He’s a scary bastard, but he has a soul.

I’m not a smoker. Sure, I’ve smoked before. But I’ve always been an athlete, and a smoking athlete is a weak athlete. So I’m not big on cigarettes.

But today hurts.

So I’m smoking.

I hear crickets in the distance and the sound of wind sweeping through the purple fields.

I’m alone. I’m thinking. I wish I wasn’t thinking.

I hear the back door to the kitchen close and see a form step outside with a trash bag. I know that form. I’ve felt that form against my body.

Pixie starts to turn away, but freezes when she catches sight of me in the shadows. How she sees me I’m not sure, but she’s on her way over.

I stay seated and rub a hand down my face.

Her walk is slow and deliberate until she stops beside me, dressed in her work clothes. Even though we both had the day off, we still decided to work. Work keeps the demons out.

She watches me smoke for a moment. “Got one for me?”

I exhale a cloud of smoke. “No.”

She plucks the lit cigarette from my hand. At first I think she’s going to stomp it out and lecture me on the health ramifications of smoking. But she doesn’t. She takes her own slow drag and breathes the smoke in before handing it back to me.

I take it from her, both annoyed and turned on. “You shouldn’t smoke.”

She sits on a rock in front of me, just a foot or so away, and I can feel my body respond to how close she is.

“I shouldn’t do a lot of things.” She looks at the stars. “Charity hated cigarettes.”

I shift against the log.

“She would always try to smoke, but end up coughing and gagging.” She tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “It was fun to watch her try, though.” A small smile plays at her lips.

I take another drag, watching her carefully. “I don’t remember that.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t think she ever wanted you to see her try. You were her hero, you know?” She plays with a lace on her shoe.

“I don’t remember that either.” My lungs are shrinking and I can’t quite get the air I need to keep my eyes from stinging.

“You were my hero too,” she says softly. “You still are.”

She drives her eyes into me, and all the memories I just ran away from, all the thinking I wasn’t doing, it all comes swooping back in, picking me up with razor-sharp claws.

It feels like Charity is right here, sitting between us. It’s tense and it’s heavy, but, somehow, it doesn’t feel wrong. Pix must feel it too because I see her shift on the rock.

I wish I could protect her from everything bad, always. I want to protect her from drunk driving and asshole guys, of course. But I also want to protect her from the sadness of losing Charity. The guilt.

“It’s not your fault,” I say.

Her eyes glide to mine in the darkness.

“What happened to Charity,” I continue, “wasn’t your fault. Not at all.”

The moment Charity’s name leaves my lips, a charge goes into the air, and at first I’m afraid of it. Like maybe I just unleashed an emotional hell that will take me another year to shove back inside my soul.

But then I take a breath and my chest rises freely, because saying Charity’s name feels good. No. It feels safe.

Safe with Pixie.

She leans forward on the rock so our faces are directly in front of each other, and she looks right at me, silent. It’s not sexual. It’s not playful. It’s Pixie asking for my full attention, and now she has it.

“It’s not your fault either,” she says.

I look down at her scar.

She follows my eyes and takes my face into her hands, tipping my chin up so I’m gazing at her soft face. “And what happened to me wasn’t your fault.”

I pull my head away and look at the dirt.

“It wasn’t your fault—”

“Stop, Pix,” I say quietly.

She’s quiet for a few minutes; then she slides down the rock until she’s right in front of me, knees in the dirt, apron on the ground.

“I forgive you.” Her steeled eyes wait for mine to meet them and hold me there under the stars. “You have nothing to be forgiven for,” she says, “but I still forgive you. Will you forgive me?”

I stare at her in horror. “For what?”

“For getting wasted with Charity at that party. For encouraging her to leave. For letting her drive drunk.”

She’s insane. None of that was her fault. None of that was—

“I forgive you,” she repeats. “Will you please forgive me?”

The look in her eyes tells me we’re not talking about blame. We’re talking about heartbreak and loss and all the things we don’t know how to deal with.

“I forgive you,” I say, meaning it even though there is nothing that needs to be forgiven, and I’m looking at little Pixie, six years old and stealing my Transformers. Six years old and wiggling her way into my heart. She’s still there, wrapped inside me like she’s mine. And maybe she is.

Suddenly it’s gone. The guilt, the heaviness. The fear of letting myself be happy, love fully. It’s all gone. Because Pixie just forgave me. And maybe I just forgave myself.

The air around us is free. It’s like a million tiny weights are floating up off my chest and into the sky, and I didn’t know I could feel so much relief.

She moves to sit beside me, and my body tenses as hers slides down my side until she’s leaning against the log. Reaching over, she takes the cigarette from my hand and brings it to her mouth. Tiny red embers glow in the darkness as she sucks smoke into her lungs and tips her head back, resting it against the log as she stares at the sky.

I shift down a bit, the side of my body rubbing against hers until our shoulders are level, and rest my head back as well, looking at the sky as Pixie slowly exhales beside me. A cloud of gray smoke feathers into the air above us, blocking the night sky until dissolving into the black and unveiling the heavens.

We gaze at the sky for a long, quiet minute, and the only sounds I hear are the crickets and Pixie’s steady breaths.

I feel like a kid again. Stars above me, Pixie beside me. There’s solace in the silence that floats between us, and I wonder if she feels it too. I could stay here all night, where the sky is bigger than anything in my life and lavender scents the air. I could stay here forever.

I hear the smile in Pixie’s voice. “Remember when Charity and I tried to jump off the porch roof and you got all mad?”

I scoff. “What were you, like six?”

“Yeah. We were being fairies, remember? We had our costumes on from Halloween and we were going to fly.” She says this in exaggerated wonderment and I laugh. I actually laugh.

Charity was a pain in the ass to keep alive. It wasn’t just the porch thing. The girl climbed ridiculously tall trees and went cliff jumping and stuff. But the fairy thing, that was the beginning of it all. Charity and Pix were dressed up with my mom’s makeup on and they were carrying these stupid wands. Ugh. They were so adorably annoying.

“I didn’t let you fly,” I say.

“No. You told on us.”

I smile. “I sure as hell did.”

And then we’re silent for a moment, but the air isn’t so smoky and I’m not so heavy.

“That was the first time you ever called me Pixie,” she says quietly.

I inhale, thinking about little Sarah dressed up like a fairy in my backyard, all pink and sassy. “Yes, it was.”

She pauses. “I like being Pixie.”

I don’t say anything, but I smile.

Inhale.