‘Never had to,’ I said, and checked my phone again. No calls. Every time I checked and I didn’t see Claire’s name, I felt the dark, jagged ball of anxiety inside get a little bigger, choke me a little more. ‘You giving me a ride to the border or what?’

‘Shane—’

I gave him a long look, and he shut up. ‘We’ve been through a lot, Michael, but I’m not going to collapse into your manly arms and cry about it, okay? I already said I don’t blame you. I don’t. It’s not your fault she left us … it’s mine. I should have trusted her more. I should have believed in you more. I got some things to make up for, not just to her but to you. And it’s probably better I do that away, so you and Eve can get to feel actually married without me lurking around in the background.’ That still hurt, the idea I was holding them back; I knew that was part of why Claire had decided to go, too. But he and Eve did need alone time. It was just truth, hard as it was.

‘I’ll give you a ride,’ Michael said. He walked over to my backpack and picked it up like I’d loaded it up with feathers. ‘You got weapons in here?’

‘A few.’

‘You know that it’ll get your ass arrested out there, right?’

‘Only if I’ve got really bad luck, or I decide to hold up a liquor store with ’em.’

‘You are a cocky bastard, did I ever tell you that, bro?’

I flashed him a grin. ‘Did you really think you needed to?’

He backslapped me as he passed me. ‘Come on, criminal. Eve will kill me if I don’t let her say goodbye.’

‘Oh man, that means she’s gonna cry. Again.’

‘Like a river,’ he assured me. ‘Good thing you wore a black shirt. That mascara never comes out.’

I stopped him at the top of the stairs, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Then he set the backpack down, and hugged me hard. No need for words or speeches or anything like that; he just offered me a fist to bump, I bumped, we were good.

And then we went downstairs to where Eve was pacing the floor, chewing on a neon-coloured thumbnail. Sometime in the past couple of years girls had started painting their nails weird, so the neon thumb didn’t match the other four fingers, which were standard Goth black. She’d tied her colour-streaked hair back in a ponytail so tight that I wondered how it didn’t give her a migraine, and she looked pale even though she’d gone light on the rice powder today. In fact, she didn’t look particularly Gothed out any more – dramatic eye shadow and liner, but not a lot else.