CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD
NOW
• • •
I’m twenty-one years old and I don’t know how to stop loving him.
That’s where I started.
Now you know why.
Now you know the whole shape of it.
The windows and the sirens and the roof and the bathroom.
The kisses that meant everything.
The mornings he was gone.
The blue daisies.
The pill bottles.
The quad.
Now you know.
So let me tell you what happened after.
Cassian drove twelve hours through the night after my last message.
After I woke up to hospital lights and my dad's hand and the particular quiet of a room where something almost didn't happen — where Mara had found me on the floor and the bottle was empty and somewhere between the ambulance and the IV drip, I had apparently told a nurse I just wanted to sleep, which is the truest and the most terrible thing I've ever said.
I waited for Cassian.
Some stupid, unkillable part of me waited.
Watched the door.
The way I’ve watched doors my entire life.
He didn’t come through it. My dad told me everything. He said he was coming.
My dad was there though.
He held my hand and talked about the garden and the cooking class and the neighbor and all the tether things.
All the things that mean you are still here, you are still here, please stay here.
He didn’t mention Cassian again.
Not once.
But on the second day he stepped outside for ten minutes and when he came back his eyes were red.
I knew without asking.
