Friday afternoons meant counting down the seconds until she was done with work and could see Henry again. Tonight, he'd told her that he could be at her place by six, which gave her a comfortable amount of time after work to drive home and freshen up a bit.

It was a little hard to dress for a date when she wasn't entirely sure what they'd wind up doing, but she was sure that she'd probably need something warmer than the long-sleeved tee shirt and leggings she'd been in all day. The sun hadn't completely sunk under the horizon yet and it was already down to a brisk forty degrees outside, so she was sure it would only continue to get colder.

Perhaps she could make them some hot chocolate—that'd be the perfect, cozy treat to end their week with, wouldn't it? She didn't actually know for certain that Henry even liked hot chocolate, but considering that he'd enjoyed every other sweet thing she'd seen him eat, she figured it was a pretty safe bet.

She was still daydreaming about cocoa and fluffy marshmallows when the doorbell rang and though she intended to immediately ask him if he was a fan of hot chocolate, her breath caught in her throat when she pulled the door open.

"You brought me flowers?"

The luxurious-looking bundle of pink roses in his hand suggested that the answer was yes.

"I did," he agreed as he stepped inside. "Is that okay?"

"Of course it's okay." The air finally left her lungs in the form of a surprised laugh. "But why?"

Henry almost seemed to be teasing her now, his eyebrows quirking upwards. "Do I have to have a reason?"

"No, but..."

"They just reminded me of you when I saw them," he offered as an explanation as she stood on tiptoe to fetch a vase out of her kitchen cabinets. "I mean, there's the fact that they're roses, obviously. But I don't see the pink ones all that often and for some reason the color made me think about that sweater you wore on our first date."

Her lips broke into a smile before she'd even turned back towards him to place the vase on the kitchen table.

"That is one of the cheesiest things I've ever heard," she informed him. "And one of the sweetest."

He didn't mind her poking fun at him—in fact, he grinned at it. "We both already knew I'm cheesy. That date was a Disney concert, remember?"

Amelia carefully took the bouquet from his hands to arrange it in the vase. "I couldn't forget," she murmured as she did it, then looked back up at him when she was done admiring her handiwork.

If there was anything she enjoyed looking at even more than the flowers, it was him. She lifted a delicate hand to his cheek and drew him in for a kiss, slow and sweet.

"Never change," she whispered to him. "You're wonderful the way you are, cheesiness and all. And the flowers are beautiful."

"I'm glad you like them." He stepped around the corner of the table so that he could come and wrap his arms around her from behind instead, dipping his chin to rest against her shoulder. "These past few weeks, it's felt like one hard thing keeps happening after another without us having much time to breathe in between. And I don't know how much it's been affecting you, but I realized I've been feeling...heavy, I guess. I wanted to do something nice for you."

"If you don't stop being so precious I'm literally going to start crying," she told him, her throat already feeling tight, but she slowly nodded at his statement. "I've been feeling it, too."

"I also might have come up with a bit of an unconventional suggestion for what we could do tonight," he admitted.

"Ah, so the flowers were really to soften the blow."

"They weren't," he mumbled. "They were just because I—because I care about you. You don't even have to come with me for this if you don't want to, but..."

Softly, because his mood seemed to have shifted a bit, Amelia asked, "What is it?"

"I...I try to go visit my sister every once in a while."

It took her a few seconds to process what he was saying. "You want to show me her..."

She couldn't seem to get the word grave out, but Henry regained his confidence and took it in stride.

"You haven't always wanted to go on a hot date to the cemetery?"

An ungainly snort came from the back of her throat, giving both of them a fit of the giggles. She could feel the soft vibration of it in his chest and held him closer for a second.

"You're a real keeper, alright." She lifted one of his hands off of her waist to press a quick kiss on it. "Of course I'll come with you—let me just grab one more jacket just in case."

"In case the dead people get cold?"

She laughed. "Henry–"

"Sorry, sorry," he grinned. "Sometimes you just have to find the humor where you can."

Amelia scurried into her bedroom to grab the first comfy jacket she saw and tug it on over her sweater. And a scarf. And a hat. She could never be too careful—she really didn't want to catch a cold less than a week before Thanksgiving. But when she reemerged back to the living room and Henry saw how much she'd bundled up, it took him considerable effort not to smile too much. Once she stepped outside and then bolted to his car as fast as she could, she could hear him softly laughing behind her, but he was nice enough to unlock it for her from as far of a distance as he could so that she didn't have to wait to crawl into its warmth. There was still some heat lingering inside from when he'd been driving it just a few minutes ago.

"You okay?" he asked once he slid into the driver's seat.

"I'm okay," she agreed. "Are you?"

"I am," he replied, reaching over for her hand. "On a kind of unrelated note, do you know what you're doing next Friday?"

"Black Friday? If you want me to wake up at like 2 a.m. to go shopping with you, the answer is probably no."

"The feeling's mutual. But we, um, we usually do dinner with dad's side of the family on Friday and it's honestly probably gonna suck this year–"

"Oh," she said quietly. "You want me to come...make it less miserable?"

"Make Liam less miserable, really," he acknowledged. "Aunt Teresa still decided to invite him this year and he didn't have it in him to say no."

Amelia's heart sank. She couldn't imagine what he was going to feel like sitting through dinner with Lily's parents this year—what any of them were going to feel like trying to celebrate the holidays without her.

"I'll be there. For both of you guys."

Henry exhaled a sigh of relief. "Thank you."

She nodded, unsure if she had the words to correctly verbalize what she was feeling. She would have endured so much for Henry's sake—that much had become obvious to her a while ago. But she had never really anticipated to find a friend in Liam, to come to care for him and be rooting for his happiness like it was her own. But they had both offered her solace at a time when she sorely needed it and brought her abundantly more comfort than she could have anticipated.

Her thoughts were only yanked back to the present situation when she noticed a pair of flashlights sitting in the middle console. Amelia glanced out the window, suddenly and irrationally nervous. The sky was pitch black now—thanks, winter—and although she wasn't usually afraid of the dark, she couldn't shake the eerie feeling out of her mind as they rumbled up to the cemetery, the ground beneath them morphing from asphalt to gravel in the parking lot.

Once Henry turned off the car and its headlights spluttered out, the only forms of illumination left were a dim lamp by the entrance sign and the flashlights in their hands. Amelia inhaled slowly, consciously reminding herself that creepy things probably didn't actually happen at cemeteries at night. This wasn't a horror movie.

Henry took one look at her face and said, "You're scared."

"I'm not–" she started to protest, then gave up as his expression softened. "Okay, maybe a little. It's just the dark and the...the openness, I guess."

"Nothing's gonna get to you," he murmured. "I've got you, okay? I promise."

She was equal parts embarrassed and relieved that he wasn't irked with her for being a total chicken about it. "Well, when you put it like that..."

"That's the spirit," he started to smile. "Get it? Spirit?"

She wasn't sure if she wanted to roll her eyes or laugh or both, but regardless, she was grateful when he held out his free hand to her. I really will follow this boy anywhere, she thought.

She took his hand and let him lead her into the darkness.

Amelia was clumsy enough when she could see more than five feet in front of her. In the dark? She was a walking disaster waiting to happen, but Henry kept her close to him so that she wouldn't accidentally plow into anything as he navigated her through the labyrinth of graves. This clearly wasn't his first time doing this at night—he never had to stop to get a sense of direction, never slowed down his long strides, though she wondered if that had anything to do with him trying to keep her out in the cold for as short a time as possible. He must have been as painfully aware of the temperature as she was, but it wasn't so bad while they were huddled up next to each other like a pair of penguins, the warmth of their bodies traversing back and forth to one another through their palms.

She knew that they must be near the right place when he started slowing down, and sure enough, he gradually came to a stop and shone his flashlight on the headstone in front of them.

It looked to be in good shape for its age, and her heart turned in her chest at the thought of someone, a stranger, tending to it week after week for these past eighteen years. Crouched where she and Henry were standing now, heat beating down on the back of their neck as they scrubbed the stone surface clean, plucked the weeds around it. Amelia knelt down to read the engraving.

Sarah Elisa Caruso

Beloved Daughter and Sister

August 15, 1997 - September 2, 2002

A sudden sadness roiled over her like a stormcloud. She hadn't anticipated that seeing the grave itself would be as difficult as hearing Henry talk about her, but the goosebumps that trailed up her arms weren't from the wind.

This was real, tangible. The physical manifestation of that little girl whose life had been cut much too short, who Amelia would never get to meet.

"Elisa..." The word slid off of the curve of her lips like water. She hadn't known what Sarah's middle name was before now, but it touched her in an unexpected way. "That's beautiful."

"It's from Dad's side of the family," Henry said quietly, sitting down next to her. "I've always liked it."

She glanced over at him. The harsh shadows cast on his face by the flashlight made him appear older than he was, sadder. But although his slightly scrunched eyebrows told her that he might be deep in thought, his posture was otherwise one of acceptance.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm okay. Once you've done this for long enough, you stop trying to control how you feel about it," he explained, his voice gentle. "If you start trying to change your emotions too much, you start to believe that one feeling is better than another. That there's a right and wrong way to be reacting, you know? And so that makes you feel guilty when you don't feel whatever you've convinced yourself is correct. You'll tear yourself apart if you start thinking like that. So I come, and I sit, and I feel whatever I'm feeling, and it's a little bit different every time."

He reached out and touched a delicate hand to the stone, his fingers drifting along its smooth surface for a moment before he pulled them back. "And in a way, this is the most grounding place for me to be if I'm thinking about her. It's definite. It has its odd way of calming me if my thoughts start going around in circles."

"Is that what happened to you today?"

He nodded. "If I start getting these random anxious thoughts about her, I know it's time to come back here. I think it's her way of bugging me from the afterlife."

"Just fulfilling her sisterly duties."

"Exactly." After a pause, he added, "Did I tell you that I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid? I wanted to help people, to maybe stop someone from suffering the same fate that she did. But as I got older, I realized that I just...I couldn't do it. I couldn't take on other people's pain like that when I already had enough of my own."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't regret it—that frankly would have required way too much school, anyway. But sometimes I wonder if I've lived a good enough life. If I was supposed to channel all that anger into doing something profound and instead I wasted it on self-loathing."

Oh, her sweet Henry. Couldn't he see how inherently good of a person he was?

Amelia covered his hand with her own. "You channeled it into loving Lily," she softly reminded him. "That could never be a mistake."

She heard the intake of his breath, but he seemed too overcome to speak and she had no intention of forcing him to. Instead, she set her flashlight down on the ground to reach into her pocket, her fingers brushing against the single rosebud she'd managed to sneak in there before they left the apartment.

"I'm sorry that it's not purple, Sarah," she murmured as she set it in front of the headstone as carefully as she could. "But your brother did a really good job picking it out for me."

She felt the gentle pressure of Henry resting his head against her shoulder, and she didn't let him go.

They stayed there and leaned into one another's warmth for an abstract amount of time—minutes, seconds, years—their breath creating clouds of misty vapor in the frigid air, until they finally took a particularly strong gust of wind as their sign to retreat.

Henry climbed to his feet first, shoving his flashlight in his back pocket so that he could offer Amelia both of his hands to help her up. On their way out of the cemetery, a fractal of light from one of their flashlights would occasionally snag on a headstone just long enough for her to get a glimpse of a name. Marie Jensen, Jamal Wallace, Leon Bishop, Eden Copeland. Parents, siblings, lovers, children. And although she possessed a mild curiosity as to who they were, she wondered even more about all the other Henrys out there, the ones who had been left behind. How could it be that grief is one of the common denominators of humanity and yet nobody knows what to do with it?

Back in the car, Amelia instantly turned the heat up as high as it would go despite knowing that the initial result would be a burst of lukewarm air throttled against her face. Squinting against it, she pointed the vent further down towards her shoulders.

"Please tell me you're not in a massive rush to get home," she hummed to Henry. "I thought I could make us some hot chocolate."

"I wasn't planning on dragging you out here and then bailing, no. Hot chocolate sounds great."

"You didn't have to drag me."

"I know." He fanned out his fingers so she could slide hers in between. "Thanks for being a good sport about it."

"Were you nervous I wouldn't be?"

"It's not that I ever doubted you," he said. "Or that I didn't, like, feel safe with you. It's just...it's a vulnerable thing, I guess. Sometimes it's hard to not be a little on edge about it even when I know I'm with the sweetest girl in the world."

"I don't know about the whole world..." Amelia mumbled, but her cheeks flushed with inner delight.

"Big marshmallows or tiny marshmallows?" she asked.

Henry could have already chosen to make himself comfortable on the couch while Amelia concocted their hot chocolate, but instead, he sat at the kitchen table by his flowers, as if feeling proud for having found them. Their excess coats and miscellaneous winter accessories had been shed into the seat next to him.

"I'm not sure why I'm impressed that you have both, but I am. I'll take the small ones, please."

"The correct choice," she grinned. "Although the big ones aren't a criminal offense. That would be if you'd asked me to use water in yours instead of milk since I'm fairly certain you haven't been harboring a secret lactose allergy this whole time."

"That would be sufficient grounds on which to break up with me."

"Which we don't want to happen anytime soon," she smiled, pattering mini marshmallows atop their mugs like little raindrops.

She carried the remainder of the bag over to the table tucked between her arm and her torso, knowing that she'd want more marshmallows in approximately twenty seconds. "Just be gentle with me if it's actually terrible."

"I somehow don't think that's going to be a problem."

His lips curved into a crescent smile as he noticed her choice of mugs, a Mickey and Minnie pair that she'd picked up at Disney World back when she lived in Florida and felt highly appropriate for the present moment after he'd mentioned their first date.

Henry lifted his to his mouth and took a sip, but before he could comment on how it was, Amelia felt her phone start to buzz in her pocket. She reached her hand in to simply turn off the volume switch but then hesitated, struck with an abrupt compulsion telling her that she needed to look at it.

With an uncomfortable sense of foreboding, she drew the phone out of her pocket and stared at the screen. It was an Instagram notification.

All of that warmth that had rushed to her cheeks suddenly seemed to flee from them.

"Everything good?" Henry asked, noticing her expression.

Silently, she slid her phone over so he could see what was on the screen.

@colton_maine wants to send you a message: Can we talk? I'm outside.