I watched the colors in my room shift from blues to purples to buttery yellows as the sun rose, the shadows shrinking away with every tick of the clock.

My room felt foreign after spending so many nights away. It was a place I’d left behind, a place of memory. A limbo, the space between the boy I’d been and the man I’d become. That limbo had stretched on far too long, years where every day was the same and nothing ever changed.

Until her.

I’d captured sleep in wisps and fluttering moments through the night, plagued by what she’d said. What I’d said. What I’d so willingly stepped into and what had been inevitable from the start. Acceptance set a quiet resolve upon me, a heaviness that settled in my chest, immovable. This had always been our fate.

I’d just been reckless enough to hope.

I’d been careless enough to fall in love with her.

I knew it now in hindsight, the path to this moment laid out plainly behind me. I’d realized it last night when she stepped out of the van. When she’d broken, so had I, and what had spilled out was my love for her. But there was nothing to catch it. So it’d slipped away, disappearing in the cracks, lost but for the remnants.

Those, I feared, would stain me for the rest of my days.

My alarm went off uselessly, and I found that heaviness weighed down my arms, my legs, my weary eyelids. But I slid out of bed, mindlessly pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, shoved my feet into my boots, and carried myself down the stairs. There was nothing else to do. Not with myself, not with my day, and not for Lila and me.

Lila. The pain on her face, the shock at discovering she’d been betrayed, was etched in my mind. In that moment, I could have burned that place to the ground. I would have scorched the earth to save her, to serve vengeance, to end it all.

But she wasn’t the only one who had been betrayed.

The words I’d spoken that very first night haunted me. It was true—the only danger in a rebound was to the reboundee. And here I thought I’d known what I was getting myself into.

Silly me.

The greenhouse awaited, the earthy musk comforting in its familiarity. Dad glanced at me from behind the dahlias with a flicker of concern in his eyes. But he said nothing, as was his custom, and for that, I was grateful. The last thing I wanted to do was regale him with the story of my dashed and foolish hope.

So I picked up my shovel and worked. The shuck of the spade against the wheelbarrow brought me back to center, hypnotized me into forgetting.

No, not forgetting, but burying.