I tell them about Jenna. How her lipstick saved me, about Moot and family dinners where I never felt like an extra puzzle piece that didn’t fit. We laugh as I recount the time I pushed her into the Williamses’ pool fully clothed and she hauled me in after her and I ended up with a black eye when my face met her knee. We laugh harder when I tell them it was the day before a dance and Jenna was furious because she had labored over finding makeup to match the dress she made me wear. She had not accounted for greenish-yellow skin as a base for eye shadow.

Our laughter dies off, lulled by the soft waves grazing the boat, the distant sounds of Lochbrook going to sleep for the night.

“If Nolan’s right and we all end up in a heaven somewhere,” Alex says, “I want Jenna to train Wally. I think she’s the only one who can do it. I really do.”

Nolan walks me to the door of Val’s, and I almost ask him to stay with me in the Orman room. But he looks too tired to endure another night of sleeping against bookcases, so I say, “See you tomorrow, right?”

“Tomorrow,” he promises. I think he’s going to kiss me good night, but he doesn’t.

Behind his eyes, I watch the forest start to darken, as if the sky around us is sucking out his light. “You never asked my least favorite thing about books,” he says.

I don’t ask. I don’t want to. I want to go on pretending that this night is the first of many bazaars I will photograph, the first of many nights I’ll go to bed hungry because Wally ruined a planned dinner.

But Nolan tells me anyway.

“I hate endings,” he says. “Hate them. If the story is good, it’s never going to be long enough.”

The words are out of my mouth before I can hold the sentence in my head. “But we keep reading.”

Nolan’s smile is lazy and slow and my toes curl in my shoes. He leans down and his breath brushes my forehead, my cheeks, and he pulls away.

“Good night, Amelia.”

The trains of thought zip through without stopping as I climb the stairs to my weird little guest room with the sink in the corner, but I don’t try to find out where they are going. I am on every single train and they are all taking me back to Texas and away from Nolan.

My last conscious thought before sleep is a flash of a photo that doesn’t exist. I’m on a train platform and Nolan is on one train and Jenna is on another. They are going in opposite directions. They stick their hands out the windows, beckoning me to come with them.