Amie nodded. “I do regret that.”
“You do?”
Exhaling heavily, Amie said, “I think … I think maybe I was supposed to prevent Savannah from being murdered. If I had just known, I would have done something about it. I don’t really think David’s in danger of being arrested. I just feel so guilty for letting Savannah die so many times.”
“Oh …” Ziya squeezed her hand. “It’s not—”
“I know you’re going to say it’s not my fault.” Amie set her shoulders, giving Ziya a half smile. “It’s fine. All I can do now is try to make things a little better by figuring out who killed her. And I need you with me to do that.” She laughed. “I mean, imagine how different things would have been if you were in the time loop with me, telling me what to do. Ineedyou, Z.”
Ziya’s eyes flicked away. “Amie …” She gave Amie’s hand another squeeze, then released it. “That’s the problem.”
Amie blinked with surprise. She didn’t know there was still a problem. She thought she’d fixed it. How was there still a problem?
“I was thinking about why we broke up,” Ziya continued. “I missed you so much that it made everything in the past feel so small. I thought maybe after three months apart we could figure out how to make it work. I saw how invested you were with Savannah’s murder, and sure, you said it was for David, but I knew you weren’t telling the whole truth. I just thought the truth might be that in those three months, you’d finally figured out how to try something new for a change. To follow a passion instead of staying the course.”
She took a shaky breath. “And then I found out that for you, it’d been more liketwo years.” Ziya looked desperate for Amie to understand what she was trying to say. “And you didn’t … you didn’t doanything.”
Amie scrambled for words. “What exactly was I supposed to do? I was in atime loop. It didn’t come with instructions. I was just trying to keep some sense of normalcy in a very not-normal situation. I’m sorry I didn’t go to every club within eighteen hours of here, or try not to go to the same restaurant twice even if I loved the food—”
“I don’t want you to do those things!” Ziya exclaimed. “I don’t want you to be like me. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. But you never do anything youwantto do, Amie. Nothing new, nothing different. You hardly ever do anything for yourself, especially if no one is telling you to do it.”
“What are youtalkingabout?” Amie asked, dumbfounded. “I spent two years going on the same date with you, having the same conversations, eating the same fettuccine alfredo, just so I could see you and know for certain that at the end of the night, you were gonna smile at me and say, ‘Let’s do this again soon.’ I didn’t do that foryou; you never even remembered it happening.”
“You put yourself through the same motions because you know they’re safe,” Ziya argued. “You’re so afraid of wasting your life that you never do anything more for yourself than what you already have.”
“Going to see you was me doing something for myself!”
“You already had me!” Ziya burst out. “Youhadme. I wasn’t going anywhere. But you’re always just going through the motions until someone asks you for help. If someone suggests you try something different for yourself, you twist yourself into knots trying to calculate if it’s worth risking your time for. And by doing that, you’re letting your whole life pass you by without doing anything for yourself, and itkilledme to watch you live like that.”
“I did things,” Amie insisted, her mind racing for examples. “Concerts. Paint and sip. Diwali—”
“Those were all things forme,” Ziya cut in. “You’d only ever do things I wanted to do. I knew you’d be hesitant about going to Iceland, but I thought,Maybe if I ask this of her, then she’ll do it.
“But you couldn’t. Because even though I was asking, you knew it was for you, not for me. Even when I bought the tickets and planned everything for you, you just couldn’t do it. And I don’t love how I handled it, and some of the things I said, but I realized that even if you had gone, it still wouldn’t have fixed things. Because I can’t spend the rest of my life telling you how to live yours, Amie. I can’t do it. I have my own shit to figure out, my own life to lead. I want us to be in each other’s lives, but I can’t be in charge of both of them.”
Ziya wrapped her arms around herself. “So after you said no to the trip, I decided that as much as I loved you … no,becauseI loved you so much, I couldn’t stand to watch you do this to yourself. And none of that’s changed. I thought maybe it had, or that maybe I could make you understand …”
She gave Amie a pleading look. “Doyou understand?”
A drop of water hit the tip of Amie’s nose, and only then did she notice it was raining. She wanted to say,Yes, I understand,justto make Ziya stop crying, because Ziya had begun to cry, silently, tears joining the raindrops that had begun to speckle her face as she waited for Amie’s response.
“I’m looking at colleges,” Amie said, her voice tight with emotion as she made one final attempt to save things. “I’m going to go back to school. Getting a degree in something I’m passionate about—maybe journalism, maybe something else, I don’t know yet.”
Giving her a watery smile, Ziya asked, “Are you doing that for you, or because I told you to?”
Amie paused, her mouth moving around silent words as she carefully deliberated which ones to vocalize.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “But is that really so bad?”
Ziya took her hand again, squeezing it with both hands. “I didn’t come here thinking I was going to suggest we give it more time,” she said. “Honestly, I hadn’t even gotten there whenyousaid it. But I think that might be for the best.” Her voice climbed in pitch on the final words, shaking as she spoke.
“Okay,” Amie said dully. She didn’t know what else to say. Ziya seemed to know exactly what she wanted from Amie, and as much as Amie wanted to give it to her, she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to save this.
“Please let me drive you home.” Ziya released her hand. “The rain’s getting harder.”
Shaking her head, Amie took a step back. “I’ll get the bus.”
“I drove by that bus stop, it doesn’t have a covering. Just let me—”
