The place was frozen, desolate, the streets bereft. Most people had holed up inside to escape the snow. The setting was an uncanny snapshot of the way I felt on the inside. Rafe was gone, but the space where my heart used to reside only grew bigger with each day I faced alone. Time hadn’t dulled the pain, hadn’t eased the betrayal of abandonment. I’d finally accepted he was gone, and that meant I had nothing left to do but live.

It’s what he would have wanted, but living for me turned out more challenging than I imagined. My dad and Zach had always dictated my decisions, actions, behaviors. Now that I’d grasped control of my life, I felt imprisoned, out of my element and absolutely terrified.

Every breath I took, each new cautious step toward the future…Rafe’s absence kept me in a constant choke hold, his metaphorical fingers clamping around my neck but not applying enough pressure to send me into blackness.

I blinked the snow from my lashes and gazed at the picturesque street with its shops and cafes. The day Rafe brought me here to tell the sheriff what Zach had done was a fuzzy memory, but I recognized this street, despite the layer of snow covering the asphalt.

A breath shuddered out. I shouldn’t have come here. It was too soon, and setting foot in the place where he’d grown up wasn’t going to help me move on. How could I lay eyes on that island without fissuring? But it drew me like a magnet. I needed to know if the fire had destroyed the land as much as Rafe leaving had destroyed me.

Leaving.

I couldn’t bring myself to use the word death in relation to him. He didn’t feel gone forever. I was still breathing, so he had to be alive. Didn’t matter if my logic was skewed; I gripped it with both hands.

I took a final glance down the main street of Dante’s Pass, committing it to memory, and returned to my Volvo. I drove onto the highway again, and the island came into view, rising out of the water with barren landscape overrun by snow. An artist could use that scene to paint a morbid picture of winter desolation. Nature might wipe away some of the destruction, but it couldn’t hide it entirely.