The only two men I’d ever needed in my life were gone. And I couldn’t seem to escape that thought, no matter how hard I tried.

I closed my eyes, just long enough to let the wave of sorrow wash over me again.

Grief is a quiet, shapeless thing.

It loops and dips, showing up on birthdays, in grocery store aisles, in the middle of songs you didn’t ask to hear. It lingers in the pauses—in the laughter that comes too late, in the quiet moments where you realize, again and again, that they’re still gone. But I guess, at the end of the day, it’s just proof that your heart has loved.

49

BLAKE, 1999

18 years old

My mind barely registered the rough grip on my arms, dragging me up from the couch. The world was tilting, shifting in and out of focus, the pounding in my skull dull but insistent. “Get the fuck up,” Jamal’s voice bit through the haze, low and sharp.

I grunted, trying to shrug him off, but my body felt sluggish.

A glass bottle slipped from my fingers and hit the floor, but the sound of it shattering never reached me. Maybe it didn’t break. Maybe I was too far gone to notice.

“Goddamn it, Blake,” he muttered, his grip tightening around my arms. “I said get up.”

I tried to push him off me again. I didn’t know where I was, not at first. Didn’t care. I just wanted to sink back down, back into the numbing dark where none of this was real.

But Jamal wasn’t having it.

Before I could even blink my eyes open, I was hauled upright, dragged across the room, and shoved through a doorway.

My body hit the cold tile of the bathroom floor, my head snapping forward as the world tilted violently.

The shock of ice-cold water hit me next.

I gasped, lurching forward as the freezing shock ripped through my senses, snapping me back to reality so fast it hurt. “Jesus Christ—” My voice faltered, and I instinctively tried to push Jamal away, but he wasn’t budging.

“Yeah, wake the fuck up,” he snapped, standing over me as the shower drenched us both. “You wanna shut me out for days? Fine. You wanna ignore me forever? Fine. But this…this shit? You wanna drink yourself into the grave? Do it somewhere else, Blake. Not here. Not in this house.”

“Jamal.” His name tumbled out in a strangled, breathless gasp as I struggled against him. “Get the hell off me⁠—”

“Not in my house, Blake,” he snapped, each word like a whip. “Not where my sister sleeps. Not where my parents live.” His chest rose and fell with barely restrained fury. “You hear me?”

I blinked hard, struggling to breathe through the freezing water and the weight of his words.