Six months later and those words still haunted me.

They said there were five stages of the grieving process, but I wondered who the nebulous they were. Since the day Jax returned to the safe house and told me Rafe was gone, I’d spent most of my time locked in step one of the natural progression of grieving: denial.

Of course he was coming back. He’d promised. Maybe Jax didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe Rafe had lost the remainder of his memory and was stranded somewhere, confused and alone. Maybe he’d made it out of Lucas’ house and couldn’t remember how to get back to me.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But Rafe wasn’t coming back. Deep down, I’d known it with one glance at Jax’s distraught, bloodied face.

So that brought me to step two. I was angry. Angry at Rafe for leaving me in the first place, chained to his bed with the promise of our future playing on repeat in my mind. Angry I was stuck in denial. I somehow skipped past the third stage of bargaining because let’s face it—I was screwed. If anyone existed beyond this plane of existence, they sure as hell weren’t listening to me.

Which led to step four: depression. I’d been in a perpetual state of melancholy for years, so that was nothing new. But the last stage, the holy grail of letting go and moving on…

Acceptance.

It sounded good, in theory. After attempting to put my jagged pieces back together, I wanted to accept he was gone. It was the reason I’d gotten the tattoo, my first baby step toward wiping clean what Zach had done.

“That should be the last touch up, hon.” Leslie squeezed my shoulder. “Unless you want to start on something new, you’re good to go.”

I was about to embark on something that scared the shit out of me, and it had nothing to do with getting another tattoo. The compulsion to visit the island had trapped me in purgatory, and until I laid eyes on it, I wouldn’t move forward.

I gave Leslie a sad smile, thanked her for her work, and stepped into the frigid air with my pulse thrumming a furious tempo in my veins. The drive to Dante’s Pass seemed to blur by in slow motion, yet the seconds ticked by too fast. I exited the highway and rolled down Main Street, my foot tapping the brake as snow drifted to the ground. I half slid, half wheeled into a parking spot and got out, my boots sinking into the fluffy white.