Time heals all wounds. When you have the power to rewind it, you begin to wonder whether it's too much responsibility for one person to hold.
*****
Sometimes, walking away is the sca...
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The sensible thing to do would be to refuse to keep Lyra's belongings. After all, Iris had already suffered enough with her absence; keeping memorabilia as a reminder she could never have the real version of Lyra—not the same she'd known, at least, and rewinding time would bring back an alternate iteration of her—would be far too painful to withstand.
Or so she thought.
Iris had never dealt with loss in her life the same way she had to grieve Lyra in the present. Everything she'd lost—her motivation, her college friends, frequent, normal contact with her parents following their divorce, her novelist dreams—had never been that serious in the greater specter of things, but losing Lyra had been the most monumental event of their life. A word usually reserved for good things was now being used to describe her heartbreak, perpetuated by a painful type of love that transcended everything, even death, and she couldn't even allow herself to try and look at other people the way she'd looked at Lyra.
After everything, her heart kept on beating even when Lyra's wouldn't, and it beat for her and her only. It was pretty pathetic, all things considered. No matter how hard she pushed herself to move on, it remained the most significant loss she'd ever been through as far as she could remember, and there wasn't a thing in the world she could forget. Certainly not about Lyra; after all, no one ever forgot about Lyra Sinclair, who had left such a deep rooted mark in the world and in Iris' universe to make sure she'd always be present.
So, Iris was obsessive.
Not obsessed, no. Obsessive.
Her former therapist had always highlighted that aspect of her personality, her tendency to fixate on certain things and making everything else disappear into thin air, and she'd always been too stubborn and strict to ever fully let go of it. That meant she had to refocus those efforts, reframe the way she saw those fixations, and stop chasing comets.
And yet, as she stood in Lyra's room, it was as though those conversations with her therapist had never happened. She realized how fixated she still was on the idea that this had been the right call all along, that following Coraline into a dead girl's bedroom to try and find something to trigger her time rewinding powers would amount to anything positive or productive.
"I know this is probably a bit overwhelming for you, but I didn't . . . I didn't know how else to do this," Coraline confessed. "Ambushing you while you were grocery shopping wasn't ideal"—no, but at least Coraline had let her store her groceries in her kitchen while Iris was in the house, and Iris never would've had the courage to approach her for tea and reminiscing otherwise—"but I wasn't sure whether you'd pick up the phone if I called. I knew you were back, of course; it's hard to keep anything a secret in Emelle Bay."
