“Finally, she managed to hurl me up back to the platform, but she fell onto the tracks in the process. Five seconds later, she was gone. The train approached. I tried to reach for her, I did. But she . . .” I draw a breath, feeling tears rolling down my cheeks. “She said, ‘Don’t you dare.’ Don’t you dare.”

And so I didn’t. Didn’t dare to live, to move on, to forgive myself for what happened.

It’s all coming back to me now. The moment I’ve tried so hard not to think about these past six years. The looks. The horror. The shame. The guilt. The screams. The odd silence that followed. The police. The paramedics. The insurance people. Nice, but firm. Renn and Dad crying. Pippa asking too many questions, so many questions. The police officers asking me, again and again and again, in their softest, nicest voices, to relay the last few minutes. And me, being honest, and dumb, and scared, telling them that I danced over the edge of the platform because some boy I liked had texted me.

I knew they were judging me. I judged me.

“I’ve never gone into the subway ever again,” I hear myself say. I don’t feel the words coming out of my mouth. Rather, I listen to them. “And I never will. I cannot see a train without . . . without . . .”

Without thinking about it. Smelling it. Replaying the whole scene in my head.

“Ever,” Joe says softly. “It wasn’t your fault. It could’ve happened to anyone.”

“But it happened to me.” I smile sadly. I can barely see him behind the curtain of tears. It’s happened to me twice, in fact. Dom was the second death I was responsible for. “I remember, as the policemen talked to me, as Dad and Renn frantically tried to understand what had happened, you kept on sending me message after message. The screen kept flashing with a green light. Until one of the police officers asked me to put it aside. I was still holding it in my hand. I didn’t let it go, even when I fell to the tracks and hit my head.”

There are tears in his eyes. I don’t remember Joe ever crying. Not even when Dom passed away. But he is crying now, and when I reach over to hold his hand, he clasps my fingers like I’m made out of sugar. Carefully. As if I could melt away.

“So you blamed yourself for your mother’s death, and me for causing you to act that way.” Joe stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray with his free hand.