Archive of Our Own

Rain falls on the day of Leon’s interment. An early November rain, cold and merciless.

Ashley gazes out the tinted window of her Escalade as her chauffeur takes the turn into the cemetery, and she smiles grimly at the cliché of it all. She has to smile. If she doesn’t, she’ll cry, and she can’t cry the way she wants to where people might see. In the eyes of the public, Leon should be nothing to her. A special agent who led her rescue operation half a lifetime ago, someone whose job it was to save her, that’s all. Anyone on the outside looking in would have assumed they parted company afterwards.

In some ways, they did.

But they also didn’t.

The car follows the curves of the single-lane road between the headstones. Ashley watches them pass by, row upon white row of them. Soon, very soon, they’ll be laying what’s left of Leon to rest in one of these graves, to sleep alongside countless other Americans who gave their lives for their country.

Ashley knows that, eventually, everyone ends up in a place like this. But Leon … she never fully believed he could die, despite the hazards of his job. This was the man who got her home safe from Spain. The man who came back in one piece from every mission afterwards.

She let herself forget how dangerous his work really was. In her mind, he was always the hero, like a man from an action movie, invincible and unstoppable. Her way, maybe, of protecting herself from the helpless fear and worry. There was nothing she could do to keep him from going, nothing she could do to protect him while he was in the field. All she could do was put his mortality out of her mind, like a stubborn child with her fingers stuffed in her ears.

Now the fears she tried to deny are real. Leon is gone, but she’s had no closure. She learned of his death nearly a week after it happened and never got to see him after the fact. The details of his last moments are opaque, locked away inside top secret reports, so classified even her connections don’t have access to them. All she knows is that his body was recovered from the bottom of a subterranean facility in Raccoon City. There was an incident. The telecopters managed to capture some grainy footage of a burning pit in the ground before the BSAA ordered them away.

Then the news cycles moved on fast. Too fast.

The car crests a gentle slope and his gravesite comes into view. There are people gathered around it already, figures clothed in black with dark umbrellas deployed to shelter them from the rain. The knot in Ashley’s throat tightens. She blinks hard as her eyes sting with tears. Whatever happens, she has to keep it together. She has to stay strong. There will be time to fall apart later.

Her chauffeur pulls the car to a stop along the curb and Ashley gets out, umbrella in one hand and a small bouquet of forget-me-nots in the other. She takes a steadying breath before she approaches the crowd. There are a few dozen people there, she’d guess, almost all of them unfamiliar to her. Colleagues from the DSO and friends outside work. No blood kin. Leon told her his parents died when he was a kid, and he didn’t have any siblings. If he had extended relatives, he never knew of them.

Some faces she expected to see are missing, people Leon mentioned over the years. Sherry Birkin. Claire Redfield, and her brother, Chris. Ashley is most surprised by Sherry’s absence; she’s the closest thing Leon ever had to family. The way he talked about her, Ashley got the impression she was like a little sister to him.

The one person she does recognize is Jill Valentine, an old mission partner of Leon’s. She stands at the edge of the open grave, looking down into it, arms folded around herself, mouth in a grim line.

Then Ashley’s eye catches on another face. A young woman standing a bit of a distance from the plot, her face taut with grief, her fingers twisting restlessly in the strap hanging from the grip of her umbrella.

Grace Ashcroft.

According to the news reports, she was the only survivor of the incident that took Leon’s life. After reading her name in the newspaper, Ashley had her people look her up and pull any information they could find: twenty-three years old, FBI analyst, daughter of the late reporter Alyssa Ashcroft. What she was doing down there, in that facility, Ashley still doesn’t know. That data is as classified as the particulars of Leon’s death.

Ashley makes a note to talk to her later.

For now, she assumes a position near the open grave. More than a few people do double-takes when they see her there. It’s what she expected; she’s the daughter of a former president, the victim of a kidnapping for the history books, and the chair of a prominent anti-human-trafficking nonprofit in D.C. Most of the people Leon worked with likely know who she is. Hopefully they’ll think she’s just here to pay her respects to the man who rescued her twenty-two years ago, and to whom she owes her life. She gives them polite smiles and moves her gaze away. She doesn’t want to socialize.

She wants to say goodbye to Leon in peace.

The grave is small, only two by two feet, and there’s an urn on a stand next to the headstone. Seeing it puts a lump in the middle of Ashley’s chest, brings back that same breathtaking pain she felt the night her father called to tell her Leon was dead, the kind that had her rocking back and forth on the floor, locked in a soundless howl as the agony thrashed her heart to pieces. She forces herself to take a deep breath. She’s glad she decided to wear her black pillbox hat with the veil, so that the tears welling in her eyes won’t be so obvious to anyone watching her.

A man in a dark suit and trench coat steps up next to the headstone with a leather-bound book in hand. Ashley takes him to be the funeral director, and so must everyone else. As one, the group draws in closer around the grave.

“If everyone is here,” he says, soft and even, “I think we can get started. Today, we’re gathered to commit Leon Kennedy to his final resting place. As we send him on his way, I invite you to reflect on your memories of him and take comfort from them.” He opens his book. “We’ll begin with a reading of Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd…”

As he recites the verse, Ashley fixes her gaze on Leon’s headstone, thinking about the last time she talked to him: the night before he died. She called intending to tell him that she and Brian had separated, that she’d served him divorce papers, that she was free of her marriage. But Leon was busy and couldn’t talk.

He said he’d call her later.

Ashley tilts her head back and blinks hard. Pointless—the tears spill down her cheeks anyway.

“He leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths…”

She thinks instead of all the moments she did have with him. They never seemed like enough at the time and feel like even less now.

Like the occasional run-in at the White House, in the early days, when Leon would come by to meet with her father. Always on business, but he took the time to chat with her when they crossed paths. Sometimes they got coffee and talked in the kitchen. Ashley remembers how good he smelled. She’d liked him even when he stank of sweat, mud, and gunpowder, but this version of him, cleaned-up, fresh-faced, with his sweet, woodsy cologne … she liked it too.

He wore the same cologne the night of her grad party, when her dad put him and only him on her security detail at her request. After two years of struggling with her trauma—taking a year-long hiatus from her studies, transferring from Harvard to Georgetown University in D.C. so she could finish her undergrad at home, avoiding crowds like they were the literal plague—she wanted to feel normal and have fun with her peers on her last night as a university student. But she didn’t trust the Secret Service anymore. She didn’t trust anyone.

Except Leon.

They ended up leaving the party early. Ashley asked him to take her somewhere quiet, where she wouldn’t have to deal with crowds. He brought her to the rooftop of his apartment building. They looked at the stars, and talked, and then they went all the way. It was the one and only time they were together like that, but she’s never forgotten it. To this day, she remembers just how it felt to be in Leon’s arms, to have him inside her. For a man capable of such violence, he was so tender, murmuring her name as he pressed kisses down the length of her throat.

Sometimes she thought about that night when she was with her husband, wishing it was Leon’s hands on her, his voice in her ear telling her he loved her.

They didn’t see each other for a while after that, but they kept in touch sporadically. There were happy birthday texts every year, like clockwork; his number lighting up the display of her pink Motorola Razr was always her favourite gift. Sometimes when an outbreak was in the news, she’d message him to get his take on it. Once, on a whim, she asked him to tell her his favourite song. After that, she got the occasional late-night emails with links to music on YouTube, sent without commentary.

Most of them seemed random, like maybe they were songs from his childhood, ones his parents played for him before they died, or maybe they were just songs he heard on the radio that he liked—Blue Öyster Cult, Uriah Heep, Fleetwood Mac, the Ramones, Alice in Chains. Some were clearly topical, like “At My Job” by the Dead Kennedys, which she thought was meant to be a darkly funny jab at his lifestyle.

And then there were others that made her wonder if they were about her, songs like Pearl Jam’s “Black.” It’s still on her playlist. Maybe it’s silly, but she listens to it sometimes when she misses him, when she wants to pretend he was professing his longing for her through Eddie Vedder's voice.

Over the years, it’s become her song for him too.

The fact that she loved him—couldn’t stop loving him—was probably inevitable. Leon had saved her. Not just saved her, but put his own life on the line for her over and over again. He’d kept her calm and focused when she was ready to lie down and die in the backwoods of Spain. In her most hopeless moments, when she could feel the plaga crawling under her skin, slowly taking her over, she would close her eyes and listen to his voice. It was low and steady, warm like a hug, like a glow of lantern light beckoning her out from the black abyss of hell.

“Though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

To this day, she has never felt more at peace than she did that sunrise on the jet ski, when she had her arms around his waist and her cheek pressed to his back, and she was gloriously, giddily free. Alive. Because of him.

There was the aftermath too. The times he answered her phone calls at all hours because the nightmares kept bringing her back to the maze of Salazar’s castle, and Leon was the only one who she thought would understand. He never made her feel bad for needing him like that. He always stayed on the line, talking about everything and nothing, until she felt ready to go back to sleep.

Sometimes she thought he needed her the same way. Once, he called her at 2 a.m. from Colorado, drunk, his speech slurring over the crackling line. Ashley crept out to the balcony adjoining the master bedroom, leaving Brian snoring away in bed. When she asked Leon why he was calling, he didn’t answer for a long time. She waited, holding her breath in the heavy silence, looking at the spill of moonlight on Easton Bay’s obsidian waters, until finally he said, “Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

The hollow defeat in his voice made her heart lurch.

Ashley knew the horrors she saw in Spain were just a fraction of what he’d endured in his career. It didn’t surprise her that he might have found refuge from his trauma in the bottom of a bottle. She wanted to help him, but she had to be careful. She was a married woman. She couldn’t go haring off to meet up with him; besides that, she didn’t think he’d agree to see her even if she asked. He had always been careful to keep her at arm’s length, whether out of respect for her father or fear of him.

Ashley knew she should stay away but she couldn’t. Their communication had waned since she got married; after the call from Colorado, she renewed it. She got in the habit of messaging him almost every other day. If she went too long without reaching out, he would text her to ask how she was doing. She took it as a sign that she was on his mind too.

At first, they shared the little, inconsequential details of one another’s lives. When she sent pictures of the family’s new sheepdog puppy, he sent pictures of the succulent plant he was failing to nurture on his living room windowsill. When she explained her overly complicated Starbucks order to him, he wryly told her took his coffee black. They once spent a whole morning debating whether the dress was blue and black or white and gold.

Eventually, she got bold enough to send a selfie from the Newport beach near her family’s cottage, a modest one of herself in her sunhat, oversized sunglasses, and a swimsuit cover-up. Leon reciprocated with a picture of himself in his bathroom mirror, in a navy dress shirt, hair dishevelled, with the message just got off work. She saved it in a secret folder on her phone labelled only “LSK,” and she looked at it often, along with all the others he later sent her over the years.

As time went on, their conversations grew more intimate. When she learned she’d be receiving an award from Global Hope for her work to end human trafficking for the purposes of bioterrorism, Leon—not her husband—was the first person she told. And the night Leon called her to say he was sitting on the curb outside a bar, itching to go in and swallow down a glass of whiskey, she stayed on the line with him until he had the strength to get up and walk away.

It was the least she could do for the man who gave her everything: a second chance at living; the resolve to go on.

“Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.”

Ashley closes her eyes and breathes out. “Amen,” she murmurs.

After the interment, everyone gathers in the reception hall on the cemetery grounds. Most of these people seem to know each other, clustered together in groups. Some look at her like they want to approach, but Ashley isn’t in the headspace to make small talk, so she avoids eye contact and beelines for Jill, who’s standing just inside the door and, apparently, greeting visitors.

“Hi,” Ashley says, extending her hand. “I’m—”

“Ashley Graham,” Jill says. When Ashley’s eyes widen, she smiles and takes Ashley’s hand to shake it. “I remember Spain.”

“Oh. Of course.” Ashley smiles back. “You’re Jill, right? Leon mentioned you once or twice. You worked together on a few assignments? San Francisco?”

Jill nods. Though from what Ashley knows, Jill wasn’t a good friend to Leon, just someone who worked in the same circles as him, so why is she the one running the reception like she’s been made responsible for carrying out his final wishes? She thought Sherry would be the one to do that, would be the sole beneficiary and executor of his estate.

“Were you … close with him?” Ashley asks.

“We were acquaintances,” Jill says with a shrug. It clears up none of Ashley’s confusion. “I mostly knew him through a mutual friend.”

“Chris?”

“Yes.”

Ashley makes a show of looking around. “Is he here? I thought he would be. I thought a few people would be, actually, but I don’t see them.” She glances at Jill and ventures, “Claire and Sherry?”

Jill’s jaw tightens, her eyes narrowing with something that looks to Ashley like pain, and she shakes her head. “Claire and Sherry are sick. Too sick to be here. And Chris is away on a job.”

Sick? So that’s why all the people closest to Leon are absent. How sad, that none of the ones he loved most are here to send him off, to say their last goodbyes. Except possibly for her, though she can’t be sure he felt the same way for her that she did for him. And now she’ll never know.

“Does that job have anything to do with…” Ashley’s throat closes with grief. She swallows hard to clear it, blinking back a fresh round of tears. When she finally trusts herself to speak again, her voice wobbles. “The place where they found Leon?”

“That’s classified,” Jill says, though her eyes flit from one part of Ashley’s face to the next, as if she’s finding pieces to a puzzle and assembling them to create the whole picture of Ashley’s heartbreak. Her expression softens. “But … yes. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I understand,” Ashley says. She still has questions, but she knows she won’t get the answers from Jill. “Thank you.”

They look at one another for a moment longer, Ashley casting for something else to say and Jill watching her with a tilted head, but Ashley senses someone coming into the room behind her, so she gives Jill a tight smile.

“Well … I’m sorry. My father sends his condolences too,” Ashley says. She gestures vaguely around the reception space, at the varicoloured bouquets of flowers perched on all the tabletops, meant to bring brightness to an occasion that can’t be anything but grey to Ashley. “And thank you for this.”

“Don’t thank me. Sherry and Claire did all the planning. Claire just asked me to stand in for them.”

“Still.” Ashley presses Jill’s hand between both of her own, then releases it. “It means a lot that you’re here. For him.”

Jill gives her that knowing look again, so Ashley averts her eyes, scanning the room. There’s nothing more to say, and besides, there’s someone else she wants to talk to more. She turns to walk away, but Jill’s voice stops her.

“Hey.”

Ashley looks at her questioningly.

“For what it’s worth … I’m sorry too,” Jill says.

Ashley’s chest squeezes with emotion. That familiar sting pricks her eyes again, and she blinks hard to quell it. She never thought anyone would recognize the depth of her grief for a man she couldn’t love publicly, much less acknowledge it.

“Thank you,” she says.

With a final nod, Jill turns away to greet the next person entering the room.

Collecting herself, Ashley looks around for Grace. When she spots her, sitting alone in one of two armchairs beside the fireplace, Ashley watches her for a moment, this waif of a girl, this girl who was the last person to see Leon alive. Did she give him comfort before he died, whether with words or simply her presence? Was she there the instant he blinked out of existence? Selfishly, Ashley hopes so. She doesn’t want to think that he died alone.

Along the back wall, a credenza hosts a picked-over spread of sandwiches and vegetable platters. There’s a Keurig machine too. Keeping her head down, Ashley quickly makes coffee in two waxed paper cups and carries both across the room to Grace, who sits gazing off into space.

“Hello,” Ashley says, smiling when Grace looks up at her, startled. “Do you mind if I join you?”

“Um … n-no, it’s fine.”

Ashley hands her one of the cups, which Grace accepts with pleasant surprise, and takes a seat in the armchair opposite her. She sets the bouquet of forget-me-nots on the table beside the chair.

“My name is Ashley,” she says. “I was … a friend of Leon’s.”

Grace nods and looks down into her coffee cup. “I’m Grace.”

“I know.” Grace glances up at her, brow furrowing, so Ashley smiles again, in a way she hopes is reassuring. “I saw your name in the newspaper. You were with Leon in that facility, weren’t you?”

Grace nods again and takes a sip of her coffee. She doesn’t seem to want to meet Ashley’s eyes.

“How are you doing?” Ashley asks. “I don’t know what happened down there, or even what that facility was, but…”

“It was called ARK,” Grace says. Then she squeezes her eyes shut and presses a fist to her forehead. “Shit. I wasn’t supposed to say that. It’s top secret.”

“I won’t tell anyone. Pinky promise.”

Grace just looks at her guardedly. Of course she does. She’s FBI; she knows better than most that bad actors will shamelessly lie and manipulate to get their hands on sensitive information. At twenty-three, Grace is too young to recognize her. She couldn’t have been more than six years old when Ashley’s father left office. For all she knows, Ashley could be a spy posing as Leon’s friend to dig for classified intel.

“Grace,” she says, “I’m Ashley Graham. President Graham’s daughter. Leon rescued me from Los Illuminados cult in 2004. You can Google my name if you don’t believe me.”

Grace gazes at her for another guarded moment before she picks up her phone and types something into it. She scrolls for a minute, most likely skimming Ashley’s Wikipedia article, matching the headshot there to the face she sees in front of her. Seemingly satisfied, she sets the phone back down on the arm of the chair.

“I won’t ask you to reveal any classified information,” Ashley goes on. “I just…” She swallows hard and blinks back a fresh sting of tears. “I just need to know what happened to him. How he died. And since you were with him—”

“Does it … does it matter? Isn’t that kind of messed up? I mean…” Grace squeezes her eyes shut again. When she reopens them, she looks at Ashley with barely contained indignation. “W-wh-why would you ask me that?”

Ashley flushes with embarrassment. Maybe it’s morbid of her to ask, and maybe Grace doesn’t want to talk about what she saw, not after having to recount it all in detail to investigators, probably more than once. But so many chapters of Leon’s life were a mystery to Ashley; she can’t let his epilogue be the same. She can’t go on forever wondering how much he suffered in his last moments, her brain conjuring one horrific scenario after another to fill in the blanks.

“Because I’m having a hard time accepting he’s really gone,” Ashley says. “I don’t understand what he was doing down there. Why he…”

Her voice falters, and Grace’s gaze flicks up to meet hers. Maybe, like Jill, she recognizes what Ashley’s pain really means, because the hardness leaves her face and she sits back in the armchair with a sigh.

“Okay,” she says. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I-I’m not sure where to start.”

“Well … what was he doing there?”

“Um. He was chasing after me. There were these two men…”

It all comes flooding out, with so much detail that Ashley’s head spins trying to keep track of it all. Maybe it’s because Grace knows Ashley cared for Leon, that unlike the authorities who interrogated her after they rescued her from ARK, Ashley saw him as a man, a person, not just a name or a government ID number.

Grace tells her that she was kidnapped while investigating a murder at the Wrenwood Hotel, and woke up at a care centre outside the city, in the clutches of a mad virologist named Victor Gideon. Tells her that Leon saved her from zombies and mutant creatures, that he followed her to ARK at the heart of Raccoon City and saved her again from Zeno, a man affiliated with an organization called The Connections. He wanted Grace to enter the code to unleash a mind-control virus called Elpis.

“Y-you know Leon had Raccoon City Syndrome, right?” Grace says.

Ashley tilts her head. “Raccoon City Syndrome?”

“Oh, right. It’s not common knowledge.” Grace shakes her head. “Um … you might have seen something about it in the news, just not by name?”

Ashley racks her brain, and then her breath catches in her lungs. The grainy cellphone photo she saw on CNN a couple of weeks ago comes back to her, of a body lying under a tarp with a hand sticking out, putrescent with black marks. A single picture taken by someone at the scene and posted on Twitter that later made it to the networks. A report about a series of mysterious deaths, but there was never any follow-up, no explanation for what the black marks signified. Another story buried by the powers-that-be.

The thought of that happening to Leon makes her stomach roll over. Why didn’t he tell her he was so sick that night she called him?

“It’s a latent strain of the T-Virus that affects survivors of the Raccoon City Incident,” Grace continues. That explains Claire and Sherry’s absence, then. Ashley’s heart hurts for them. “Leon told me he was stage three. So I pulled all the files I could find in our system, the ones our investigators found in Victor Gideon’s computer…” There’s an apologetic dip to Grace’s voice, like she half expects Ashley to get on her case for accessing top-secret materials without authorization. “He … he was coughing blood. The files said … when the victim gets to that point, they only have a couple hours left at most.”

“Is that how he died?” Ashley breathes.

After a moment’s hesitation, Grace shakes her head, her face twisting into an expression of raw grief. That means there’s something worse. But how could anything be worse than rotting alive from the T-Virus?

“Leon couldn’t walk on his own, so I helped him get into Pandora. That’s the room where Elpis was stored,” Grace explains. “We, um … we confronted Zeno. Leon told me to put in the wrong password to destroy Elpis. I-I mean … if Zeno and Gideon wanted it, it had to be bad, right?”

Grace’s eyes pin her in place, pleading, as if she’s begging Ashley to pardon her for a crime. Ashley only nods, encouraging her to continue.

“So … I did. Put in the wrong password, I mean. Pandora started collapsing. Leon helped me get to safety, b-but he stayed behind. He and Zeno got into a fistfight.” Grace gives a brittle laugh and shakes her head. “I don’t know how he even had the strength to stand.” She looks down at her hands in her lap, fingers twisting around a loose thread on her jacket. “He was in such bad shape,” she murmurs.

Ashley smiles grimly. “That sounds like Leon. He always pushed himself too far past his limits.”

It takes her back to Spain, in the eleventh hour when they’d nearly fallen to the plagas. She remembers how far gone Leon was when she dragged him over to the operating table in Luis’s laboratory, and how terrified she was that the parasite would claim him before she could lift his weight. She still doesn’t know how she managed it. Maybe in wanting him to live more than anything, she tapped into some primordial strength lying dormant inside her.

“So they fought?” Ashley prompts.

Grace nods. “Yes. I guess Leon was trying to buy enough time for Elpis to self-destruct, but he was too weak to put up much of a fight. And then Zeno… he…”

Grace presses her fingers to her eyes and lets out a gasping, shuddering sob. Ashley watches her quietly, trying to breathe through the pain and fear throbbing in her chest as she waits for Grace to tell her the rest. The girl takes another shaking breath and lets it out in a lost, plaintive sigh.

“Zeno overpowered him,” Grace says. She wipes at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “And sh-sh-shot him point-blank in the face.”

Oh, God.

Ashley leans her elbows on her knees and puts her head in her hands, biting back a whimper. The unwanted image of a bullet ripping through Leon’s face, obliterating his beautiful features—his steel blue eyes, the Cupid’s bow of his lips, the ones she still daydreams sometimes of kissing—flashes into her mind.

Next to her, Grace cries quietly. Poor Grace, who had to witness that. “It’s all my fault,” she says.

“No.” Ashley collects herself enough to reach out and put a hand on her knee. “You said it yourself. You only did what Leon told you to do. And you trusted him, right?”

Grace nods miserably.

“Then you can’t blame yourself,” Ashley says, squeezing Grace’s knee. “He wouldn’t want that.”

Grace only nods again, her lower lip quivering. Ashley grabs a couple of tissues from the box on the table beside her and hands one to Grace. They blot their tears together, quiet in their shared misery, until at last Ashley speaks again.

“Did he say anything before he…?” she asks.

Grace hesitates for a moment, then shakes her head. “Just that he was glad he could save me. There was no time for anything else.”

Ashley’s heart sinks, but she’s not surprised he didn’t mention her or anyone else with his dying breaths. Leon was nothing if not one hundred percent focused on the job. He never married—never even had a long-term relationship, as far as Ashley knows—because he didn’t want dependents, nobody and nothing that would give him a reason to hesitate in a last-ditch situation. In his line of work, it was achieve the objective or die trying. He must have known his luck would run out someday.

“I just wish I could hug him,” Grace says. “And say thanks. I-I mean … I’m only alive because of him.”

“So am I.” Ashley smiles through her tears, knowing just how Grace feels. It’s the same pure, wondering gratitude she felt for Leon that morning long ago when they escaped Saddler’s clutches, into the open sea. “I know I’m not him, but … you can hug me if you want.”

Grace smiles back, just as tearful, and they embrace. It isn’t lost on Ashley that Grace’s arms, which encircled Leon in his final hour, are now clasping her. It’s the closest Ashley can come to holding him for the last time. She doesn’t know if she believes in anything after life on earth, but still she exhales, slow and deliberate, and opens her mind to the possibility of a cosmic connection—

That a trace of Leon lingers between her and Grace, shining in the warmth coming off Grace’s body, some fragment of him she can grasp for one precious moment before she has to let him go for good.

When she comes out of the reception hall, the rain has stopped. The driveway leading down to the cemetery grounds shines like black glass in the wetness left behind. Ashley breathes in the scent of damp earth, absorbs the quiescent peace of the cemetery, and then she follows the road until she reaches the gravel path that will take her to Leon’s grave.

The pocket in the earth that holds his urn has been filled in. A little American flag stands at attention next to the grave, rippling gently in the breeze. Ashley walks up to the square of dirt stark against the verdant grass, her vision blurring as she reads the headstone. 



Leon Scott Kennedy
Dear Friend, Loyal Comrade
Served His Country Faithfully
Died October 9, 2026

The words are straightforward and economical. If he was hers, she would have said something about the kind heart hidden behind his cynical smile, or the strength of his will that carried them out of Spain against all odds, or his sense of justice that never faltered, even in the face of the atrocities he survived and saw. She would have told the world how deeply, unquestionably he was loved.

But he wasn’t hers. Not the way she wanted him to be.

Crouching, she lays the forget-me-nots on the headstone’s base. She runs her fingers over the engraved lettering of his name, and this time, in the solitude of the cemetery, she lets herself cry the way she wants to. She presses her forehead to the cold granite and weeps with great big heaving sobs that shake her to the bones. She cries for the time that was stolen from him, for the future she dared to hope they might have together, for all the years she’ll have to live in this world without him.

“Oh, Leon,” she whispers, the words aching in her throat. “Goodbye.”

Breathing deep, she brings herself under control again, finds an uneasy equilibrium between the pain she feels and the mask she has to wear. She wipes her tears and kisses his headstone. Only then does she find the strength to stand and make herself turn away from him.

As she walks back to the roadway, where her chauffeur waits parked along the curb, across the stretch of grass, the wind keens in the trees and catches the hem of her coat.

It tugs at her, once, twice, before it releases.