Craving by Kristina Meister Page B

that it was probably completely accurate.
    “They all say they knew her, but you need to hear someone say that they knew the same Eva you knew. Isn’t that right, Lilith?”
    I froze, and as I stared at him with eyes as big as saucers, he remained calm.
    “You need to know you were right, that you saw her clearly, but why?”
    My eyes faltered, fell to his shoes, stuttered around the rug on the floor. I shook my head, because in that moment, my voice had vanished.
    “Your parents, Howard, and now her,” he whispered.
    Frantically, I looked up and was trapped in his fixed gaze. I felt like I was falling into those sky-colored eyes; my heart sped up, the coffee burned in my stomach, and I lost feeling in my legs.
    “Your world is chaotic, filled with shattered possibilities.”
    Tears spilled down my cheeks.
    “You spend all your time organizing, don’t you? Mending the parts of yourself that crash to the ground by learning what can be pushed away without any personal sacrifice. You simplify it to preserve your own sanity. Isn’t that true?”
    My hand flew to my mouth and drops began to tickle the back of it. He watched me cry for a great while, but did not offer to comfort me, and why should he? It was exactly as he had said. It was my wayward method of compensating for things outside my control, and because of that, when I recalled her words, something in my soul had grasped for them with such tenacity that I could not let go.
    Everything means something.
    He stretched out an arm and pointed to the book. “Trishna,” he repeated.
    “Trishna?” I looked after his finger and found the red symbol. “What does that mean?”
    He sat back in the chair. “It is a Sanskrit word.”
    “For what?”
    “Craving. Things perceived to be valuable that only end up robbing us of what matters.”
    For long moments, I frowned at him, wondering if that was all there was.
    “There’s a nightclub by the river,” I began, but he was already shaking his head.
    “Don’t, Lilith. You will regret it.”
    “Why?” I demanded, suddenly absurdly angry that he would insert himself into my quest. If that was how I grieved, who was he to say otherwise? “Something’s not right about her boss, and this woman at the club knew who I was. If anyone can tell me about her, then I have to talk to them.”
    “For what purpose?” he asked softly.
    “Didn’t we just discuss that? I need to have the key, the filter. I need to be able to see her words the way she wanted me to see them.”
    He looked at me with realconcern. “How do you know that you don’t already see them the way she intended?”
    “If that were true, I wouldn’t have found this.”
    He sighed in apparent disappointment. “Her words speak for themselves and anyone reading them would see her clearly. What you are seeking is the context that would make you feel better. You’re creating a fiction that turns her death into a mystery you can solve.”
    “No, it’s here,” I insisted. I dug through the bag and produced the blue journal, opened it to the last page, set it on the red volume and handed them off to him. He considered them distantly and passed the journal back without a word.
    “She wrote that the day she killed herself. I’ve looked through these books, and nowhere was there a red sharpie anywhere inside them. It’s a hidden message. She wasn’t just some suffering girl, she was someone else with a secret life.”
    “So you don’t want your sister back, you want to expose her as a different person, someone unknown to you who has gone away. Will it make grieving easier, do you think?”
    I denied it with a fierce shake of my head though his words had the ring of profound truth. As smeared and adamant as I was, I needed him to look past it and see the real me. I needed someone, anyone to hear my words as more than noise, and he just happened to be the man who enjoyed listening.
    “You said that every word meant something if a person could listen.