I don’t know to which world—Beau’s or Grandmother’s or some other entirely. A world in which purple and yellow wildflowers grow thickly around the telephone pole and beyond.

All I know is it isn’t my world. It can’t be mine.

Because below REST IN PEACE, the name engraved on the stone is NATALIE LAYNE.

29

I’m dead.

Somewhere, sometime, I’m dead.

There’s an epitaph too, but the letters jumble in my mind, unread. Rain clouds break apart overhead, and I feel myself gagging in front of the poster and run a few feet before the bile shoots up my throat and hits the slick, muddy grass between my boots. I shouldn’t drive, but I can’t stay here. All I know is I can’t stay here. I stumble back to the Jeep and turn around to drive back toward the high school, Beau’s house, my house, Megan’s house.

I find myself on the stormy gravel road, crossing the little bridge that leads to the Kincaids’. Next thing I know I’m outside Beau’s house—and it is Beau’s house, and the lights are on, but his truck isn’t there.

Still I don’t leave. Where will I go? Where will I be safe when I know that somewhere I’m dead, my body rotting beneath the ground, and that maybe tomorrow morning I’ll awake and that orb will have descended around me, cutting me off from the two people who can understand all this.

I turn off the car and that’s when I hear the screaming. Two hardly familiar voices shouting furiously at one another: Beau’s mom, Darlene, and her new husband, Bill.

Their words are impossible to decipher, muddled by the linoleum siding and drywall between them and me, but I can tell it’s serious, brutal, angry, and I don’t know what to do.

I start the car and drive away, backsliding again into my thoughts and my terror, until I find myself parked outside Megan’s house, my whole body trembling like a sapling in a tornado and my face striped with tears and snot. I wipe my nose across my arm as I get out and circle around the white, columned mansion to the basement patio and let myself inside, out of the rain.

The orb is gone, but I know it will be back. The second I fall asleep it will engulf me. I sense it. This is the end, and I won’t have any answers. I’ll have no peace.

I kick off my boots and pace. My legs and back ache, so I sit on the edge of the bed, trying to empty my mind but stay awake, to not think and not sleep. Hours pass and I’ve managed to conjure a mindless numb, but when I hear the knocking on the glass door, “Thank God” escapes me, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath, waiting.

I hurry to open the door, but Beau hesitates, swaying in the doorway with his face turned down. Something’s wrong: he’s sopping wet, his hair dripping along the outside of his downturned face. I take his hand, and he squeezes mine in his, almost painfully. “Beau?” I whisper.

I touch his face, and he flinches under my fingers. I tilt his chin up to me.

“Oh my God,” I breathe. His lip is split and, though no longer bleeding, still smeared in red. His left eye socket is garishly bruised, the top of his high cheekbone starting to swell. “Beau.”

He finally looks at me, and I feel my heart breaking in my chest.

“Why are you all wet?” He half turns away, face hanging again. “Beau, what happened?”

“Bill sold my truck,” he says.

“What?” I ask. “How? It’s not his.”

“He’s an addict. They’re all goddamn addicts,” he says. “It was in my mom’s name, but she didn’t know he was doing it. Someone just came and took it. Then Bill came home high. My mom was mad, and they started to fight.”

He stops talking for a second, his bottom lip trembling. I don’t say anything; I’m waiting on the edge of a precipice, afraid any motion will shut him up, shut him down. Finally he goes on. “He started hitting her, and I pulled him off her, but . . .”

I press my fingers to Beau’s split bottom lip, and his eyes find mine. “She told me to leave.”

“I’m sorry.” I stretch my arms up around his neck. “I’m so sorry, Beau.”

I pull him closer, and he’s tense and stiff in my arms for a second before his eyes close and he starts to shake, his face pressing into my neck, my chest, his hands gripping my hips as he silently cries. “I’m so sorry,” I say again, cradling his face as I kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his black eye, and neck. “I’m so sorry.”

I pull Beau inside the rest of the way, and clumsily close the door behind him as he kisses me roughly, ignoring the slice through the side of his lip and his soaking clothes between us.

Cool rain and hot tears, mine and his, slip down our faces, catching between our mouths as we wind ourselves together. He lifts me and carries me to the bed, and I hear myself say, “Don’t let go.”

He shakes his head against me. “No.”

I want to tell him I love him. If I don’t get to tell him about the headstone with my name on it or the black orb floating over my head or the panic attacks or the end looming over us—it will be okay. But if I don’t tell him I love him, I’ll regret it far past the end.

I need him to know he’s loved.

I need him to feel safe, like he makes me feel safe. I need to wrap my love around him and leave it there, even after I’m pulled away from him forever.

“I love you.”

He lifts his face away from me, and his rough hands push the hair back from both sides of my face before he presses his wet nose and mouth against my cheek. “I love you, Natalie Cleary.” It’s no more than a whisper. It takes no longer than a heartbeat.

“I love you,” I tell him again.

“I love you,” he breathes, lifting me against him and holding me there, the muscles of his body and mine both tense against one another. I skim my hands up the back of his soaked shirt and along his damp skin. He sits back, letting me sit up too as he peels the thin gray shirt off and tosses it on the floor.

My heart is pounding, but I don’t feel nervous. I feel only the crushing heaviness of a future without Beau, where I’m not there to pull him inside and protect him from all the darkness and pour light into him through kisses and touches and whispered words.

His fingers graze the hem of the tank top I’d planned to sleep in, the front already cold and damp from the water squeezed out of his shirt between us. His hands are so careful, his eyes heavy, as he lifts the shirt from around my waist, up over my shoulders. For a minute, we sit there looking at one another, his hands soft on my bare waist, and then he slides me closer to him and folds his arms around my bare back, placing his lips against the space between my neck and shoulder as our chests connect. His skin is softer than I would’ve expected, unevenly tanned by the sun and etched in muscle.