Nolan is silent, his free hand now stroking Avery’s stone. “There are a hundred thousand ways to tell a story,” he begins. “Medical students help people live longer and continue their own stories. Engineering majors tell a story of technology that goes back to cavemen with rocks and sticks. Marine biologists piece together shreds of plot until they know where whales sleep at night and where fish live in coral reefs. Everything is a story, not just writing. You need to find the story that means something to you, a story you like telling.”

He falls silent again, the wind and chimes kicking up in a melancholy symphony that sounds like a heart breaking. I try to take my hand back to move windblown hair out of my eyes, but Nolan tightens his grip before quickly releasing it, like he doesn’t want to let go.

“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to do that.”

I leave my hand in his, using the other to rid my sight of hair.

I’m crying. I think I’ve cried more in the last month than I have the entire rest of my life. Maybe if Jenna were here, she would change her mind. Maybe if she knew I would be alone, she would tell me to forge my own path.

I am trying to hold it all in my head when Nolan says, “You’re the only person outside of Lochbrook who knows about the girls. We managed to keep it from the press, even after the books became popular and reporters came to poke around, but only because Val has everyone scared shitless.”

There is a question buried in his statement and how his hand tightens on mine. He wants to know that I won’t say anything, that if the stars should fall from the sky and our fake and real friendships imploded into nothing, I wouldn’t take this story to the press and sell it to the highest bidder.

He wants to know that he is safe.

And though it is dreadfully inappropriate, while sitting beside the graves of his sisters, with the manifested fog of my dead friend weaving its way around us, I kiss Nolan Endsley on the cheek.

He freezes, and I wonder if I’ve made a mistake, if I’ve misinterpreted the hand-holding and the sleeping in a pile on the bookstore floor. My face reddens with a blush of embarrassment and I make to pull back.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

But his head whips toward me, his hand coming around to the back of my neck. For an unfathomable period of time, we stare at each other, the kind of staring where your eyes don’t blink and your toes curl in your shoes the longer you look. The air between us is humming with a charge for which I have no name as the line between us tightens just short of breaking.