My breath catches when I see the two smoothed hunks of petrified wood nestled between twin cedar trees, each natural headstone bearing a small metal plaque. They feel like Orman, blissfully new while unmistakably old. Their purpose is enough to make my insides roll into a ball, but at Nolan’s urging, I release his hand and fall forward to my knees to read the words aloud.

“Emily Jane Endsley and Avery Juniper Endsley. Together in life and death.”

The birth dates are separated by a handful of years, but the date after each dash is the same.

Sisters. Nolan Endsley had younger sisters. And they died on the same day. “Everyone thinks I came up with Orman in high school, which is partly true,” Nolan begins. “Most of it came from before, though, when my sisters and I were little. I made up stories for them, worlds. Orman was their favorite.”

I continue to rack my brain for any whisper of siblings in interviews or internet ramblings and find nothing. Nolan shakes his head at my expression.

“They’re not mentioned anywhere,” he says. “Anywhere. Dad made sure of that.”

“But why?” I ask. My brain is scrambling for an answer. Maybe there is bad blood between him and his family, now that he has taken the stories he made for his dead sisters and turned them into gold.

Nolan sighs, and I recognize the slight shake in his breath for what it is: the piteous, defeated sound of grief.

“They’re dead.” It’s all but a whisper. And then, impossibly quieter: “It’s my fault.”

Dead means something new when death has touched you. Before Jenna died, the death of other people seemed like a sad story that didn’t ever quite reach my heart. Death was inevitable, natural in its unnaturalness.

Death was for other people.

But as I watch the first hint of a tear nestle in the corner of Nolan’s eye, I feel the ground beneath us give way, my own tides of grief rising up to meet his.

I suddenly feel impossibly old. But I force myself to look at the stones, at Nolan, and the evidence of our artificial history, which we created to justify a relationship that feels much older than a couple of days, and I make myself stand in the waves.

“We summered here as a family,” Nolan says, staring at the stones. His eyes are glazed, unseeing. “The blue house was our vacation home—I bought it from my mom with the money from my first book. Every year my mom, dad, me, Emily, and Avery came here. Dad would fly back and forth to New York for meetings and Mom would spend time in town, so the three of us would be left alone a lot.”