I blinked at him, convinced I had misheard. “What?”

Blake stared at me for a long moment. Then he choked out, “He didn’t approve. He didn’t want us together. Not like this.”

I shook my head, refusing to accept it. “No. That’s not true.”

His gaze was empty. “It is. He said there’s no future for us.”

I swallowed past the ache rising in my throat.

“He said we were too young,” he continued, his voice flat, emotionless. “That we might hurt each other. That⁠—”

“But we won’t hurt each other⁠—”

“Beverly, the point is he didn’t want us together. He said it. I’m telling you what he told me, and you need to listen.”

I wanted to scream at him, shake him, force him to take it back. Instead, I shook my head. “That doesn’t change things.”

“It changes everything,” he hissed through gritted teeth, pointing at the gravestone. “And that’s the damn proof, Beverly.”

I flinched at the venom in his voice.

“No,” I whispered. “He didn’t mean it that way⁠—”

“He did,” Blake said bitterly, his face twisted in pain. “And…and he was right.”

My lips trembled. “You didn’t fight for us?”

“You have no idea how hard I fought.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean⁠—”

“Do not make me talk about this right now,” he interrupted, his voice strained. “It’s not important. Not after everything that’s happened.”

But it was important.

“I need you,” I choked out.

Blake looked away.

Something sharp and ugly rose in my throat. “Blake⁠—”

“Would you just stop it already?” His voice cracked. “Just—give me space, Beverly. Leave me alone. I—” He closed his eyes. “I need to be alone.”

Then he turned and walked away.

I watched him go, panic creeping into my bones.

He was just angry, I told myself.

He didn’t mean it.

He didn’t mean it.

But he didn’t stop.

And standing there, mere feet away from my dead father, a gaping hole in my chest, with no arms to wrap around me to make it better, I finally felt it. I felt the rupture. A wound so deep and so sudden that I wasn’t sure it would ever heal.

Because this wasn’t just losing my father.

This was losing Blake.

And that?

That felt like death, too.

47

BLAKE, 1999

18 years old

It was as though I had been abruptly pulled back into the past, to a time when I was a kid, isolating myself in order to avoid everything and everyone around me. I had spent years perfecting this—this numbing, this retreat into silence and solitude. I had built my walls high enough to keep out the world, high enough that even I couldn’t see past them. And now, with Arthur gone, those walls shot up so fast that it was as if they had never been lowered at all.