He’d donesomethingto my brother, and then he’d… disappeared.
It didn’t matter that it was impossible. It didn’t matter that there was noproofhe’d ever been there at all.
I knew.
I was sure I saw him sometimes when he thought I wasn’t paying attention—from the corner of my eye while I was working, watching me from a distance when I was out to eat.
And sometimes I saw him in my dreams.
His golden eyes were like the sun burning bright against my skin. He held a red petal in his hand, and I wanted to hate him…
I wanted a lot of things, but it didn’t seem to matter. As much as Iwanted, Caiden had died—I’d known he was going to, but I’d thought I had more time. Some part of me had still clung to the hope that he’d get better if we just tried hard enough. He’d gotten sick when we were teenagers, and even though I’d done everything I could—donated blood and marrow, been there, offered to give him more. I would have given himeverything.
It wasn’t enough for him to make it past twenty-four, though. We were perfect mirrors of one another, and I couldn’tunderstand why he’d gotten sick and I was fine. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t give enough of myself tofixhim.
Physically, I was fine.
Inside, though, it felt like I was in a thousand pieces that had never come back together from the second I’d dropped that vase on the hospital floor. I was scattered petals flying through the air. I’d left myself there when they’d forced me out of the room so they could take care of his body. I hadn’t feltwholesince that man had disappeared.
Hisbody.
Caiden was never supposed to be a body—he was supposed to be here, beside me. He could have told me the man I’d seen standing over him, the one I saw in my dreams, was all in my head… and maybe I’d have believed him. He could have laughed at me, because when we were kids, I’d described a man who lookedexactlylike that as the one I’d fall in love with someday. I’d drawn shitty little pictures of him in the margins of my notebooks.
My brother would have told me I was full of shit when I said all I wanted was for the asshole to leave me alone. But Caidenwasn’there, and every time I saw the man, I wondered if it was a manifestation of my guilt because I hadn’t gotten to tell my best friend goodbye.
“Fuck,” I murmured, blinking away the sting behind my lids. Whoever said grief got easier with time was full of shit. Nothing about this was any easier than it had been the day he left.
If anything, it was worse.
If anything, it felt like the days had stretched into centuries and not just a year. Things feltwrong.
And it was worse, because everything else had kept turning like nothing had changed. I still had to go to my job.
I still had to exist in a world that demanded I function—that I eat, sleep, work, make money, pay bills.
It was hard to do when there were parts of me that felt like I didn’t even want to breathe.
I forced air into my lungs in defiance of the grief trying to strangle me and grabbed my keys. As hard as it was, today was another day—just another day. Another day of pretending.
Another day aching.
Another day feeling like there was a piece of me missing. The soft sigh that escaped me was the only sound of resignation I let out. After all, there wasn’t actually anything I could do about it. I just had to… wait.
Wait and know that someday either everyone would be right and time would heal all wounds, or I would finally get tojoinCaiden.
And that would fill the hollow sensation in my chest, right?
There were parts of me that worried it wouldn’t, parts of me that were so certain something inside me was broken beyond repair.
I had to put those parts aside when I went out into the world—I wasn’t about to have my coworkers ask if I was okay.
Again.
I took one more deep breath, slipping on the mask I wore whenever I stepped outside of my apartment, and moved intoanother day.
At least the feel of the cool air seeping against my skin through my motorcycle jacket was soothing. I’d been restless again last night, torn somewhere between nightmares and feeling guilty when they subsided. It wasn’t feeling peace that made me ashamed, it was knowing where that peace came from—the nightmares stopped whenever the man appeared at the edge of my vision, hazy and soft and hardly there.
It left me drained the next day, exhausted in a way that was bone deep—soul deep. I just wanted…
