Sari did my hair.
She showed up at the diner the next afternoon with a rolling suitcase full of makeup and a curling iron and a dress she swore she'd "only worn once to a cousin's wedding where nobody died," and she sat me down on the closed toilet lid in the tiny upstairs bathroom and went to work like a sculptor.
"Hold still," Sari said.
"I am holding still," I said.
"You're vibrating. You're like a chihuahua," Sari said.
"I've never done this," I said.
"Babe, you've never done anything. That's what makes it so fun." She wound a strand of my hair around the curling iron and held it. "Okay. Rules. You don't have to talk about the angel stuff. He knows. Let it be a normal date. Ask him about himself. Laugh at his jokes even if they're bad."
"His jokes aren't bad," I said.
Sari's eyes met mine in the mirror. Her face split into a slow, wicked grin.
"Oh, you are so gone," Sari said.
* * *
The dress was dark green and soft, with little buttons down the front and a skirt that moved when I walked. Sari made me spin in front of the mirror. Clay, coming up the stairs with a box of napkins, stopped dead in the doorway when he saw me, and his eyebrows went up, and something in his face went very soft and a little sad.
"Well, look at you," he said.
"Is it okay?" I asked.
"It's more than okay, kiddo." He cleared his throat roughly. "Wilton kid picking you up?"
"At seven," I said.
"He'd better be a gentleman," Clay said.
"Clay," Sari said, "he's a mechanic who reads philosophy and adopts stray dogs. He's gonna be the most gentleman guy who ever gentlemanned."
Clay grunted. But at five to seven, I noticed he was out front polishing the already-clean counter near the window. And when Kade's black truck pulled up to the curb, Clay was the one who went out to meet him first. I watched through the glass as they shook hands, and Clay said something with his big hand still clamped around Kade's, and Kade nodded very seriously, and Clay finally let go and clapped him once on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger.
"What did he say to you?" I asked when I climbed into the truck.
Kade pulled away from the curb, carefully. "He said if I hurt you, nobody would ever find the body. Then he asked if I'd look at his transmission sometime next week."
I laughed so hard I had to hold my stomach.
He glanced over at me, at the dress, at my hair, and for a second he didn't say anything at all, and his ears went pink.
"You look," he said, and stopped, and tried again. "You look really nice, Eva."
"Your ears are turning red," I said.
"Shut up," he said, and grinned.
* * *
He didn't take me somewhere with candles. He meant to. He'd made a reservation at a restaurant downtown, a nice one with white tablecloths, and we got there and sat down, and a waiter brought us bread and a wine list, and I looked around at the low lights and the hushed conversations and the forks lined up beside my plate, and I must have looked like I'd been dropped in a fish tank, because Kade leaned across the table and whispered:
"You hate this."
"Your face is doing a thing," Kade said.
"There are three forks, Kade. Three. Why does one person need three forks?" I said.
He laughed so loud the couple at the next table turned to look. Then he stood up, left forty dollars on the table for the bread and the trouble, took my hand, and led me back out to the truck.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Somewhere better," Kade said.
* * *
Somewhere better was a drive-in burger stand on the edge of town with picnic tables and a hand-painted sign, and then a long, winding road up into the hills southwest of town as the sun went down. He pulled into a little parking area near the top, and we walked a short trail through pine trees to an overlook: a rocky ledge at the edge of the hill with a split-rail fence and a bench.
And there was the whole valley.
All of it, laid out below us like a map. Kalispell, its streets and roofs and the courthouse, the lights coming on one by one in the dusk. The green and gold squares of farmland running away north. The long silver gleam of the big lake to the south, catching the last of the light. And beyond it all, ringing the whole valley like the walls of a cathedral, the mountains, their snow gone pink and purple and then deep blue.
I stood at the fence with a paper bag of fries in my hand and forgot to breathe.
"I used to come up here with my dad," Kade said quietly beside me. "When I was a kid. He said it was the best view in the valley, and you didn't have to pay a dime for it."
"It's like the Veil," I said, before I thought about it.
"What's that?" Kade asked.
"In the Hall. Where Healers look down at the world." I was still staring. "You could see everything from there. Everyone. But you could never touch any of it." I looked down at the lights of the town, at the tiny cars moving along the highway, at the dark square of downtown where the Broken Antler was, where Clay was probably wiping down the counter right now, humming. "This is better. This is so much better."
"Why?" Kade asked.
"Because I can go back down there," I said. "I can go back down and be in it."
He didn't say anything. But he moved a little closer, until his shoulder brushed mine.
* * *
We sat on the bench and ate burgers in the dark, and he told me things.
About growing up in the garage. About his mom, who'd left when he was six, and the postcards she sent from Arizona for a few years and then stopped sending. About his dad, who couldn't cook anything but chili and pancakes, so they'd had chili and pancakes, sometimes together, for most of Kade's childhood. About the scholarship to a university back east he'd turned down when his dad got sick. About the night his dad died on the garage floor, between two cars, with a wrench still in his hand.
"He was fixing a guy's brakes," Kade said. "For free. Guy couldn't pay. Dad never could say no."
"You can't either," I said.
"Yeah." He looked down at his hands. "I guess that's the family business."
He asked me things, too. Not about heaven. About me. What I liked. What I'd found, down here, that I loved.
"Hot chocolate," I said. "Bacon. Huckleberry syrup. Clay's laugh. Sari's terrible car. The sound the rain makes on the diner window. Free samples at Costco. Sleep. Sleep is incredible, Kade. Do you know how incredible sleep is? Nobody tells you."
He was smiling at me. The real smile, the slow, lopsided one.
"What else?" Kade asked.
I looked at him. At his face in the dark, the starlight catching on the thin white scar through his eyebrow. At his gray-green eyes. At his mouth.
He went very still.
"Eva," he said.
"Yes?" I asked.
"I'm going to kiss you now. If that's okay," Kade said.
My heart was beating so hard I thought it might break out of my chest. "I don't know how," I whispered.
"That's okay," Kade said. "We'll figure it out."
* * *
I had watched humans kiss for six hundred years.
It was nothing like that.
It wasn't something you watch. It was something that happens inside you, everywhere at once, like healing in reverse. Like all the warmth I'd ever given anyone came rushing back into me at once. His hand came up to cradle my jaw, rough and careful. His mouth was warm and tasted like salt and root beer. The cold night air was on my bare arms, and his heat was against me, and between the two of them I felt every inch of my own skin, alive, singing, the way I'd felt in that alley when I first fell, except this time it wasn't fear.
When he pulled back, just a little, his forehead resting against mine, I realized I'd grabbed the front of his shirt in both fists and was holding on like I might fall again.
"Okay?" he whispered.
"Do it again," I said.
He laughed against my mouth. And then he did.
* * *
He drove me home a long time later, after the moon had come up over the mountains and turned the whole valley silver. We didn't talk much. We didn't need to. His hand was on the bench seat between us, and mine was on top of it, and every so often, at a stop sign, he'd turn his palm up and lace his fingers through mine and squeeze, just once, like he was checking that I was still real.
He walked me to the back door of the Broken Antler, in the alley where Clay had found me. The same brick walls, the same dumpster, the same metal stairs zigzagging up to my window.
"This is where I landed," I said quietly. "Right there. Where you're standing."
He looked down at the cracked pavement under his boots. Then back up at me.
"Glad you did," he said.
He kissed me one more time, slow and careful, against the brick, until I couldn't remember my own name, either of them. And then he stepped back, and his eyes were dark and warm, and his voice was rough.
"Goodnight, Eva Bell," Kade said.
"Goodnight, Kade," I said.
I went up the narrow stairs and into my little room and closed the door and leaned against it, my lips still tingling, my whole body humming like a struck bell.
The window was open. I didn't remember leaving it open.
On the fire escape outside, a single white feather lay on the rusted metal, glowing very faintly in the moonlight.
I picked it up. It was warm.
Aurelle had been here. She'd been here, and she'd seen, and she'd left without saying a word.