“And the day I bought one for academic probation, it hit me that I would probably need one for not graduating too. Then I thought I could buy one more and go see my mom.”
Cade went completely still beside me.
“My last one.”
I got up and ran to my room to get the marble I carried everywhere. The glass was cool against my palm, familiar in a way that felt alive after all these years. I held it out to him, and Cade took it like he knew without asking that this wasn’t just another marble. Inside the glass, the dagger moth looked suspended in motion, its wings delicate and wooden-looking, detailed in a way that still made my chest ache every time I looked at it. It was beautiful. Frozen forever in its little glass cage.
“I’d never seen one like it before,” I whispered. “And I am the marble girl, Cade. I scour the internet for unique ones. Trinkets and Things started ordering special ones because I kept wiping them out of anything pretty or weird enough to represent my Nevers, but this one was different. It had this little dagger moth inside, all three-dimensional and detailed like somebody had trapped one tiny, perfect thing inside glass and decided it was better that way.”
I watched him roll it gently between his fingers, his face unreadable except for the muscle flexing in his jaw.
“Anyway, I was sitting at my desk with that dagger moth marble and a pros and cons list because apparently seventeen-year-old me decided to be thorough about emotional destruction. The cons list was everything I loved. My dad. My brothers. Aura and Charm. Music. Movies. Sports. The way my dad makes pancakes on Sundays. My mom’s old perfume bottle on my dresser. Every reason I had to stay in this world was written in front of me.”
Cade’s voice came low. “And the pros?”
I looked at him then, and the ache in my throat nearly closed around the words.
“At the top, my number one was that I could be with Mom.”
His expression changed so fast I almost looked away.
“And the rest?” he asked, even though I could hear what it cost him.
“Every vile thing Luke Dempsey ever did to me.” My fingers curled into the blanket. “But at the bottom, I wrote something so simple. I didn’t even think it was deep when I wrote it. I just wrote, ‘a thousand no’s ignored.’”
Cade stopped breathing.
I knew because I was close enough to feel it.
“And in that instant, when I read it on my pros for dying list, I recalled every single no I screamed. Every no I begged. Every no I cried before every intrusion. Every no ripped from my soul that he ignored. My whole world just crashed down on me, and there wasn’t another fucking lie I could tell myself that would ever convince me Luke Dempsey was a man I couldn’t live without. There were no lies left to tell if they were going to cost me my life.”
The room went quiet around us, and for once, I didn’t try to fill it with a joke.
“I was going to trash my Nevers,” I whispered. “Burn my Never book. Burn the whole thing to ashes. I thought maybe if I destroyed all of it, I could destroy the girl who had made it. The girl who kept collecting proof that she needed her mom and had to keep surviving without her.”
My eyes drifted toward the lamp beside my Nevers, even though it wasn’t the same one from back then.
“And then a fucking dagger moth flew over my lamp.”
Cade looked at me in this confused but trying-to-follow way, and I let out a tiny, broken laugh because even now, after everything, that part still sounded ridiculous.
“I know. Very cinematic. Very emotionally unstable Lifetime movie of me. But it landed on my lampshade like it was trying to decide whether my lamp was worth burning its little moth feet on. I just sat there staring at it. It was beautiful, Cade. Its wings looked like wood, but softer somehow, all these strange little patterns that made it look fragile and ancient and completely unbothered by the fact that I was sitting there wondering if a world with Luke Dempsey in it was worth staying alive for.”
His thumb moved over mine.
“I watched this moth struggle to decide if it wanted to land and chill or keep throwing itself around the room like a tiny winged lunatic. After about the thirtieth time it flew itself recklessly at the bulb, I was enthralled. I was watching this little badass fight for the light and felt more peace than I had since I was fourteen.”
I looked down at the marble still resting in his hand.
“Those two dagger moths saved my life. One of them was trapped in my last Never with no way out. Beautiful and perfect and frozen forever inside glass. Safe, I guess. Untouchable. Butdead.” My voice shook as I looked back at him. “And the other one was no bigger than the marble, full of life, reckless and far too energized, with nerves of steel, fighting its ass off for a little bit of light.”
Cade’s eyes stayed locked on mine.
“I realized I had a choice,” I whispered. “I could be the moth in the marble, and my dad only got seventeen years of memories with me, or I could be the idiot on the lampshade burning its ass for warmth.”
A faint, shattered sound left him, almost a laugh and almost something else entirely.
“So, I kept the marble,” I said, tears slipping down my face again. “Not because it reminds me I almost died. Because it reminds me I didn’t. It reminds me that every hard day after that is survivable. Glass cage or light. Frozen or fighting. And I have chosen the light every day since, even when it burned. Even when it hurt. Even when I wanted my mom so badly I thought it would split me in half.”
