No flowers for the dead - Chapter 61: Chapter 61

The first days of spring arrived slowly in the south of France.
Warmth crept into the stone of Alina’s vineyard estate like a secret. The vines, still bare from winter’s touch, stretched against the golden morning light, waiting. It was quiet here—quieter than Elara had expected. She stood by the terrace, coffee in hand, the scent of rosemary wafting from a nearby planter. Somewhere inside, Rae laughed—sharp and sudden, chasing after a mouse.
They had all come back here, to Alina’s estate, not for grief this time, nor strategy, nor the headlines that once hunted them like wolves. This time, they came for something slower. Something softer.
Closure wasn’t a grand thing, Elara had learned. It wasn’t a speech or a final kiss or even forgiveness. It was this: watching the sun rise without reaching for a ghost. Waking to the sound of two other women who once knew Elias in entirely different ways, and realizing that none of them belonged to the past anymore.
Alina stepped out onto the terrace, her silver scarf catching the breeze. “He would’ve hated how much the world loved the series,” she said wryly, handing Elara a folded envelope. “Too much attention. Not enough control.”
Elara took the letter gently, recognizing the return address from their production partner. “We made him human,” she replied. “The world wasn’t used to seeing power that tender.”
Inside, Rae called out, “Stop whispering about him like he’s some tragic prince—we all know he was impossible half the time.”
They both laughed, but Elara’s eyes shimmered. Rae joined them a moment later, barefoot, curls wild, holding three bowls of sun-warmed strawberries like a peace offering. “You two thinking of turning the vineyard into some kind of feminist sanctuary? Alina can be headmistress.”
“I thought you would be,” Alina quipped.
They were older now, not in years but in grief worn smooth. What they had built—out of ashes, memory, scandal, and strength—was more than legacy. It was a rebirth.
The letter Elara held would change little, but it symbolized much: a final greenlight for the documentary companion to the memoir. More truth. More voices. This time, not about Elias.
This time, about them.
By late afternoon, the hills around the estate turned the color of old honey. Rae walked the long path between rows of vines, her fingers trailing the tips of budding leaves. She wasn’t used to silence without consequence. In the world she’d stepped into—after Elias, after power, after inheritance—every silence had once been a trap. A boardroom before a blow. A press pause before the storm.
But here, it was different.
The silence tasted like lavender. Like time. Like freedom she hadn’t asked for but was learning to love.
She paused when she reached the low stone wall at the edge of the vineyard, where the earth fell away into a view so wide it made her breath catch. The Mediterranean shimmered far in the distance, a blue ribbon that reminded her the world was still vast—even after grief had narrowed it for so long.
“Thinking of not going back?” a voice asked behind her.
It was Elara, barefoot now, a sketchbook in her hand, a pencil tucked behind one ear. The sunlight had warmed her skin, turned her dark curls into a halo. She looked like a woman finally stepping into her own shape. No longer just the shadow of the man she had loved.
Rae smiled. “Maybe. Or maybe I just want to know what it feels like to not always be the one surviving.”
Elara’s gaze softened. “You did more than survive.”
They stood there a while, letting the stillness wrap around them like silk. Below, the vines rustled with a breeze that seemed to whisper old stories. And maybe that’s what they were now—old stories. But Rae knew something else, too:
They were the storytellers now.
“Alina’s planning something,” Rae said finally.
“Of course she is,” Elara said dryly. “She’s been in the cellar too long. That woman can’t go six days without a cause.”
“Or six minutes without a dramatic entrance.”
They both laughed, but then the quiet returned—not empty, but full. Of memory. Of love. Of the women they had become.
“I think he’d be proud of you,” Elara said softly. “Of us.”
Rae didn’t answer right away. Instead, she reached down and picked a single sprig of rosemary, twirling it between her fingers.
“I think he’d be surprised,” she said.
And somehow, that felt like a deeper truth.
The cellar was warmer than it looked. Alina had opened every dusty window, let the light in to chase the shadows away. She was at the long oak table with Rae’s half-drunk espresso beside her and Elara’s graphite fingerprints smudged across the corners of her manuscript draft.
The memoir had been published. The adaptation aired. The world had listened—some reverently, some violently—and moved on.
But Alina hadn’t.
Not from the weight of legacy. Not from Elias’s voice, which she still heard sometimes, not in her head, but in her pen. It moved through her as though he’d left her with his last task;
She was writing a second book now.
Not about Elias.
Not even about the women he’d left behind.
This one was about what came after. The blank pages. The rebuilding. The strange and beautiful life of survivors.
She titled it: In the Wake of Fire.
And maybe it would never sell. Maybe it wouldn’t echo across the world like the first had. But Alina knew—somewhere deep in her bones—that someone, someday, would find themselves in its quiet truths.
She dipped her pen again, and this time, the words came easily.
The dead are not buried in earth. They’re kept alive in memory, in decision, in the shape of a life rebuilt with trembling hands. This is not a story of endings. This is a story of return, and of becoming. And if there are , let there be gardens for the living.
⸻
That evening, the three women gathered in the courtyard. Lanterns flickered like stars that had forgotten to rise.
They didn’t speak much after.
They didn’t need to.
The silence between them had grown sacred—not the space of loss, but the space where something new could be born.
Later, when the moon had risen and the cicadas hummed in steady chorus, Elara leaned her head on Rae’s shoulder.
“We did it,” she whispered.
Rae turned to her. “What did we do?”
Alina’s voice was the one that answered, quiet and certain:
“We lived.”
Rae, Elara, and Alina remained tethered, though distance often stretched their days. Alina returned to France for good, where she taught literature in a seaside village and lived in a stone house surrounded by lavender. Her students adored her—not for the stories she had written, but for the truths she helped them find in their own.
Elara stayed closer to the city, where Elias’s empire had become something else entirely. Not a machine of power, but a foundation—quiet, steady, human. She focused on education, equity, soft influence. Her name was known now not as his heir, but as her own storm.
And Rae—Rae remained a flickering star across many skies. Sometimes in New York, sometimes in Marrakech, sometimes simply gone. She rarely stayed anywhere long, but always wrote. Always returned with postcards and poems, journals half-filled and coffee-stained.
They didn’t live the same lives anymore. But they kept a promise they’d made during that last summer in the courtyard:
Once a year, they would return. Not to mourn, but to remember forward.
⸻
The old villa stood where it always had—half wild, half forgotten. A crooked gate, the scent of figs, rosemary dried on the sill.
This year, Rae arrived first.
She carried no luggage, just a satchel of books and a new tattoo inked along her collarbone: still becoming.
Alina arrived by train, her hair longer now, streaked with silver, her smile unchanged.
Elara came last, her flight delayed, her suitcase stuffed with hand-painted dishes from a recent collaboration with a women’s cooperative.
They embraced like people who had grown into their scars, not around them. The awkwardness of grief was long gone. What remained was the intimacy of those who had walked through fire together and survived.
On the first night, they watched the stars from the rooftop. Someone opened a bottle of wine too old to drink, but no one complained. They poured it anyway, sipped, and winced.
“What would he think of us now?” Elara mused, looking at the sky.
Rae snorted softly. “He’d say we were impossible.”
Alina added, “And then he’d be proud.”
They laughed. They let the quiet settle again.
Below them, the city breathed. The world turned.
⸻
The next day, they visited the old tree by the edge of the vineyard—where Elias had once promised them everything, and then left them with something far more fragile: a future not yet written.
They sat beneath its branches with a new notebook passed between them. Each wrote something small, something real—something they wanted to remember next year.
Rae wrote: I am not afraid to stay anymore.
Elara wrote: Forgiveness is a seed. So is joy.
Alina wrote: He was not the ending. We are.
They didn’t say the words aloud. They folded the pages and tied the journal shut, slipping it back into the hollow of the tree.
Letting it wait.
Letting it breathe.
On the third morning, rain came soft and steady.
The kind that didn’t drive you inside but pulled you toward windows, mugs warm in your palms. Alina lit candles along the villa’s bookshelves, and Rae, barefoot, wandered through the kitchen humming a half-finished melody. Elara, always the early riser, sat at the long table sorting through old photographs they had never quite managed to frame.
Most were of Elias. Not the powerful man with a tie knotted like armor, but the boyish version of him—the one who had grinned crookedly at Elara’s seventh birthday, the teenager who had thrown Rae in the sea, the young man caught mid-laugh beside Alina, flour on his nose and cinnamon rolls cooling behind them.
Time had done strange things to his face.
He no longer haunted them.
Instead, he lingered. As memory, as lesson. As ache and sweetness in equal measure.
When the others joined her, they sorted through the photographs quietly, making a pile for each year, a stack for each city. Some they remembered. Some none of them could explain—faces they didn’t recognize, places blurred by motion.
But one picture stopped them all.
It was taken from behind. Elias stood at a cliff’s edge, arms outstretched as though embracing the wind. You couldn’t see his face, but the gesture was unmistakable—free, defiant, like he was daring the world to try and stop him.
“I remember this day,” Rae said softly. “He said, ‘If I die tomorrow, remember this moment. Not the mistakes.’”
“He said that to me, too,” Alina whispered.
Elara nodded. “He must’ve said it to all of us.”
They sat with that for a long time.
Then Rae reached for a fresh journal, tore out a page, and wrote the words down in long, looping script. She folded it and slipped it into the pocket behind the photograph.
“For whoever finds it next,” she said. “Let them know who he was. Who we were.”
⸻
That evening, the rain stopped, and golden light spilled across the old floors.
Elara cooked dinner while Rae read aloud from Alina’s memoir. They laughed at the inaccuracies—No, I never wore heels to that meeting!—and teared up at the truths.
“You didn’t write us perfectly,” Elara said.
“I didn’t need to,” Alina replied. “I wrote us as we survived.”
⸻
After dinner, they sat beneath the grapevines outside, wrapped in shawls, letting the dusk fall slow.
It was Alina who said it first, as though speaking it would make it real.
“Do you think we’ll keep doing this? Coming back?”
Elara leaned back in her chair. “I hope so.”
Rae gave a slow, lopsided smile. “I think we already promised ourselves we would. Even if the world changes. Even if we change.”
The villa’s garden faded from lush green to russet and gold, the air laced with a crispness that whispered of endings, of transitions not meant to be mourned but carried. The grapes were picked. The olives cured. And the three women who had once stood on opposite shores of Elias’s life now shared morning tea in silence, not because there was nothing to say—but because everything that mattered had already been spoken.
Elara began painting again.
It started small: abstract sketches on the edges of envelopes, color swatches pressed into the margins of her notebooks. But one afternoon, Rae found her in the studio, sleeves rolled up, barefoot, facing a wide canvas with streaks of cobalt and ash blooming like a storm across the surface.
“I didn’t mean to finish it,” Elara murmured when she noticed Rae. “But I think I needed to.”
Rae said nothing. She stepped forward and looked.
It wasn’t Elias’s face.
It was his impact—his storm, his sorrow, the way he entered a life and left a mark impossible to erase. And somehow, within all that wild motion, Elara had painted three steady figures in the center, luminous and defiant.
Rae knew who they were.
⸻
Meanwhile, Alina traveled again.
Not out of restlessness, but because the memoir had begun to ripple wider than she expected. A museum in Lisbon asked her to speak. A university in Berlin named a new leadership course after her final chapter: Legacy Is a Living Thing. She accepted each invitation not to perform her grief, but to share what came after it. And when asked about Elias, she always told the truth.
He wasn’t perfect. But he mattered.
And they had loved him, not because of his power, but in spite of it.
Because beneath the sharp brilliance, the ambition, the temper—there had been a boy who once carried their secrets in his pocket, a man who died trying to make a place where they could all be free.
⸻
Rae stayed longest at the villa.
She turned one room into a space for young women to come and learn—some from the cities her father once ruled, others from small corners of the world where his name meant nothing. She taught not strategy or legacy, but voice.
Theirs.
“You don’t have to become a monument,” she told them one evening as rain danced against the windows. “Be a question. Be a wildfire. Be something that cannot be owned.”
And in that moment, looking out across those listening faces, Rae knew her father would’ve smiled.
Not because she followed him.
But because she’d learned how to walk alone.
⸻
The three women never said goodbye.
They didn’t need to.
Every reunion, every quiet conversation, every shared silence was its own form of love. A living proof that what Elias left behind was not a kingdom, not an empire—but a promise that even broken stories could grow gardens.
In spring, the grapevines would bloom again.
In the studio, Elara’s second canvas waited.
On a shelf, Alina’s next journal sat half-filled, the cover worn soft from travel.
And in the center of it all, a single photo remained.
Three women. Standing in the morning light. No longer defined by who they loved, but by who they had become.
In the end, time did not erase him.
It softened the edges.
It took the sharp, staggering weight of his loss and wove it into a rhythm the women could carry—not as burden, but as breath.
Rae began to walk the gardens at dawn.
Not because Elias had once walked them, but because the silence there reminded her of who she’d become in the aftermath. Each step was a word. Each breath a boundary rewritten. Sometimes she would kneel and press her palm to the earth. And once, she whispered, “We’re okay now.”
Elara painted light.
Not scenes. Not portraits. Just the feeling of morning stretching itself across skin. Gold and gray and soft. It wasn’t about remembering Elias anymore. It was about reclaiming the pieces of herself she had once folded into his shadow. In a gallery downtown, one of her paintings hung beneath a small plaque that simply read: Grief ends. Color doesn’t.
Alina kept writing.
Her second memoir bore a different name: What Grows After. It spoke less of Elias and more of the women who shaped him, survived him, outgrew the cage of memory. Her voice was gentler now. Not because she had forgiven everything—but because she had learned peace did not come from vengeance, or forgetting, but from making meaning.
And so the world turned.
Not away from Elias, but beyond him.
His name no longer opened doors. His legacy no longer weighed on their shoulders like a brand. He became, at last, what all love becomes when time and tenderness are allowed their full measure—
Human.
Flawed.
Loved.
Gone.
But not erased.
⸻
At the base of the vineyard, beneath an old fig tree that never bore fruit, they placed a stone.
Unmarked.
No flowers.
Just earth and silence and sunlight.
It was not a grave.
It was a promise.
And beneath that tree, when wind moved through the leaves like a breath held and released—
It almost sounded like laughter.