Archive of Our Own

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

 You tell me of our future that you plann’d:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

— Christina Rosetti

I.

Aaron wakes alone, memories swimming. He has been drowning for twenty years. Beside him, Alexander stirs. He has been on fire for a little over ten.

“We’ll find them today,” Alexander promises, squeezing Aaron’s hand, as he says and does every day.

“Sure,” Aaron answers, as he says every day, and squeezes back, as he does every day. “I believe you.”

Aaron remembered who he used to be on a random Monday in March two years ago, then promptly spilled tea all over the dining hall floor.

Across the room, Alexander stood with coffee dripping down his fingers, his face slack, his eyes struck through with light. “Aaron,” he said. His hand fell to his side, right where the bullet hit. “Aaron, baby, oh my god.”

Aaron felt his legs give out from underneath him. Somebody caught him, but Aaron hardly felt them there, numb until Alexander’s palms found his face.

“It’s okay,” Alexander said. “It’s okay, honey. I’m okay.”

Aaron pressed his head to the would-be wound, grief wrenching out of him in choked cries. He could feel the world behind him, knew the whole of their college was watching them right now, but he couldn’t care. Alexander was here. Alexander was here.

Alexander sank down to his knees, folding Aaron in his arms. “It’s okay. It’s okay, love. You’re okay.”

Aaron felt the bones of Alexander’s back, the muscles of his shoulders, the knobs of his spine. They were in different places than they had been before, or maybe Aaron had never gotten to hold him like this in their first life. The memories were swarming now, his vision going in and out like a broken film reel.

“Come home with me,” Alexander said.

“Okay,” Aaron said, and the world ended, shuddered a sigh so deep it shook the stars, and started up again.

Every year, on the anniversary of Alexander’s death, he and Aaron walk to Trinity Church. Alexander lies over his grave and cries, noiseless, for hours. Aaron sits criss-cross on the floor and watches him.

He has this terrible thought, sometimes, that it’s only the two of them. That maybe they came back alone, and they’ll never see anyone else they love again. When Aaron spirals like this, he always crashes into thoughts of Theodosia. She used to sit in their parlor on Sundays at six, because the morning sun always hit her chair just right. Aaron hasn’t found an apartment where the light hits just right, though he goes to every open house he can find on the weekends. He hasn’t found Theodosia either.

Alexander happened upon the Washingtons when he was ten. He’d run away from his fourteenth foster home and hidden in their backyard, only to be discovered by their adopted child Lafayette, who immediately declared Alexander to be their long-lost brother and dragged him inside the house. Aaron lost his parents at fifteen, and though they left him a mansion, he spends most of his nights in Alexander’s bed.

“I don’t know where John is buried,” Alexander says suddenly, his hands folded over his stomach. Aaron looks up from his book, eyes catching on Alexander’s name, carved in too-big letters beside Eliza’s.

“Okay,” Aaron says. “I can look it up, if you want—”

“No. It doesn’t matter.”

“Okay.” Aaron has never been a man of many words. Alexander is a man of too many words. Together, they’re just right. “Are you ready to go?”

“No.” Alexander has been weeping for several hours now, but on this word his voice cracks and he dissolves into shuddering sobs. Aaron would hug him, but they have rules about when Alexander is playing dead.

“I just—” Alexander chokes, keeling over into wet coughs. “We were buried apart, Aaron. And nobody knows we loved each other, they may think it but they’ll never know, and I don’t think it’s fair that I was buried with my wife and not my husband. I don’t think it’s fair I had to marry my wife at all.”

Aaron cranes his neck back, staring up into the grey sky until his vision goes spotty. “You love Eliza. Best of wives and best of women.”

Alexander shakes his head. “She was my best friend,” he says. “But she wasn’t my soulmate.”

Aaron doesn’t say anything else. Alexander straightens back out again, his cries ebbing back into silent tears. They stay there until the sky is pink and orange and full of gold. Alexander stands up, takes Aaron’s hand. Looks around. Says, “I don’t feel lucky.”

Lafayette swings by Alexander’s room after dinner, dressed in a frilly pink dress and matching Mary Jane heels. “Alex is in the shower,” Aaron says, not looking up from his book, but Lafayette doesn’t leave.

“Are you happy you’re alive?” they ask.

Aaron jolts, his book tumbling from his hands. “Um—” His lips part around nothing. “Why?”

Lafayette won’t meet his eyes. “Tell me.”

“No.” Aaron bends down to pick up his book. “But I’m happy I’m with Alexander, and that’s enough, most days.”

“Yeah.” Lafayette looks up, their eyes red-rimmed. “I found Angelica Schuyler.”

The world can end in many ways. Aaron decides this is one of them. “Does she remember?”

“I don’t know.” Lafayette bites their lip, glancing towards the bathroom door. “I haven’t told Alex.”

“No shit.” Aaron isn’t one for cursing, but sometimes Alexander bleeds out of him. “Why are you telling me?”

Lafayette shrugs. The water turns off. “I think—” They cut themself off. “I think sometimes yours is the only voice he hears.”

The bathroom door unlatches. Lafayette disappears in a whirl of glitter, leaving no trace behind. Aaron stares at the hallway through the door frame, even as Alexander emerges with his stringy hair dripping.

“You all right?” Alexander asks. He’s wearing nothing but boxers and one of George’s sweaters.

Aaron chooses his words carefully. He doesn’t have many to spare. For Alexander, he has only four: “We’ve found your angel.”

In this life, Angelica’s eyes lack a certain guarded coldness. She regards Aaron with a fond smile, though it fades immediately at the sight of Alexander. “I know you,” she whispers, reaching out a hand. “You’re—”

Alexander takes her hand and kisses her knuckles. “My dearest, Angelica,” he rasps, his eyes wet. “I—”

Angelica leaps across the desk and kisses him. It’s over before Alexander can blink, her arms locked around his neck.

“Mine,” she mumbles, burying her face in his neck.

Alexander bubbles over. “Yes,” he says, squeezing her around the waist. “Yes, angel, all yours.”

Aaron looks away. By the window, a potted plant is wilting. Aaron walks over to it and empties the rest of his water bottle into it. It wilts some more, then perks back up. Aaron takes one of its leaves between his thumb and forefinger and holds on tight.

II.

Angelica Schuyler remembers who she is when Thomas Jefferson slides a ring pop onto her finger. She is thirteen, and he is fourteen, and they’re very much in love despite not really knowing what love is and being too young to feel it anyway. Angelica blinks at him, but he doesn’t look the slightest bit fazed, so she decides he must not remember. The same seems to be true for her sisters, neither of whom understand why she won’t answer to her fake name anymore.

The next ten years are a quiet, lonely blur. Her father keeps waiting for her to break up with Thomas and find a new beau, but Angelica makes it to twenty-three with that emptied-out ring pop on her hand before Thomas sinks to one knee with a real one. Angelica accepts with a tearful laugh and he picks her up and spins her around. They marry at the courthouse with only Eliza and Peggy for witnesses. A year later, Angelica is sitting in the library reading Thomas Paine when the love of her first life walks up to her desk and says her real name.

After the tears have stopped and the library has closed, Alexander and Aaron walk Angelica home. “I’ve been looking for you,” Alexander says, clutching her hand over his arm. They’ve been looped together for the past thirty minutes; they haven’t stopped touching since they said hello. “Have you found your sisters?”

“Eliza, Peggy, and I were all adopted together,” Angelica says, leaning into him. Aaron trails behind them, his head bowed over his new plant friend. “They don’t remember, though. At least not that I know of.”

Alexander looks at her and his eyes shine with water once again.

“Stop crying over me,” Angelica teases, smiling gently. “I’m not going anywhere, my Alexander.”

Alexander sniffs, looking away. “Who’s the lucky man,” he asks, nodding to her ring. “You’re young to be married.”

“Late, in our times.”

“Our times expected far too much of children.”

Angelica silently agrees. “Come for dinner,” she says. “You and Aaron. Meet my husband, my sisters. Meet our family.”

Alexander hugs her. They’re standing in the middle of a crosswalk, but the streets are empty, and Angelica feels fairly confident that no cars will hit a Senator’s wife. She wonders if Alexander is one of those reincarnates who doesn’t use modern technology, the way Aaron seems to be; after all, Angelica Schuyler-Jefferson is easily googlable.

Angelica pulls away. She wipes Alexander’s cheeks with her thumbs. She takes his arm again. They walk on.

“How long have you been married?” Alexander asks.

“A year, technically, but he proposed when we were in middle school.” Angelica rounds the corner and glances over her shoulder to check that Aaron is still with them. “I’ve been writing letters to you, you know. I knew if I returned you must have too. I sent the letters to the post office with your name on them, even knowing you’d never get them because I didn’t have an address and you probably had a fake name just like me. But the letters were never sent back, so I kept hoping. Did you ever get them?”

Alexander frowns. “Are you Renée?”

Angelica’s heart seizes. “Yes.”

“You sent me a birthday card every year,” Alexander breathes. “You called me my love.”

“And so you are.” Angelica stops just before her and Thomas’s house. “Alexander. Before we go inside, you need to promise me you won’t hurt him. Yelling I’ll allow.”

Alexander, unfortunately, is still not stupid. His eyes bulge wide. “Wait, you married—”

“Hamilton!” Thomas comes storming down the front steps, Eliza and Peggy well in tow. “You goddamned unkillable bastard—”

Alexander lunges away from Angelica and towards her husband. “You outlived me, you fucking twat—”

“Still dressed like a pompous ass—”

“You still are a pompous ass—”

They collide in a mess of insults and tears. Thomas lifts Alexander’s tiny body into his arms and crushes him against his chest, the both of them trembling with love and rage.

“I missed you,” Thomas concedes, first.

“I missed you more,” Alexander bites back, then dissolves into sobs.

Angelica turns to Aaron. “Was it this dramatic when he found you?”

Aaron’s mouth quirks up at the corners. “Oh, absolutely.”

It’s five minutes before Thomas and Alexander manage to wrestle themselves away from each other. When they do, Thomas’s eyes find Angelica and he blanches. “You’re—”

“Your wife.” Angelica takes his hand in both of hers. “Angelica Schuyler-Jefferson, good to meet you.” She smiles. “You’re quite the feminist, these days.”

Thomas smiles back, brushing her cheek with his thumb. “I really am the luckiest man alive.”

Angelica kisses him. “You really are.”

Behind Thomas, Eliza stands stock-still, staring at Alexander, who stares back with a fierce grief, his hands twitching at his sides. “Betsey,” he says. “Do you know who I am?”

Eliza bursts into tears.

Alexander rushes to fold her in his arms. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Eliza shoves him away. Alexander blinks, stumbling back in shock. Peggy catches him, realization dawning over her own face. Eliza looks up, sees Angelica, and becomes sunshine.

“Angie,” she breathes. Angelica opens her arms. Eliza flies right into them like Angelica’s been waiting for her to do for twenty-four years. “Oh my god, Angie, you’re home.”

Angelica strokes her hair. Sometimes she forgets she died first. “Hi, Liza.”

Peggy barrels into them. Angelica tugs her arm out from the mess so she can have one around each sister, kissing the tops of their heads. “I can’t believe you married Thomas Jefferson,” Eliza mumbles.

“I can’t believe you let me.” Angelica looks over their heads at Alexander, who looks right back, caught between Thomas and Aaron, the two men who killed him and yet would throw their lives away for him in an instant. “Eliza, you know Alexander’s here.”

Eliza pulls away, turning towards her once-husband. “Do you remember heaven?” she asks, and Alexander shakes his head. “Well, I do. Bits and pieces. And we didn’t work, Alexander, not once we didn’t have to. I’m not sure we ever did.”

Alexander’s eyes are dull mimics of the suns they once were. “You never deserved me, Betsey.”

Eliza shakes her head. “No. I didn’t.” She looks back at Angelica. “Where’s Maria Reynolds?”

Angelica has been waiting for her to ask. “I don’t know. I haven’t found her yet.”

“Maria?” Alexander says her name like he’s forgotten it. Angelica loves him. He’s awful and terrible and such a bad person with such a good soul. “You— Why?”

Eliza ignores him. “Angie, our dinner is getting cold.”

“Eliza.” Angelica touches her arm. She lowers her voice. “I thought you forgave him.”

Eliza’s eyes are cold. Angelica doesn’t recognize her.

“I forgave him for me,” Eliza says. “I never forgave him for her.”

A week passes. Eliza doesn’t leave her room, obsessively searching the phonebooks for any variation of Maria Reynolds, even though Maria almost certainly doesn’t have that name anymore. Alexander calls every day, checking in, and every day, Angelica tells him Eliza doesn’t want to talk, though she knows Eliza is listening from up the stairs, because they creak when the phone rings. Eliza wants to talk to Alexander. She wants it more than anything. She just doesn’t know how to reconcile all that missing with all that anger.

At the end of the second week, Angelica makes the long climb to Eliza’s room. She and Peggy have lived with Angelica since she moved in with Thomas. They said it was because Angelica would get lonely, since Thomas had to fly to D.C. every few days for work, but Angelica knew it was because they couldn’t bear to be parted.

She pushes open Eliza’s door. Eliza lies on the bed, staring at the ceiling, an open phonebook spread across her stomach. “Don’t say it, please.”

Angelica doesn’t say anything.

Eliza sits up. “Angie.”

“Thomas owned slaves.” Angelica crosses her arms and bites her lip, scuffing her heel against the floor. “He did the shittiest things. He also helped create our country. People aren’t all good or all bad. Reincarnates aren’t blessed with a second chance because we were so good in our first lifetimes. We’re here because heaven cast us out. Because we didn’t learn our lessons.”

“Then why am I—”

“I don’t know. You’re the one I can’t figure out.” Angelica dares to come closer and, when Eliza doesn’t flinch, sits down beside her on the bed. “You said you remember heaven, right?” Eliza nods. “I think you chose to come back. I think you came down here to help us, because you’re an angel of the highest order. You don’t have anything left to prove, Liza.” She folds Eliza’s hand in both of hers. “And it’s okay to talk to Alexander.”

Eliza stares at their hands. “I think you chose to come down, too.”

“Eliza—”

“I think you followed me.” Eliza looks up. “I think Alexander fell and I followed him and you followed me. Because I was stupid enough to love him, and you were stupid enough to let me.”

Angelica doesn’t answer, which she knows is damning enough in and of itself. She squeezes Eliza’s hand once, then lets go.

“Your wings were brown,” she says. “Like a sparrow’s.”

Eliza laughs. Halfway through, the laugh becomes a cry. Angelica holds her as she weeps.

That night, the phone rings. The stairs creak. Angelica closes her eyes.

The ringing stops.

III.

George has never not known who he is. Since he was old enough to remember things, he has remembered himself. He has remembered Martha. He has remembered his sons. He has remembered living, and leading, and dying. He has remembered all of it.

He does not remember how to help John Laurens.

Twenty years ago, Lafayette’s parents sent them to America to visit their grandmother. Their grandmother died while they were on the plane. Their parents died while they were in the cab. George taught at the college across the street from the police station, and he’d stopped by to offer donuts to the underappreciated secretary and happened to see Lafayette being led in by gentle police officers who seemed baffled by what to do with them.

George had walked over, bent down, and held out his hand. “Hello, son,” he said. “I’m George.”

“Je m’appelle Lafayette,” sniffled the child. “Je ne parle pas anglais.”

George frowned. Heels clicked behind him and the secretary knelt down beside him, laying her hand on Lafayette’s tiny knee.

“Je m’appelle Martha,” she said. “Nous prendrons soin de toi, chérie.”

It took two years for the adoption papers to go through. By that point, George and Martha were engaged, and they married later that year. Lafayette babbled sometimes about things that didn’t make sense, and George tried to fit them into what he knew of Lafayette’s first life. By Lafayette’s ninth birthday, he had a list of names.

Now, fifteen years later, George puts down the home phone and takes a deep breath, his eyes pricking with tears. He curls his spine and with a shaking hand slowly, carefully, crosses off John Laurens.

“You have ten minutes.” The guard opens the door just enough for George to step through, then immediately shuts it again.

John Laurens stares right through the wall across from his bed. There’s another bed, empty of belongings, and George settles on the edge of it, right in John’s eyeline. John doesn’t move, one leg hugged to his chest, the other dangling off the bed, his hair tied back too loosely to contain his curls. George feels an infinite sadness well up inside of him and shoves it down before it can drown him.

“Hi, John,” he says, keeping his voice soft. “My name is George Washington. In your first life, you were one of my sons.”

John shakes his head. George waits, but John doesn’t say a word.

“Do you remember me?” George asks.

John doesn’t do anything for a long moment. Then, he gives a small nod.

George wants to cry. “Okay. Okay, that’s good.” He lets out a breath. “John, how long have you been here?”

John holds up ten fingers. Then, as if George’s heart could break any further, he puts them down and holds up four again.

“Fourteen years,” George whispers. “You’ve been here since you were ten?”

A nod.

“Can you speak?”

A nod.

“How long has it been since you’ve spoken?”

Ten fingers. Then three.

“Jesus.” The word sneaks past George’s lips before he can stop it. “Okay. John, you’re twenty-four. You’re an adult. You can leave this place if you want to, can’t you?”

John shakes his head. With his hands, he spells out D-A-D.

“Conservatorship,” George realizes. John nods. “Okay. I’ll get you out of this, and I’ll bring you home to Alexander.”

For the first time, something sparks in John’s eyes.

George smiles. “That’s right, son. Your husband’s back, and he’s looking for you.”

John’s lips part around a quiet whine. He drags his second leg to his chest and folds his hands over his ears, rocking back and forth. He does this for several minutes, long enough that the guard knocks on the door. “Time’s up.”

George stands. “I’ll be back, John. And I’ll get you out of here.”

He doesn’t promise. He doesn’t need to.

He feels John’s eyes on him long after the door bangs shut.

George can’t sleep that night. He tosses and turns until half past three, when finally Martha has had enough and turns on her bedside lamp. “All right. Out with it, George.”

George rolls over. “How do you fight a conservatorship?”

Martha frowns. “What?”

“I found John Laurens.” Martha chokes on a cough and George pats her back. “Sorry, sorry. A few nights ago, one of my connections finally came through. That cop I used to have lunch with back when you were a secretary. Apparently Henry Laurens locked his son up in a mental institution when he was ten years old, citing ‘violent outbursts’ and ‘unpredictable flashbacks’. Knowing John, I wouldn’t be surprised, but Henry Laurens is an abusive, homophobic shithead who’s kept custody of his son long past when it should’ve been taken away, and I won’t stand for it.” He pauses for a moment, finding he’s heaving for breath. “I couldn’t help him in his first life, Martha. I’ll be damned if I don’t help him in this one.”

Martha lays her hand over his arm. “I’ll ask around. Are we telling Alexander?”

George lifts her hand to his lips. “No. Not yet, anyway.”

“Okay.” Martha turns out the light. “Go back to sleep.”

George “stays late at the office” the next night, or so Martha tells their children (and Aaron). In reality, he leaves early, drives upstate to the Frederick Estate, and storms inside with his ID and lawyer’s letter in hand.

“I’m here for John Laurens,” he says. The secretary blinks up at him. “John Laurens, Room 1782. I’m bringing him home with me.”

The secretary clears his throat. His nametag calls him Seabury. George dislikes him immediately.

“Sir,” Seabury says, “Mr. Laurens is under the highest security here. He’s not allowed visitors.”

“I saw him yesterday.”

“Special circumstances. It seems you called in every favor you had, and we still had to endure an hour-long meeting with Senator Laurens, who insisted we bar you from ever visiting his son again.”

George’s eyes narrow. “Tell Senator Laurens that I’m going to have him arrested for child abuse.”

Seabury doesn’t flinch. “Mr. Laurens is a fully grown adult.”

“He wasn’t when his father put him in here.” George slams the letter down on the counter. “Take me to see my son.”

Seabury’s mouth twitches. “As I’ve said—”

George punches him in the nose.

Martha doesn’t sound surprised when she picks up the phone. “Who’d you punch?”

George leans against the cell wall. “Secretary.”

Martha clicks her tongue. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

Two hours later, she shows up with Angelica Schuyler in tow. “Your lawyer,” Martha says by way of explanation, then hugs George tighter than she has in twenty-four hours. “You’re an idiot, and I’m very proud of you.”

George kisses her head before he pulls away. “Mrs. Schuyler,” he says, holding out his hand. Angelica shakes it. “My son hasn’t stopped talking about you since we adopted him.”

Angelica doesn’t smile. “Punching a snivelling manchild will not help John’s case, so let’s not do it again. That said—” She smiles a little. “Nice right hook.”

“Thank you.” George follows her down the hall, Martha’s arm looped through his. “We’re keeping this from Alexander and Laf for the moment—”

“I keep secrets for a living, Mr. Washington, don’t worry.” Angelica signs his release papers and gestures for him to do the same. “Mr. Seabury has dropped the charges and left his job. Evidently his husband, Charles Lee, used to be a guard at the Frederick Estate and beat John nearly to death once. Henry Laurens didn’t care, nor did the institution’s warden, but I’ve threatened them with a lawsuit on your behalf unless they drop the case.”

George curls his hands into fists. “I’ll kill that Lee fucker.”

“You don’t have to,” Angelica says, unfazed. “Apparently John regained control at the end of the fight and bashed Lee over the head with his own flashlight. Lee’s been in a coma for two years.”

George tries to feel sorry. He fails.

“Good riddance,” Martha mutters. “All right. What do we have to do to help John?”

Angelica strides through the sea of cop desks, parting them without so much as a glance. “I’ll work on his case, but I’ll need help. Help from good lawyers, ones who know reincarnation law and feel passionately about the case…”

“No,” George says.

Angelica opens the door for him. “Either we involve your son and his murderer slash life partner, or John stays in this hellhole for another five years, at least. Your call.”

George doesn’t answer.

Angelica grins. “Good choice.”

IV.

Five years ago, Maria was at a bar in Queens when some dick grabbed her by the waist. A man across the room saw, shot over, busted the guy’s ass, and bought Maria a drink. Two months later, that man grabbed her in her own kitchen and slapped her across the face.

Today, she dabs at her black eye with concealer, trying to avoid looking at his ring on her hand.

Somebody knocks on the door. “Maria?” Dr. King, fuck. “Your lunch break was over two minutes ago.”

Maria shoves the concealer in the pocket of her scrubs and hurries to unlock the door. “Sorry, Dr. King,” she says, careful to keep her eyes down as she brushes past him. “Where do you need me?”

“In the future, you’d do well to keep an eye on the time.” Dr. King glances at his clipboard. “Room 1782. Mr. Laurens had an episode a few days ago and some uptight reincarnate is attempting to get him released. I want you to keep a close eye on him for the rest of your shift.”

Maria nods. “Yes, sir.”

She walks briskly to John’s room, making sure to stop by the supply closet first to divvy up his pills. She never makes him take any, but she has to make it look like she does.

She knocks before she comes in, and calls her name so John knows who she is. She closes the door behind her and sits down on the empty bed across from him—John has never had and will never have a roommate—then sets the pills on the small table between the two beds.

“Hi, John,” Maria says. “I’ll be here the whole day. Do you want to talk today?”

John looks up at her. His face spasms and he shakes his hand frantically towards his eye.

Maria winces, touching her bruised skin. “Oh. Yeah. Just James. You know.” She smiles. “I’m fine.”

John growls, low in his throat, glaring with a wicked gleam. He’s going to kill her husband one day, and she knows it, because she’s going to help him.

“There’s a man trying to get you out,” Maria says. “What’s his name?”

John makes grabby hands. Maria jolts, then waves away his silent apology, reaching into the bedside table drawer for the notebook she keeps there. From her pocket she pulls a pen, then hands them both to him.

John scribbles something. It takes several minutes. Maria waits, daydreaming that she and John are hidden in the woods somewhere and nobody can find them.

Halfway through their imaginary coffee routine, John hands the notebook back. Maria looks at the mess of scrawl bleeding over the page: George Washington. Used to be my father. Knows my husband. Help please.

Then, at the very bottom: I like your hair.

Maria smiles. A real one, for the first time all week. “Thank you.”

John nods. He tugs his legs to his chest, his favorite position, and presses his mouth to his knees in a sort of self-kiss. They sit there quietly for the rest of the afternoon. Maria picks up the notebook and starts writing poems. John takes the pen to his walls. He draws turtles, mostly, but occasionally a man Maria has always assumed to be his husband. She wonders if John will still know his husband so well, now that the man wears a different face.

She had known James. Not by love, but by the terrible, awful feeling in her gut that she had let his brute protectiveness overrule. Now she’s trapped in a marriage like a sinner in shackles, and she has no Alexander to run to for help, not that he’d helped her last time.

She doesn’t know where Eliza is, either.

The clock strikes three in the morning before Maria registers it’s dark. John’s cell window really is too small. Once he’s out Maria will make sure he has the biggest windows she can find.

Her phone is blown to bits with messages and missed calls. She was supposed to be home at three. It’s three-oh-two. Maria closes her eyes and grips the edge of the bed, imagining it’s Eliza’s hand. One day she’ll find her wife again. One day, she’ll be safe.

John is asleep in his bed. Maria tucks him in and kisses his forehead. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she whispers, then leaves the door unlocked.

Maria doesn’t pull into her driveway. Instead, she stops at the end of the street and kills the headlights. She can see her and James’s house from here, and the lights are all on. He’s raging about; his silhouette storms and paces and throws smaller silhouettes across the room. Maria sits in the car and considers what in that house she can’t leave behind.

She decides nothing is worth him.

She gets out of the car. She tugs her ring off her finger and sets it down on the road. She goes to the trunk and rummages around for the toolbox she keeps around in case of an emergency. She pulls out a hammer. She walks back to the ring.

Once the thing is in pieces, Maria gets back in the car. She turns the key. She steers back onto the street. She doesn’t drive to the police. The police don’t help women, and they don’t help Black people, and she’s both of those. She doesn’t drive to a hospital either. They’d just call the police. She does drive to a fire station, where she hurls her phone out the window and into the bushes.

Then she drives to an ice cream parlor.

It’s five in the morning, so nobody’s there. But Maria is an expert mechanic, and a high school dropout, so she knows how to pick a lock. Inside, she climbs over the counter and finds herself the tub of cookie dough. She gorges on sprinkles. She scarfs down M&M’s. As the sun rises, she writes out a note and leaves it on the counter with a fifty-dollar bill: I washed my hands, and everything I touched is in the middle of the room. I’m sorry. I hope you have a good day.

She leaves, relocking the door behind her with the key she found in the back office. She stashes the key in the mailbox. She gets in her car, and she drives for the nearest law office.

A very tired-looking man opens the door. “Hello?”

“I’m Maria Lewis,” Maria says. “Can you help me?”

The man takes Maria inside and offers her a cup of coffee, which she declines. He then offers her a bottle of chocolate milk, which she accepts.

“Here,” the man says, pulling a tin of cookies out of a drawer and handing those to her too. “These were made by a friend of mine, they’re exquisite. I’m sorry I don’t have any real food to offer you, but it’s six in the morning and I shouldn’t even be here.”

Maria takes another gulp of chocolate milk. “You could take me to breakfast. I’d pay.”

The man eyes her half-blue face. “No, I think you’ve paid enough.”

Maria flushes. The man offers her his hand, slowly, and she shakes it. “Aaron Burr.”

“Maria,” Maria says, then blinks. “Sorry. I already—”

“No apologies here.”

Maria ducks her head. “Okay.”

Aaron takes her to a diner across the street. He buys her pancakes and bacon and waffles and a whole heaping of home fries, all of which she eats. James didn’t like it when she ate. Maria decides she is going to eat everything she wants from now on.

“Do you know who I am?” Aaron asks as she’s wiping her mouth. “You could just have a certain name, but I thought maybe—”

“You killed my ex-lover,” Maria says. She swallows the last of her orange juice. “Thank you.”

Aaron shakes his head. “Don’t thank me. I regretted it every day of my life until I died, and I regret it every day now, of this life. Of course, this time around I have Alexander by my side, so the ache has lessened, somewhat.”

Maria tries not to flinch. “Alexander is here?”

“Yes.” Aaron inches his hand closer to hers on the table, but doesn’t touch her. “He’s a much better man than he was two hundred years ago. He’s sorry for not helping you. He’s sorry for using you. And you don’t ever have to forgive him if you don’t want to.”

Maria glances around the diner. She feels suddenly very exposed, even in her full-cover scrubs and Aaron’s hoodie. “Can we go somewhere else?”

Aaron walks her back to the law office. They settle in Alexander’s office and Aaron sits and reads a book while Maria studies every speck of the room, searching for clues about who Alexander is. She finds mountains and mountains of madly written papers. She finds an entire closet full of bags of coffee grounds, which is more than a little concerning. And she finds letters from over fifty organizations dedicated to stopping violence against women, all thanking him for his generous donations. She checks the receipts. In total, Alexander has given nearly half a million dollars away to shelters that could’ve helped Maria if they existed back then.

“Okay,” she says, turning back to Aaron. He looks up at her. “I’ll meet him.”

Alexander is not what Maria expected of the man who ruined her life. He’s small. He trembles. And he looks… sad.

“Hi,” he says in the harried voice of a man out of time. “Hi, Maria, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I—” He drops to his knees. She doesn’t remember him like this. “How can I help?”

“I need to get away from my husband,” Maria says. “And I need to find my wife.”

Alexander tilts his head. “The husband I can do, and with pleasure. Wife might take a bit longer. What’s her name?”

“Eliza Hamilton.”

Alexander chokes on nothing. “You— What?”

Aaron pushes open the door with his back, holding a tray of full mugs. He spots Alexander beating his chest and hacking up snot and spit and blinks. “I told you not to talk to her before I got back.”

Maria smiles, just a little. Aaron hands her a mug of Earl Grey and she takes three long, full sips, warmth seeping through her whole body. Alexander downs his own mug of coffee in one swig.

Aaron settles at the desk, putting his mug off to the side. “I’ve drawn up divorce papers on the grounds of severe abuse. A mostly standard, slightly expounded restraining order is making its way through the needed signatures as we speak. And I’ve taken the liberty of sending the police to your house and kickstarting the case against James Reynolds for domestic violence.”

Maria’s heart beats a little faster. “You mean—?”

“Your husband is in jail, yes.” Aaron smiles into his tea. “And a close friend of Alexander’s father is keeping a… special eye on him.”

Maria giggles. She slaps her hand over her mouth, appalled at the sound, but then she sees Alexander beaming up at her and decides maybe laughing isn’t so bad a crime.

She kicks Alexander gently with her boot. “Hey. I’m sorry about your son.”

Alexander’s grin fades as an old grief clouds his eyes. He ducks his head, hair falling over the past and snapping the memories shut. “Thank you.”

At the desk, Aaron clears his throat. “Alexander. I’m sorry, but we do have other clients.” Maria waits, but he doesn’t mention John’s name.

Alexander bolts to his feet, spine straightening like a deer who heard a stick break. “Right,” he breathes, a ghost on the wind, and rushes for Aaron’s desk. He scrambles about through the papers, muttering to himself as Aaron ignores him, favoring the memo beneath his fountain pen.

Maria is not blameless in their affair. She went to his door. She batted her lashes. She asked him inside. That she fell in love with him was not her fault; that he wrote about her and published it freely was not her fault; that she married a monster who charmed her father was not her fault. And she does not blame herself for most of it—certainly not for Alexander’s endless culpability. What she does blame herself for, however, is the look in his wife’s eyes when she found out.

They passed each other on the street once, Maria and Eliza. It was just after Eliza’s eldest had died. Maria recognized her instantly, and in her shock dropped her basket of goods, spilling every last grocery on the floor. Eliza, drenched in black, helped her gather her things and throw them away. She bought a replacement for everything Maria had bought, and a rusted gold locket that she clasped around Maria’s neck. “For luck,” Eliza said, touching Maria’s cheek right over the bruise James had left there three days before. “To protect you from the men that hurt us.”

Maria hadn’t seen her again until Alexander’s funeral, which she had attended from the back of the church. She wore a thick veil, but Eliza still caught her by the wrist on her way out, and asked her if she’d come by for tea.

They fell in love. There were no other words for it. And though Eliza outlived Maria by twenty-six years, she never loved again. Maria knows this, because Eliza told her every year at Maria’s grave.

Yet at the end of her life, Eliza was laid to rest with Alexander, and Maria remained lonely in another cemetery in another state. In another heaven.

What she’s trying to say is that she understands.

“Alexander,” she says, and for the first time since 1791 the name is just a name. “Thank you.”

V.

Thomas met Angelica back in middle school, but he was in France when he realized he wanted to marry her. She was studying at Oxford over in England and he was completing an intensive internship at the Louvre for his art history minor. It was there that he met James Madison, who worked as an archiver despite being Thomas’s age. It seemed prodigies were born with every door open.

James was the kind of person who walked into doors because he was too absorbed in his book. As such, Thomas started walking ahead of him and holding the door. So went the summer: James read and Thomas walked. They spent plenty of afternoons this way, and mornings, and even nights, on occasion, when James remembered his attachable reading light. Thomas mentioned these walks to Angelica over the phone, but didn’t have much to say, because how could he even begin to explain peace?

Angelica flew in towards the end of August so they could take the flight home together. Thomas was out with James when he saw her, and his legs buckled and his hands shook. He held her as close as he could and mourned the fact that he couldn’t fuse her bones with his. When she pulled away, she was laughing, and he kissed her smile, and then he started crying, because the world had ended while she was gone and he would have to tell her and she would leave him forever.

He told her all of this once he’d calmed down enough to breathe. James had gone back to the museum, mumbling some excuse neither of them believed, and Thomas had let him, but not without a squeeze of the hand and a kiss on the cheek. Then he let Angelica lead him to a bench beneath a willow tree and he told her every last wretched thing inside his head.

When he finished, she laughed.

“Thomas,” she said. “If I was stupid, you wouldn’t love me.”

Thomas blinked. “Uh—”

“Love him, too; I don’t mind.” Angelica kissed his cheek. “I know you don’t remember this, but in our first life, I was desperately in love with a man named Alexander. And I know if I saw him now, I’d love him again, I’d love him still, and though it wouldn’t be the same, it’d still be something. I understand you, Thomas. And I hope that when I find Alexander again, you’ll understand me.”

They walked home. Angelica went to bed. Thomas grabbed his keys from the bowl by the door and drove to the nearest jewelry store.

These days, Thomas works in a history museum specializing in the Revolutionary War. His days are quiet. He calls James when he’s doing anything particularly boring, and James always answers, even though he’s plenty busy as the Governor of Virginia. Thomas was Virginia’s Senator up until three weeks ago, when he resigned, effective immediately. Realizing you’ve already been President tends to knock you out of any political ambition.

No one gets a third chance down here. If he’s going to die for good this time, he’d liked to have lived most of his days with his wife.

The museum is closed on Sundays, but Thomas still rolls into the parking lot and makes his way up the front steps. Inside wait the deliveries from last night, shipped all the way from the Smithsonian Archives. There was something in particular he’d asked for.

Enclosed is a letter:

Dear Mr. Schuyler-Jefferson,

 

I’m unsure why you’d be interested in any of John Laurens’s personal effects, seeing as you never met the man in any instance of recorded history, but in the spirit of helping other reincarnates find answers, I’ve shipped what we do have to your place of work. Please understand that these artifacts are fragile and must be handled with care.

 

Included in this delivery are as follows:

 

A ribbon belonging to Mr. Laurens’s daughter

Mr. Laurens’s military uniform

A box of letters between Mr. Laurens and Alexander Hamilton

A box of drawings signed by Mr. Laurens

Mr. Laurens’s last will and testament

 

Please see to it that Mr. Laurens’s belongings are distributed among any reincarnates you may know according to his wishes. Best of luck to you, Mr. President.

 

Sincerely,

Kitty Livingston, Director of Colonial Archives 1770–1790, Smithsonian Museums

Reincarnate est. 2001

Thomas takes the box inside his office and clears his desk, laying all the necessary tools on a nearby rolling cart. He cuts into the box with a letter opener and lifts every item out one by one, spreading them out across the wood.

Except the letters. Those he leaves in the box, for Alexander’s eyes only.

Each of the items is fairly standard, and after examining them, he returns them all to their packaging and reseals them. John’s will is fairly clear that his wife is to retain all of his wealth, but any of his personal belongings are to be bestowed to Mr. Alexander Hamilton upon the event of his death. This includes an unopened envelope marked with Alexander’s name.

It’s the ribbon that gives him pause.

The letter from the Smithsonian was right; Thomas never met John Laurens in his first life. But he knows a thing or two from what Angelica has mentioned Alexander mentioning, and it seems like John didn’t have much of a chance to know his daughter, let alone have a ribbon of hers with him when he died.

Besides, Thomas thinks—it would be strange if Alexander wore the same ribbon as John’s daughter around his wrist every day until he, too, succumbed to time.

Thomas packs up the ribbon with the rest and shoves it all into his trunk. He breaks three speeding laws on his way to the Washingtons’.

Only George is home. Thomas sets the box down on the coffee table in the living room and demands whiskey. George raises his eyebrow. Thomas makes himself coffee.

“How’d you get your hands on all this?” George asks, looking through John’s drawings. “It’s not like museums just give us our stuff back if we ask nicely.”

Thomas downs the coffee in one go. “Got hold of a reincarnate who works at the Smithsonian. She sent me John’s things ‘on loan’.” George gives him a look. “She asked that I give them to Alexander.”

George slouches back into the sofa, dragging a hand down his face. “How many damn people knew about my son and his very illegal husband?”

“Too many,” Thomas guesses. He drops down in the armchair next to the couch. “But hey, they were never hung for love. And in this world, they’re free to be together in the light.”

George nods absently. “You should’ve seen Alexander after John…” He bites his thumbnail. “Well. Let’s just say my son buried his heart with that boy, even if the rest of him kept on walking.”

Thomas knows. Alexander had hurricanes in his eyes, always had, but around August 27th they went dark. Thomas never asked him why. He told himself he didn’t care. But when Alexander died in July, Thomas caught himself thinking that at least he’d never have to live through another August.

“Thomas, if I may…” George leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Why the hell do you give a damn about Alexander, anyway? In my time you hated each other. Something change after I died?”

Thomas shakes his head. “Nothing at all. He wanted to kill me, I wanted to ruin his life. Same old, same old. Then he died, and I died, and we spent two hundred years apart, and it was so…” He laughs. “Quiet.”

George looks at all the memories laid out before them. He frowns at the sight of the ribbon, plucking it from the pile. “What’s this?”

Thomas eyes it tiredly. “John’s wedding ring.”

George’s whole body shudders with a sigh, his eyes welling. He sinks backwards, holding the ribbon with all the reverence one would have for a child. “They wore these everywhere,” he murmurs, “after Schuylkill. Anything non-uniform wasn’t allowed, but I figured if I allowed rosaries I had to allow ribbons.”

“Where’d they get them?” Thomas asks, voice low.

George shrugs, heaving in a breath, then out. “I don’t know, to be honest,” he says. “Children would come to camp and give us things, sometimes. Perhaps a little girl took out her braids.”

Thomas looks down at his own wedding ring, tugging and twisting until the skin beneath is red and raw. Angelica tells him not to mess with it—he’s cut into himself enough times for her to worry—but he can’t help it. The pain reminds him he’s alive. The ring reminds him he’s hers.

He likes being hers. She’s his favorite thing about himself.

“I heard you found John Laurens in a mental ward,” Thomas says, though he doesn’t quite know why. “He belong there?”

“Don’t we all,” George mutters. “Most people are perfectly happy being mad at home. John won’t be any different.” He pushes himself up, reaching out to shake Thomas’s hand when he, too, stands. “You know, Thomas—I never disliked you. You and Alexander, it wasn’t about that.”

Thomas nods. “I know.”

And he does. It took two hundred years, dying and being reborn, but he does know it. Death is mostly thinking. You have a lot of time to yourself. The more time you have, the clearer things become.

Outside, it’s started to snow. Thomas holds out his hand for stray flakes, watching in wonder as the world disappears beneath a light-stitched funeral shroud. Death is quiet. When you wake up, the world is so much louder than you remember. Here, ten miles from any road, it’s almost like he’s buried again, sleeping soundly in the earth.

His phone rings. Alexander; he picks up. “Hey, love,” he says. “We were just talking about you.”

“George said you dropped off some things for me from John.” Alexander sounds breathless. Worse than usual. “Thank you. I know you didn’t know him, but—”

“Are you in love with my wife?” Thomas blinks at himself, then shoves his free hand in the pocket of his peacoat. “It’s okay if you are.”

Alexander doesn’t say anything for several seconds. Then, “In my first life, yes. Desperately. I still don’t know why I married Eliza instead of her.”

“Angie was already married by the time you met.”

“Ah, that’s probably it.” Alexander’s voice drips affection. “No, Thomas, I’m not in love with your wife. She just owns half my soul, that’s all.”

Thomas looks back at the house. Through the window, he watches George weep into his hands.

“I’m sorry I outlived you,” he says.

A hand falls on his shoulder. Thomas whirls around, his heart stumbling over almosts.

Alexander drops his phone from his ear. “I’m not.”

VI.

Lafayette remembered themself when George knelt down and shook their hand. They remembered more once they found Alexander. Half their life is still missing—one quarter is locked up in a mental institution; the other is lost in the wind.

Today, Lafayette gets that first quarter back.

“Remember,” George says, showing his ID to the guard at the front door and gesturing for Lafayette to do the same, “we only get ten minutes, so make them count.”

Lafayette takes in every locked door along the way. They count twelve in between the front of the facility and the specialized ward John is kept in. Behind that door, Maria Lewis waits with a key ring and a nervous smile.

“I got you twenty minutes today,” she says, leading them down a labyrinth of holding cells. As she unlocks the door, she says, “Make him feel safe, please. His father’s coming by today.”

Lafayette rescues spiders from the radiator. They never catch fireflies, never touch butterflies’ wings, never crush ant hills. They know every life on earth is worth the same as theirs. When they eat meat, they thank the dead.

If John’s father were a caterpillar, Lafayette would place it on the hot cement of the driveway and watch it squirm under the scalding spotlights they created with a magnifying glass.

Inside the tiny room, John sits on the bed, clear-eyed. He smiles at Lafayette, white peeking out from behind pink. He has a faded bruise around his eye.

Lafayette would flatten his caterpillar father segment by segment with a rock.

Maria goes to the bedside table and pulls a notebook from the drawer there, handing it to John along with a pen from her pocket. She bends to kiss his head, stroking down his curls with her hand, and John smiles up at her, his eyes fluttering shut at her touch. George ducks his head, looking as if he may cry.

Maria closes the door behind herself. Lafayette waits for George to speak, and when he doesn’t, they open their own mouth. “I’ve missed you, ma douce tortue.”

John laughs. It is breathless and ragged and beautiful. Lafayette drinks it in. They remind themself that they will soon hear it every day for the rest of their life.

“Your case,” George blurts, suddenly jolting awake. He winces when John jumps. “Sorry. We’re doing everything we can. I’m sorry it isn’t going faster.”

John slashes his pen across the page. Can I help?

George smiles, grief bleeding through his teeth. “Do you have any photographic evidence of what’s been done to you?”

John nods. Writes, Maria has a flash drive.

George’s smile twists. “Good girl.”

John grins.

Lafayette stares. John’s eyes are kind, bright, in this lifetime. They wonder which is worse, prison or war. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps John is simply going to be John, no matter how hard life tries to wring it out of him.

There’s a knock on the door. Maria pokes her head in. “Five minutes. Henry showed up early.”

John drops his head back against the wall, his eyes going dead. He spends the next five minutes writing, unbroken. When George stands to leave, John leaps forward, wrapping around him in a desperate hug. George kisses his head and rubs his back. Lafayette shuffles on their feet. John reaches out and tugs them in too.

Alexander opens the door before George can get his keys out. “Saw you from the window,” he explains. Aaron stands behind him, a shadow. “So? How is he?”

George pats Alexander’s shoulder, brushing past him for the kitchen. He murmurs a polite hello to his son’s bedmate. Alexander chases after George, shouting for answers. Lafayette closes and locks the door.

“Hi, Laf,” Aaron says. He keeps his eyes down. He knows Lafayette doesn’t like him, even though Lafayette likes him fine. “Your mom’s upstairs.”

Lafayette loves Martha, but they don’t want to talk to her. They don’t want to talk to anyone right now. John is trapped and with him, any chance of Lafayette’s happiness.

Peace cannot be found alone.

Aaron turns to leave. Lafayette’s heart lurches. “Aaron,” they blurt, catching him by the wrist. “I love you, you know this, right? Alexander loves you, so I love you. The past is forgiven. I am happy you are here.”

Aaron looks away. He does not like people being kind to him. Lafayette knows this, because Alexander is like this, because John is like this, and people like that think they need to earn kindness, but every cruelty is deserved.

People like that are stupid with pain.

Lafayette lets him go. Aaron flees up the stairs, taking them two at a time, his cheeks flushed in the fluorescent lights. Lafayette listens for the slam of the bedroom door, but hears only a soft click. They should’ve known; Alexander is a hurricane, but Aaron is trickling stream, one that lives and dies at the storm’s whim. He doesn’t like to be heard.

In the kitchen, George is leaning against the cabinets, sipping a mug of tea. Alexander is sitting on a stool at the marble counter, mouthing the words of John’s letter to himself.

Lafayette takes the seat across from him. John had managed to write five pages in his last five minutes, so fast that they could barely see the pen moving. John was never much of a writer—beside Alexander, he seemed illiterate—but his memory transformed strategies into stories, tragedies into reports. He could remove himself from the horror in a way Lafayette never could. Lafayette didn’t like to think about why, about the blank look in John’s eyes sometimes, the way he flinched when the General raised his voice. Love is a terrible thing. Love turned inside out is worse.

“May I?” Lafayette asks, reaching for the letter. Alexander nods, letting them take it.

“It’s horrible,” he warns, but Lafayette has seen men die in delirium, believing they were at home with their wives and children. Horrible is relative.

The letter pours on and on, boiling water on a wound. Some memories are flashes, others scenes, occasionally only dialogue, but every new burn makes its home in the pit of Lafayette’s soul, where they put all the things they don’t think about. Heaven is only a comfort if you know you have avoided hell. If you know there is somewhere for all the bad people to go so bad things can happen to them.

Lafayette does not like history class. There is a unique torture in learning all the drawn-out ways your well-meant decisions have ruined your country.

The letter ends: My father will say I tried to kill him. This is true. My hands were on the gun. His hands were on my little brother’s neck.

Lafayette puts the letter down. Alexander laughs, apropos of nothing. Lafayette remembers remembering. They think they would like to forget again, but God is not so kind.

Lafayette works at a hair salon, but they call in when they’re in the car on their way over. “I’m heartsick,” they say, and the receptionist pops her bubblegum and says, “Okay, sure, whatever.” Lafayette hangs up and presses down a little harder on the gas.

They consider plans, all the way there. The scale of the doors and the windows, the layout of each hallway. How you could get out with yourself intact.

By the time they park, they know there is no way out alone.

Maria raises her eyebrow when Lafayette walks through the door of John’s ward—it has other patients, but it was surely built for John—but she waves him through without much fanfare. “Remember,” she says, catching their wrist before they go in. For a moment she has their father’s face. “His father came yesterday. He’s…”

Lafayette nods. “I understand, cerise douce. Thank you.”

This tiny cell has been John’s world for fourteen years. Lafayette does not know how you can stay here so long and not die. They keep you from killing your body, they know, but there is nothing they can do to stop you from dying.

John waves when they come in. He is lying down, hanging half off the bed, as if there is not enough of him left to be worth holding up. Lafayette sits criss-cross on the floor next to John’s bed and takes his hand.

“I have come to tell you a story,” Lafayette says, “because stories make people forget the world for a moment, and you need to leave this room but I cannot take you out of it.”

John squeezes their hand. When Lafayette looks up at him, he’s closed his eyes and curled up.

Lafayette squeezes back.

They sit like that for a very long time.

Lafayette opens their mouth. They close it. They realize they have forgotten all their stories.

“When you died,” they say, then choke, surprised by the sound of their own voice; “When you died, Alexander was not the only one who lost his mind.”

This is all they can bring themself to say. It is not a story; but it is.

John kisses their head. Lafayette closes their eyes. Two minutes later, Maria comes to collect them, and Lafayette has to leave their brother behind again.

When John smiles at them, they could swear his heart is bleeding.

Alexander is sitting on the couch with an envelope in his hands. George and Martha are not home; it is Wednesday, and they go to the grocery store on Wednesdays. Lafayette drops their keys in the bowl by the door and comes to sit by Alexander’s side.

“I can’t read it,” Alexander whispers. His hands are shaking. “John wrote it to me before he died and I can’t read it.”

Lafayette reaches out. When Alexander doesn’t move, they take the envelope from between his fingers, breaking the seal gently and pulling out the letter.

“My dearest, Alexander,” they recite. “I’m sorry I’ve had to leave you. I confess I had hoped I would be first, but not so soon, and not without any chance to say goodbye. When I imagined my death, you were always there beside me, holding my hand. In my worst moments, you were bleeding out with me.

“If historians find this letter, I’ll be damned, but I’ll happily rot in an unmarked grave if it means you get the closure I know you’ll need. I won’t be buried with you anyhow, so how could it matter where this wretched body ends up?

“Alexander, I love you. My life, summed up in four words. You have a greater purpose than any of us can ever know, but my only purpose has ever been to love you. I did other things, things I’m proud of, but you were always my reason.

“I realize I am filling up the page without much of anything to say. You’d scold me for it, and you’d be right to. I’d kiss you, and you’d laugh, and the world would be a good place full of good things.

“Here is the last of me: May you always know I love you. May I always remember your face.

“In the next life, may we have more time.

“Ever yours, John,” Lafayette finishes. They fold up the letter. They slip it back into the envelope. They set it down in front of Alexander, a man loved and all too quickly lost.

“The end of the world,” Alexander says, “is his laugh, cut short.”

Lafayette stares at the broken seal. “Alexander,” they say. “Where’s your white ribbon?”

Alexander crumbles into tears. “I don’t know,” he weeps, his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

VII.

The morning of Alexander’s duel, Eliza stood at the window of their bedroom and watched him leave her for the last time.

She knew he was leaving when he sent her to bed alone. She’d spent most of their marriage alone, and though she told herself it would end after whatever thing was preoccupying Alexander’s mind was over, there was always another thing, another job, another reason. Her husband wasn’t hers, and it was only after his death that Eliza could admit to herself that he never had been.

Alexander was a man out of time, even at the start of his life. He never felt safe, never settled, never let himself belong to anybody, because belonging meant you were home, and his first home had been torn out from under him by God himself. Yet there was a white ribbon Alexander wore around his left wrist like a chain, as if the person who had given it to him was his keeper after all.

He had been wearing it when the bullet hit. It never came undone, not even in the chaos of attempted surgery or the painful hours afterwards, waiting, once it became clear nothing could be done. Eliza wouldn’t allow it to be removed, even as his body was cleaned and dressed for burial. They laid him in the coffin and she kissed his forehead goodbye, thumbing the ribbon’s frayed ends.

“Go,” she’d whispered. “He’s waiting for you.”

She knew, from Alexander’s silence over the years, what John Laurens was to him. She never needed to be told. After Alexander died, she made her way through their house and found every last page of his handwriting, and he’d written plenty of letters to a dead man. And he’d kept, beneath his and Eliza’s bed, a box of letters from John that Eliza never read, though he’d moved it to Phillip’s room after Phillip died. Eliza supposed he needed to keep his griefs together.

It was only when they put him in the ground that Eliza finally crumpled beneath the weight, sagging into Angelica’s side. Her sister led her into the church, and they sat in the front row of pews until Eliza’s body had run out of tears. She felt dried-up and withered. Angelica stroked her hair.

“I wasted half my life with that man,” Eliza said. “He never loved me, Angie. But he was so good at pretending, and I thought maybe I could be too.”

Angelica kissed her head. “I told you he’d never be satisfied.”

“He was.” Eliza pulled away. “He was, Angelica. Before me. Before he lost…” She smiled. “There was somebody before me. Alexander’s heart has never left him.”

Angelica didn’t say anything else. She held Eliza until the sky blackened and the church candles were lit, priests moving about them quietly. “I have to go home,” she said finally. “I’ll visit you tomorrow. Be well, Eliza.”

Eliza let her go. Every pew was empty save for the last row, where a woman sat in an ebony dress, a lace veil hiding her face. But Eliza would know those crimson lips anywhere.

She caught her by the wrist at the door. “Maria.”

Maria kept her head bowed, even as Eliza lifted her veil. “Mrs. Hamilton.”

Eliza shook her head. “Schuyler, please,” she murmured. “Miss Lewis. Come home with me.”

Eliza wakes up in her bed in Angelica and Thomas’s house. She can hear Peggy across the hall, humming along to Avril Lavigne and doing her makeup. Downstairs, someone is shuffling about; likely Thomas, because Angelica leaves at five in the morning these days, trying to build a case against John’s conservatorship. Eliza slides out of bed and twists her hair back in a braid. She walks downstairs in her pajamas, then stops dead in the doorway when she sees who’s sitting at the table.

Aaron nods at her, lifting his coffee mug in a salute. “Good morning.”

Eliza doesn’t say a word. She remembers him from heaven, though she’s never been sure how he made it up there. “You killed Alexander.”

Aaron smiles, his eyes flickering with regret. “I’m sorry.”

Those words should be meaningless by now. Somehow they aren’t. Eliza walks to the table and sits down across from him.

“You love my husband,” she says.

It’s not a question. Aaron doesn’t answer it like one. “He’d love to see you.”

“No.”

Aaron takes a sip of coffee, then slides the mug away. “You used to be forgiving.”

“I used to be sad.” Eliza eyes his hands, the way they shake without Alexander’s to hold. “Why are you here, Aaron?”

Aaron folds his hands together. It hides the shaking well enough. “Every reincarnate must ask themself why they were given a second chance. Why we were returned to this earth. Well, I rose from hell to find my place by Alexander’s side. To protect him, to love him, to do everything in my power to make him happy. Put simply, I’m here to guard his heart. And you’re breaking it.”

Eliza rolls her eyes, ignoring the guilt that blooms in her chest. “He broke mine first.”

Aaron doesn’t argue. “Maria Lewis is looking for you.”

Eliza’s chest hollows out. She sucks in a breath that feels like rusted iron in her throat. “You mean—”

“Your wife is here, and she’s safe.” Somewhere a door slams and Aaron jolts, fingers paling as they twist around each other. “Please, Eliza. Come see Alexander.”

Eliza’s gaze darkens. “Take me to my wife.”

Aaron bows his head. “As you wish.” He stands and comes around the table, offering her his hand. She pushes herself up without him. “Eliza—” He cuts himself off, dropping his arm. “Okay. Okay, it’s up to you. But—please, before we go, please—” When he looks up at her, his eyes are wet. “I need to ask a favor.”

“I owe you nothing, Aaron,” Eliza says, but her heart stutters in her chest, straining against the cold.

“I know, I know.” Aaron smiles as the first tear falls. “But if there’s any part of you that remembers John Laurens, then you know you owe him everything.”

Eliza flinches.

Aaron looks away, backing into the table. “Sorry. I’m sorry. But Alexander—”

“I know.” Eliza covers her mouth with a hand. “What do you need me to do?”

Aaron wilts. “Tell him,” he says. “Tell him what I can’t. Tell him that his husband came back, but he can’t come home.”

Eliza understands, suddenly, why she leapt out of heaven. She’s an angel; she’s always been an angel. It’s just taken her far too long to understand whom it is she’s here for.

“Okay,” she says. “Come back tonight. I know what to do.”

In all her years back on this earth, Eliza has never been to her own grave. She hates the look of it, the smell of wet grass, how it’s next to Alexander’s. Angelica should have been buried with him, not her. John should’ve been buried with him.

Well. No way to fix that now.

“What are we doing here?” Aaron asks, huddling by the car. Eliza waves for him to follow her and he shakes his head. “I don’t go to Alexander’s grave without him. We have rules.”

Eliza leaves him there. She hikes up the hill on her own, knocking on the church’s doors. It’s almost three in the morning, but supposedly God is awake at all hours.

The man who opens the door looks anything but awake. His eyes are rounded with red, his lips chapped. “Can I help you?”

A name flashes through Eliza’s head. “Hercules.”

Hercules tugs her inside, banging the door shut behind her. “How do you know who I am?”

Eliza hugs herself, taking in his pajama pants and bare chest. He’s clutching a copy of Tolkien. “Are you a priest?”

Hercules shakes his head. “Crypt keeper. How do you know who I am?”

“The same way anyone would know,” Eliza says, taking a seat in the last pew. “I used to know you.”

Hercules keeps on staring, but nothing dawns in his eyes. Finally Eliza sighs. “Elizabeth Schuyler, at your service.”

Hercules swallows, his fingers still curled around the handle. “Oh.”

She waits, but he doesn’t say anything else.

“You’re here late,” she says.

“Night shift.” Hercules finally lets go of the door. “I don’t go out in the daylight. Somebody could recognize me.”

“You have a new face.”

“You knew me, and we weren’t even important to each other.”

Eliza wants to deny it, but can’t. She barely knew Hercules Mulligan. She hopes to change that this time around. “I remember heaven. I’m an angel.” She shrugs off her cardigan so he can see the tips of the wings tattooed on her back. “I’m here to save John Laurens.”

Hercules drops down beside her. “John,” he breathes. “John’s—?”

“Yes.”

Hercules moans, burying his face in his hands. “My god. My god. Thank you, thank you, thank you—” He lifts his head again, laughing so loud it seems to shiver through the rafters. “Laf may be lost to me, and Alex, too, but at least there’s our dear John.”

Eliza lays her hand on his back. “Everyone you love has returned,” she says. “They’ve been looking for you.” She tries for a smile. “If only you’d taken the day shift.”

Hercules’s laughter trails off into tears.

“I looked for them,” he rasps. “I went to South Carolina looking for John, then New York, looking for Alexander, then Virginia, looking for General Washington, and when I could find none of them I flew to Paris and lived there for three years, searching the whole country for my dear Lafayette. When I could not find them, I…” He sobs. “Oh, darling, my sweet darling…”

Eliza looks away, pulling her hand back down to her lap. She lets him cry for roughly twenty minutes, counting the time on her watch. She wonders if Aaron has gone home. She hopes Aaron has gone home.

“I came here to open Alexander’s grave,” Eliza says, once Hercules’s cries have withered to sniffles. “I buried him with a white ribbon. He needs it back.”

Hercules wipes his eyes. “His—white ribbon?” He coughs. “You— You knew?”

“If I was a stupid woman, Alexander would not have married me.” Eliza understands very little about her ex-husband, but that, she’s always known. “Would you get it for me, please?”

Hercules nods, absently, like a bobblehead. He stands, gripping the pew for balance, and one by one takes careful, measured steps towards the doors. He shuts them quietly behind himself. Eliza waits, listening. She listens to his boots crunch into the grass, listens to his grunts as he pries the slab of stone off of Alexander’s tomb, listens as the bones rustle and clack against one another as Hercules rummages around for a vow.

Eliza cranes her neck, pointing her chin up to God’s altar. “You should know,” she says; “when we met, I didn’t like you.”

Hercules returns within an hour. Eliza has been watching the sky grow lighter through the stained glass, but when the door creaks open she looks over her shoulder, finding Hercules with haunted eyes and filthy hands. Between his thumb and forefinger is a faded, dusty white ribbon.

Eliza takes it in her palms. “Thank you.”

Hercules shakes his head. “Don’t thank me. Take me home.”

Eliza loops her arm through his. She waits for him to lock up. They walk down the hill, out of the cemetery, and she keeps her eyes down, away from the desecrated grave.

Aaron is still there, on the sidewalk, sitting on the ground with his knees hugged to his chest. He looks up at them as they come closer, his eyes bursting wide at the sight of the ribbon hanging from Eliza’s fingers. “You—”

“Please.” Eliza is surprised at the desperation in her own voice. “Please don’t look at me like that.”

Aaron opens his mouth. He closes it. He looks away.

“Take me home,” Hercules says again. “Please.”

Aaron doesn’t ask who he is. Eliza helps Hercules into the backseat and slips into the passenger’s seat herself. The drive to the Washingtons’ is shorter than she remembers it. All the lights are off, but the porchlight is still on, which means Alexander never came home last night.

Lafayette is sitting on the front steps.

Hercules’s eyes are filled with stars. “They’re beautiful,” he whispers. They’re wearing pajamas. Their hair is a tangled mess. Their mascara is running and their nails are chipped.

Eliza has to agree.

“Go,” Aaron says. “You’ve been waiting long enough.”

Hercules climbs out of the car. Aaron hasn’t pulled all the way up to the house, so it’s a bit of a walk, and Hercules stumbles along enchanted, his entire body tilting forwards, yearning for his lost soul. He sinks to his knees just shy of ten feet from the house, trembling apart, lifting his arms to the heavens. Lafayette scrambles to their feet, staggering back against one of the porch columns, collapsing beneath the weight of what up until now has been a painful dream.

“Hercules?” Lafayette shouts over the wind. “Is that you, mon amour?”

Hercules crashes onto his stomach into the mud. “Je’taime,” he gasps, and Lafayette cries out, tripping to his side.

Aaron pulls out of the driveway, turning around back onto the exit road. Eliza bows her head, looking at the ribbon in her hands.

The rain is coming down hard now, slapping brutally against the windows. Alexander is probably hiding under a desk or a bed somewhere. Eliza hates that she misses him.

“Where to?” Aaron asks. Eliza looks at him. He looks soft, sometimes. Like he’s only half of himself.

“Are you a girl?” she asks.

Aaron doesn’t even blink. “Today, yeah.”

Eliza nods to herself, turning back to the window. “I’ll talk to Alex.”

“Thank you,” Aaron says. Her voice is a shipwreck. Her eyes are receding waves, apologizing, backing off too late. “I promise he’s different.”

“We all are.” Eliza rubs at the ribbon, staring through the blurred-wet windshield. Between her ribs, she feels her heart thaw with hope. “I like us better now.”

Thunder cracks through Aaron’s voice. “Me, too.”

Alexander stares at the ribbon for a very long time.

Eliza listens to Aaron rummaging around in her office across the hall from Alexander’s, where Eliza now sits across from her ex-husband and his cloth wedding band to someone else. She can smell the faint rose of Maria’s perfume, and she wonders how long it’s been since her wife sat in this chair.

“We were married before you and I met.”

Eliza lifts her head towards Alexander. He seems so far away. Their feet are touching over the ugly carpet.

“When?” she asks.

Alexander’s eyes shutter between memories and reality. He holds a thousand ghosts in his bones. “1777,” he murmurs. “They thought me dead after Schuylkill, and he grieved me by cutting into himself. Lafayette kept him alive while I clawed my way home, and when I returned, he held me as if I was a phantom limb reanimated. I whispered prayers into his mouth that we would never be parted again, and he took my mother’s ribbon from his pocket. We left it with each other whenever we were separated, as a promise to always return, and that night we cut it with the shears we used to shred tourniquets, and he kissed a half and I kissed the other, and we tied them around each other’s left wrists, binding our hearts together. I swore my soul to him forever, and he vowed to me his eternal love, and we kept those promises, even as we had to pretend we had never made them at all.”

Eliza hooks her ankle around his. If she had to do it all again, she would have let him marry her sister.

“I’m sorry,” Alexander says. His hands have begun to tremble. “I’m sorry, Eliza. I’m so sorry—”

He chokes on his own tongue—a first, she’s sure, for Alexander—and curls in on himself, gasping, strangled cries wrenching themselves from his throat. Eliza feels something give way within her, and suddenly she’s holding him, rocking him, loving him, the way she hasn’t for over two hundred years.

“Shhh…” She hushes him, kissing his head. “It’s all right, my love. It’s all all right.”

“No,” Alexander wails. “No, John, John, I’m so sorry, John…”

Eliza kisses him once more. “Shhh…” He is like a child, and eons older than her. “Come with me. I’ll take you home.”

He lets her lift him up, and she guides him to the door and down the hallway, towards the front entrance. He is skin and bone beneath her hands. Once he was larger than life, and now that that life has been stolen from him, it seems he has shrunk back down to the ghost he always was beneath it all. Eliza cannot be angry with him anymore. He is a world ravaged; a torn-up grave. He is grief itself.

Alexander does not ask where they’re going. He leans his head against the window and closes his eyes, lulled into a waking sleep by the steady hum of the engine. Eliza glances at him every now and then, but doesn’t say a word, keeping her conversations with herself, within her head, where nobody but she and God can hear them.

If God was ever listening.

She pulls into the back lot of the mental institution where Aaron said John has been kept for the past fourteen years, and she turns off the car. Alexander fumbles for the door handle, but Eliza touches his shoulder, shaking her head. “Give me a minute.”

Inside, the foyer is empty. She walks to the front desk, and she asks for the floor of the psych ward. They tell her that’s all there is here. She bites her wobbling bottom lip, and she thanks them, and she resolves to visit each and every one.

On the third floor, the elevator doors open to a dream.

“Darling,” Eliza breathes, and lunges to catch Maria as she crumples in a hurricane of papers.

“I don’t understand,” Maria says, eleven minutes later when their tears have slowed. She is wearing a pink shirt beneath maroon scrubs and her hair is loose and wavy and her eyes are smoky and bruised with exhaustion. Eliza has kissed her so many times she’s lost count. It’s not enough. She doesn’t know how any amount of time could ever be enough. Finally she understands Alexander’s restless soul.

Maria cups Eliza’s face. “How are you here?”

“I fell from heaven to find you,” Eliza says. She grasps Maria’s wrists. “Ria, baby, I’m so sorry, but I need to see John Laurens.”

Maria’s eyes flash. “Please help him,” she says, swaying closer. “Please help him, I can’t, and he—he’s so good, Liza, you have no idea, he’s just—” Her bottom lip trembles. “He doesn’t belong here.”

“I know.” Eliza kisses her cheek. “I left Alexander in the car. He doesn’t—” She coughs, for the first time faltering. “He doesn’t know why we’re here. I don’t think anyone’s told him, yet, that he didn’t come back alone.”

“Jesus,” Maria breathes. She pulls away, tucking her hair behind her ear as she rushes behind the front desk. “Go get Alex. I’ll distract Dr. King.”

Eliza glares. “That madman is—”

“A problem for another day.” Maria rounds the desk with a file in her hand, shoving Eliza gently towards the door. She slips something into her pocket. “Go, angel.”

Eliza goes. The elevator ride is the longest of her life.

At the car, Alexander is waiting with his hands in his pockets, the white ribbon once more bound around his wrist. He eyes her warily as she approaches, then drops his head back to look at the greying sky. “It’s going to rain,” he says, voice laced with an aching so old it’s yellowed like paper. Eliza takes him by the wrist and tugs him towards the double doors.

They get as far as the ward doors before he stops, bones locking up like the chainlink of a swing when a child shoves off into the clouds. “What are we doing here,” he whispers, staring at the sign above the doors that reads Combahee River Wing. “What are we doing here, Eliza, that’s where… That’s where my life ended—”

“That’s where John Laurens died,” Eliza echoes, the same song in a different key. “And it’s where he’s been buried, for the past fourteen years.”

Alexander looks at her with a hurt so haunting she knows she’ll see it for the rest of her life.

“Come on,” she says, gripping his arm tight. “I told you I’d take you home, didn’t I?”

Alexander nods. His eyes drip stars. She leads him down the halls, around corners, through waves of nurses and doctors muttering to clipboards, to Room 1782.

Alexander reaches out for the door handle. “Promise me,” he says, shivering in the heat; “promise me I can bring him home.”

Eliza pulls the keys from her pocket. “I promise.”

She unlocks the door, then steps back. Alexander pushes the door open, and sunlight spills into the world, and John Laurens lifts his head from his sketchbook.

There is a white ribbon around his wrist.

“John,” Alexander gasps, a prayer.

The dead man rises. He answers: “Alexander.”

VIII.

John came into this new world with a violent cry, and a pain in his stomach so confounding he still cannot describe it even twenty-four years later. He feels an echo of that pain now, staring at his husband’s grief-stricken face.

“I’ll leave you to it,” the woman behind him says softly, nudging Alexander into the room. She closes the door behind her, and John waits for the resounding clang of the lock, only to find silence in its stead.

He hasn’t been in an unlocked room in fourteen years.

“Alexander,” John says again. His voice is rough and as scratched-up as his childhood bedroom’s floorboards. “Alexander. Alexander.”

Alexander’s legs give out and he grips the end of the bed to keep from crumpling. John watches as he takes in the walls, the countless drawings of his old face, of turtles, of Lafayette and Mulligan and Washington. Of cracked clocks, of muskets, of bloody bullet wounds, of quills, of ribbons, of tombstones etched with familiar names.

Of a battlefield, empty, save for a clumsily carved wooden cross bearing John’s own name.

John Laurens-Hamilton, 1755–1782

Alexander’s breath hitches. “Why are you here?”

John shrugs. His father hates him. He remembers too much. He’s crazy. He’s gay. He’s a dead man walking. He says all of this the only way he knows how: “I came back wrong.”

Alexander falls to his knees and crawls across the room until he’s at John’s feet. He grasps John’s hands in his, their white ribbons glancing against each other.

Four days ago, Maria had brought it to him in her pocket and tied it around his wrist. John had stared at it in wonder, uneating, unsleeping, for the next three days, until this very morning, when Maria threatened to take it back if he didn’t swallow some cereal and close his eyes. Now, John brushes his thumbs across Alexander’s knuckles and tries to remember if he’s ever dreamed of this tired face before.

Alexander kisses the back of John’s left hand, half over his ribbon. “Twenty-two years I lived without you,” he murmurs. “Then twenty-four more, once I woke up again. Nearly the length of my first lifetime, I’ve kept on against the wind that sings your name, forced my way forward into the dark.” His mouth trembles open, rain dripping from black eyes. “I never thought I’d see the light again.”

John touches his head to his husband’s, to the sun. The world is warm and wide and full. He is going to live past twenty-seven, and he is going to live happily.

The door creaks open. “John,” Maria says, clutching a clipboard too tight, the woman from before just behind her. “Your father’s here.”

Henry Laurens has always met John in his tiny cell, unwilling to allow his mad son out of his prison for even a moment. Today, for the first time, John leaves Room 1782, headed for a conference room to meet with lawyers and old friends and the monster who put him here in the first place.

John finds himself stuck in the doorway.

Alexander stops with him, keeping a tight hold of John’s hand. He doesn’t say it’s all right. He doesn’t say it’s okay. He doesn’t say John is safe, that he won’t let anyone harm him. Before they died, they were soldiers, and soldiers live by an unspoken rule: Do not lie.

Alexander’s mouth is an unfurling rose. “I love you.”

John has known very little in this life for sure. Of Alexander’s love, he has never had any doubt.

Of himself, he has had many.

Of this step, he has just enough to hope.

They are thirteen minutes late. Alexander takes his seat at George’s righthand side, Lafayette on their father’s left. John sits between Alexander and Angelica, taking in the other faces around the table. The woman from before, identified now as Eliza, sits beside her sister, across from Maria; Hercules is at Lafayette’s side with Aaron next to him, looking distressed even beneath Martha Washington’s soothing hand. At the other end of the table, facing George with no small amount of disdain, sits Dr. King, flanked by Henry Laurens and an empty chair that separates him from Martha.

“We are here to discuss the matter of John Laurens’s conservatorship,” Angelica begins, her hands folded in front of her. She’s wearing a wedding ring. John wonders which lucky bastard wears its match. “My client is seeking full emancipation from Henry Laurens’s custody, as well as financial recompense for his lost years, totalling to—” She says a number so large John feels his eyes blow wide. “Additionally, it’s my duty to inform you that everyone at this table, exempting Dr. King and John, has been interviewed by the police in the case against you, Mr. Laurens, for child abuse and neglect.”

John looks at Alexander. Alexander squeezes his hand, ducking his head to whisper in John’s ear, sniffling when John’s curls graze against his nose. “I vowed to keep you safe,” he says, then presses a soft kiss to John’s jaw. “From bullets or bullies, I swore an oath, and I won’t forsake it.” His smile dips in the shape of a bird’s broken wing. “I will not bury you.”

Never again.

John lays his head down on Alexander’s shoulder.

Angelica straightens her papers. “If you have any last words for your son, Mr. Laurens, now is the time.”

John closes his eyes.

A moment passes. A lifetime, too. Then, the end of the world—

“For what it’s worth,” Henry says, “I do love you, son.”

John opens his eyes. “No.” He laughs. “No, you don’t.”

He’s left the room before he knows he’s stood up. He slides down against the wall, hugging his legs to his chest, softly knocking his head against his knees. The hand that finds his is bigger than Alexander’s.

George’s eyes are molten glass. “Are you all right?”

John is loved. John is loved, loved, loved. John is safe.

“Dad,” he rasps, and George smiles.

Says, “Happy Birthday, son.”

Alexander falls asleep first. John counts his eyelashes, memorizes the number, then starts over. Some lives begin at birth, others with a certain meeting; John’s begins here, counting Alexander’s eyelashes. There are forty-nine of them, soft as the petals of baby’s breath. John rests his mouth against Alexander’s forehead and lets his eyes flutter shut.

He wakes when it’s still dark. Maybe around two or three. He’s never slept well, not since he was born that first time, when his father started to beat him for existing wrong. At the Frederick Estate, sleep was scheduled, but John never got used to it, not even after fourteen years, and here, in this new house with his old loves, he trembles awake at the slightest sound, forgetting where and who he is and then remembering, with a violent shiver, again and again.

This time, finally, he forces himself to leave the safety of the bed, creeping towards the door on bare feet. The hallway light is off, and the hinges are greased. His stomach lurches with an ever-present anxiety, but John is allowed to go wherever he wants, now. He could leave this house forever and they would let him. He could leave this house forever and they would miss him.

The kitchen is the only spot of gold in the house. John rounds the corner into daybreak; at the marble countertop sits Aaron Burr, nursing a mug of tea and reading an old newspaper.

“George has kept every newspaper he’s ever read,” Aaron says, eyes darting across the page. “Stores ‘em in the hall closet above the winter boots. I like to read them sometimes, when the world feels too dark, to remind myself that even in oblivion there are still stars.”

John climbs onto a stool across from him. The light comes from a single bulb above the sink, which is full of dirty dishes. Messes are allowed here. John’s broken brain is allowed here.

He gets the feeling Aaron is allowed here, too.

“I heard you murdered my husband,” John says. Aaron takes another sip of tea. “I also heard you’re sorry.”

Finally Aaron looks up from the newspaper. He folds it up and puts it to the side. “We don’t matter this time around,” he says. “Have you noticed? It’s wonderful.”

John doesn’t know what he expected. Something else, surely. Exactly this, maybe. An apology, probably.

Sometimes there’s just nothing to say.

John pulls the newspaper towards himself, and he plucks a pen from the mugful at the edge of the counter. He flips to the headline—NEW BILL GRANTS REINCARNATES THE RIGHT TO EXCAVATIONS—and writes beneath it in red: They buried us apart.

He slides it back across the table. Aaron reads the note and smiles into his mug.

“I can fix very little,” he says; “but I can fix that.”

Two mornings later, there is a new newspaper, with a new headline: LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE. Below it is a picture of Alexander’s open grave, and Hercules with John’s skeleton in his arms. The end of the article is marked with a close-up of the stone: ALEXANDER HAMILTON, it reads, and below that, JOHN LAURENS-HAMILTON.

Connecting their names, encased in glass, is a frayed white ribbon.

IX.

Alexander remembers who he is all at once, in a ruinous blur of joy and fury and sorrow, when he is nineteen and first lays eyes on Angelica’s grave. He’s been at Columbia for a year, living off coffee and spite, when he happens upon Trinity Church and feels his veins pull taut, begging to go inside. He follows, drawn around the back of the chapel to a grave holding the wrong name, passing what would turn out to be his own without a hint of memory.

“My dearest,” he murmurs, dragging his hand across the years she lived. “I—” He chokes, falling back as a whole life bursts forth from the darkness, swallowing him whole. He wakes three days later in the hospital, lurching upward with a gasp of John’s name.

Five years since remembrance, Alexander strokes John’s hair back from his face as he sleeps. He’s been home for a week. He hasn’t said a word apart from Alexander’s name.

“He’s going to be all right, you know.” Alexander jumps and Aaron lifts her hands in an apology before crossing her arms and leaning against the door frame. “He found you. Everything is going to be okay.”

Alexander tries to smile. His failure makes itself known by way of Aaron’s dimming eyes. He turns away, laying his hand over John’s to remind himself: John is only sleeping. Sleeping people wake up.

Sometimes even dead people wake up.

“I wish I could go back,” Alexander confesses, welcoming the regret-filled ache with a wistful smile. “Knowing what I know now, I’d force him to stay with me, keep him from running off to South Carolina. I’d never marry. I’d love him in the dark, and we would live, quietly and happily, and perhaps we would be killed for it but at least we would die together.”

Aaron tiptoes across the carpet, coming up to Alexander’s side. “We can’t change the past, love.”

In his sleep, John stirs, his face scrunching up with an invisible pain. Alexander kisses his head and John settles once more, the softest of sighs weeping from his lips.

“Aaron,” Alexander says. “Aaron, you should know—we were never not friends.”

Aaron hugs him from the side, kissing his head.

“And you should know, Alexander,” she says; “regardless of the past—you are, and have always been, a good man.”

It takes him a year, but Alexander has finally found himself on the right doorstep. He checks the number over the door and the street name against the address scribbled on the post-it note in his hand, and he grins when he sees they match.

“What are we doing here?” Aaron asks from the bottom of the steps, leaning back against the car. His bowtie is crooked. “We’re already late.”

“John won’t mind,” Alexander says. Before he’d left their apartment this morning, John had tucked a pink carnation into Alexander’s boutonnière and kissed him on the cheek. Two hundred and fifty years they’ve waited. They can wait one hour more to make legal what has always been true. Alexander half-turns, reaching his hand back for Aaron’s. “Come up here with me. Come here, Aaron, and ring the doorbell.”

Aaron’s eyes are struck through with fright, realization dawning. Alexander kisses his ear once he’s close enough, whispers, “I promised you we’d find them all.”

Aaron’s fingers stretch past the doorbell to the lion head with a heavy bronze ring in its mouth, slamming it against the wood of the door three times. He draws back, held up only by Alexander’s arm and a frail, unfamiliar hope. There is silence, then crashing, then footsteps, and then life wrenches open the door.

“Hello,” Alexander says. “We’re here to invite you to a wedding.”

Theodosia Barstow blinks, glancing between them. When she catches Aaron’s eyes, her mouth parts in a halo, her hand flailing to hide it.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

Aaron holds out his hand. She takes it.

“That’s okay,” he says. “You will.”

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

— Christina Rosetti