Chapter 40. Mount Auburn

Tessa’s POV

“Can I show you something?” he asks.

It’s 4:30. The sun is low and orange over the harbor, and I’ve been sitting on this bench in silence for ten minutes, trying to remember a single birthday cake and failing. He hasn’t said anything. He just put his arm along the back of the bench behind me and let me sit there.

“Sure,” I say.

“It’s not on your itinerary.”

“I’ll allow it.”

***

We take a cab across the river to Cambridge. He doesn’t tell me where we’re going, and I don’t ask. He just looks out the window, and his knee isn’t pressed against mine anymore. His hands are folded in his lap, very still.

The cab stops outside a pair of tall iron gates.

Mount Auburn Cemetery.

I look at him.

“She’s here,” he says. “She was born in Boston. She wanted to be buried where she could hear the city.”

The cemetery is enormous. Winding paths, old trees gone red and gold, stone angels and stone lions and tiny marble ho