“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone out. I’m sorry.” Her foggy, blackened eyes turned toward Lucas and then to me. “Neither of you deserve this. You were meant to grow up in a different life.” Her breaths became more labored with each word. “I wanted to see you grow up to be like your father.”

“He is still with me,” Lucas said. His lips were quivering and I knew he was trying to hold back the tears to seem strong for his dying mother. I felt so proud of him. “And so are you, Mom.”

A faint hint of a smile formed at the side of her mouth. “That’s good to hear.”

Her eyes turned to me and it was almost too much to look back at her. Those eyes didn’t belong to Hattie. “You two can never let go of each other,” she says. “You have to rely on each other. Watch over each other.”

“We will,” Lucas said, looking up at me.

“Always,” I said. “I will never leave his side.”

This made her smile again. “It does me good to hear that. Neither of you have family, but now you are family. Don’t give up. They will find a cure. The world will get better. You just have to survive to the end.”

Hattie closed her eyes with these words. No matter how hard we tried, Lucas and I could not stop weeping.

“Hattie,” I said, “do you feel pain? Are you suffering?”

She took a deep breath, her eyes still closed. “Go fish.”

A short laugh escaped my lips and Hattie’s grip on my hand squeezed tighter. We sat next to her for another twenty minutes before she finally took her last breath and her grip on my hand eased.

We were then faced with the grim reality that Hattie could wake as a greyskin at any moment and someone had to do something about it. Lucas got up from her side and walked out of the little restaurant and into the parking lot while I sat still holding Hattie’s hand. I pulled her fingers from mine and followed him out there.

He was shivering and the wind blew at his thick blonde hair. “I can’t be in there,” he said.

I walked up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, leaning my cheek against his shoulder. I wanted to tell him that I knew how he felt, but he already knew that. He didn’t need me to comfort him with words. He needed his mother to hold him and to tell him that everything would be all right.

“It’s my fault,” he said, wiping away a tear.

“No it isn’t.”

“It is. You know why she got bit.”

“She was bitten because she was overwhelmed,” I said.