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Lara walks off into the woods, a small mercy. She knows I find it easier to talk when I’m physically doing something—moving, using my hands. Leaves and twigs crunch under our feet as we sweep our flashlights over the ground ahead.

“It’s just…” I trail off, struggling to name my feelings. “It’s hard seeing him again. It’s like being catapulted back in time, only he hates my guts. I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to build that bridge when he seems intent on throwing away the bricks.”

The abandoned building looms up ahead, the years of neglect visible even from a distance, ivy strangling the brickwork like poisonous veins.

“Give him time. He’s been through a lot, and this is probably dredging up a lot of feelings for him, too,” Lara says, always the sensible one. She’s been good for me, patient when I need it.

“I know. I want to be there for him, you know? We were friends first.” Now that I’ve started talking, the words come tumbling out. “Like, pinky promises and sleepovers level. Besties, even. I had to leave him behind when I moved to UPenn, and that sucked. You know I switched our rooms so he ended up in my dorm?”

I smile at the memory. His nervous little face breaking into a wide grin when I walked into the room. Him running and jumping into my arms. We’d only been apart for a month, but it felt like forever when we were attached at the hip, sleeping in each other’s beds.

When we reach the chain-link fence, I pause my rambling so I can focus on contorting my tall frame through the gap. Lara doesn’t have the same issue, slipping through with ease.

“I ended up kissing him the same night he moved in. Things were good, then. They were so good, Lara. He was my whole fucking world.”

“So, what happened?” she asks with a sad sort of curiosity.

I ask myself that question every day. I know I used his…quirks as an excuse. Which was awful and wrong and I should have been there for him, but I was worried about moving to London.

Looking back now…I think I was just terrified of missing him but didn’t know how to deal with it, didn’t understand the feelings swirling inside me. So, I buried them under all the other shit and convinced myself that I didn’t need a relationship, that it was just part of what happened when you fell in love too young—you grew apart.

“I…I fucked it up. He didn’t deserve it,” I mumble as we approach the entrance of the crumbling psychiatric hospital. The wrought-iron gates and dilapidated windows look like they belong in a Tim Burton movie.

Lara stops and faces me. “You still have feelings for him, don’t you?”

Having someone else point it out is a sucker punch to the gut. I can’t make myself say it out loud, but I do manage a tense nod. Bellamy has wandered into my thoughts many times over the years, but having him wandering into my life is really the icing on the cake. It’s only now when he’s front and center that I realize how much I’ve been looking for pieces of him in every person I’ve been with since.

“Oh, Sunny.” Lara steps forward and wraps her arms around me. I’m not much of a hugger, but I let her do it. “You have kinda been looking at him like a kicked puppy.”

“I do not look at him like that.”

She pulls back. “Cariño, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this.” She picks up my hand, squeezing it gently. “If you pine any harder for him, people are going to start hanging Christmas lights on you.”

I snatch my hand away. “Shut up. Can we get on with this?”

Lara knows that she’s pushed me to my emoting limit, so we finally fire up the cameras and head into the hospital ruins.

An empty, hollow feeling hangs in the air, our footsteps echoing as we thread through the building. I don’t know much about the place, only that some weird shit went down and it was permanently closed.

Weird shit happened after it got shut down, too. There are rumors some of the patients were left to rot still chained to their beds. Years later, there was an incident where some kid fell off the roof and impaled himself on the broken chapel spire.

Didn’t really deter people, though, judging by the soda cans littered on the ground and the poor attempts at graffiti sprayed across the mossy walls.

Lara starts weaving a story to her prospective viewers in a dramatized version of her tour guide voice. I throw out a comment or two every now and then as we wind through the dusty hallways.

We come to a crossroads and agree to split up to cover more ground. While she starts tiptoeing up the stairs, I head to the lower levels.

The deeper into the basement levels I go, the colder it becomes, my breath puffing out in little foggy clouds. Odd, since it wasn’t all that cold outside. Growing up around dead bodies means it takes a lot to unsettle me, but the absence of sound makes my heartbeat deafening in my ears.

There’s an old, mangled gurney tipped halfway down the staircase, covered in rust-colored stains that I try not to think about.

When the basement levels out, I sweep my flashlight across dark shapes on the floor ahead. My breath catches.

They’re bones.

Dozens of them, littering the ground.

It would be easy to pretend they were animal bones if I didn’t handle them every day of my life. I can tell what species of animal I’m looking at just from a handful of bones. These aren’t animals.