EMMALINE
The garden is heavy with summer heat today.
The roses are fully open, their petals stretched wide under the sun, and under different circumstances I might have found it beautiful. Now they just look like everything else in this place — something pleasant arranged carefully around something rotten.
I hear him before I see him.
The unhurried crunch of boots on gravel. The faint rustle of his coat. Dante never rushes. He moves like a man who has decided the world will wait for him, and has never once been proven wrong.
“You look thoughtful,” he says, settling across from me.
“I’m tired,” I say.
He smiles faintly and says nothing for a while. The fountain trickles between us, filling the silence he’s comfortable in and I’m not.
Then —
“Have you thought about what I asked you?
