clinging to life. The moment she saw Grayson, fear overtook her—a fear she couldn't hide.

And he falls silent. Waiting for my response? "That's good," I say, "because I don't want to share you either." He smiles and sits back, sipping his wine, his expression thoughtful. "Tell me about 'redbreast' and 'ravens'," he says. "I expected you to simply give me 'yellow' and 'red' or something similar. It sounds as though there is a story behind the two words." "It's from when I was a little girl," I say. "There were ravens at the bottom of our garden, and when I was small, they seemed so huge."