But I don’t move.I don’t even lift my head.
Because what I want to say—what sits burning on my tongue—isthen let me stay buried with him.
But all that comes out is a whisper, fragile and helpless: “I don’t know how to leave him.”
The man exhales, slow and sad, and he nods like he understands, like he knows there are graves that take more than a body—they take the living too.
“We’ll give you a minute,” he murmurs.
They step back and wait by the path and as I lie there, cheek pressed to the soil still damp from my tears, it hits me with this sharp, unrelenting clarity: There’s no version of my life where this stops hurting.
No path where I outrun the night he died.
No future where I’m not living with the ghost of who he should’ve become.
The sun climbs higher, lighting the sky in soft golds Jake would’ve made fun of me for noticing, and I feel it warming my back even as the grave beneath me stays cold, stubbornly cold, like the earth refuses to give him up.
I force myself upright eventually.My hand lingers on the headstone, fingertips tracing the letters until they blur and double, and I swallow the kind of pain you choke on instead of survive.My vision swims and my knees buckle.My whole body trembles like it’s trying to fold itself back into the dirt.
The wind moves through the cemetery, soft and cold, brushing past me.
And the worst part—the part that hollows me out so completely I’m not sure there’s anything left—is knowing that no matter how long I stay, no matter how much I break, no matter how many times I scream his name into the ground he will never answer again.
CHAPTER38
KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
NATE
The apartment doorfeels heavier than it should, like it knows what I did last night.My hand trembles on the knob—not from fear but from whatever cocktail of poison I fed myself after leaving the cemetery.
Time doesn’t work the same way anymore; it slips under me, over me, through me, folding in on itself like I’m falling through something I can’t hold onto.
Christian’s the only person I can still call without swallowing glass.The only one who answers on the first ring.Funny how your dealer becomes the closest thing you have to a friend.There’s no judgment, no pity, no fucking expectation.
Just the transaction.
And then the silence.
The understanding that you want out of yourself and he’s holding the door open.
I don’t remember when I crossed the line from using to needing.Maybe it was the night Monty pumped something into my arm and laughed while I slipped under.Maybe it was when I woke up to Mom sobbing beside my hospital bed, begging me to stay.
Or maybe it happened after the funeral, in that five-day blackout where I woke up wearing a shirt that didn’t belong to me and a soul that didn’t feel like mine.
Addiction isn’t a decision.
It’s erosion.
One day you’re managing your pain like it’s a job and the next you’re in a stranger’s bathroom tying off your arm because it’s the only way to quiet the noise long enough to breathe.
Nick tried.
Jay tried.
They all said the same lines—we’re worried about you,you don’t look good,please talk to us—but it all sounded muffled, like they were yelling down a tunnel I’d already sealed up.
I’m supposed to be crashing at Jay’s place, but I prefer strangers’ couches or floors or anywhere that isn’t filled with people who expect me to still be human in the morning.
