My legs are beginning to lose strength.

I can’t stop thinking of Elise’s stricken face when she walked out of here.

The venomous way I spoke to her.

“Gabe.” Banks isn’t finished. In fact, he seems to be getting angrier by the second. “Tell the truth. Would you have finally stood up to your brother this morning if it wasn’t for her?”

“No,” Gabe responds automatically. “I’d have kept hiding. It started when she came to the gala with me. I…I don’t know. It’s like my confidence has been snowballing since then. She makes me feel like I count. I’m around for a reason.”

“Exactly.”

Banks turns his disgust on me and I sit down on the windowsill. Or maybe I stumble backward and fall, because my knees have finally given way. My heart is beating in an unnatural rhythm now. It feels so heavy and uncomfortable that I want very badly to rip it out of my chest.

“And you, Tobias.” Banks paces toward me in full coach mode. “You aren’t the same person now that we met on the tram. You were a caricature. A sad walking innuendo. You were everything she said in that article and more, weren’t you? Until she forced you to take off your mask before she would give you the time of day. Why would she bother if all she wanted from you was an entertaining story? If that was the case, she would have been better off leaving you unchanged.”

My throat drops into my socks.

I’m going to be ill.

Banks drops the final hammer. “She was lying to herself. She was pretending this was all one big joke, that we were one big joke, because she was afraid.”

She was lying to herself.

She was afraid.

I should have expected Banks to see through Elise quicker than myself or Gabe. It’s always been that way. His loyal defense of her now boils me in shame. “You’re right,” I say in a threadbare voice. “I overreacted. I let the past get the better of me. I fucked up.”

“I doubted her, too.” Gabe lets out a frustrated exhale, his gaze staring a hole through the bedroom door. “How could I do that?”

“You—we—are all going to make this right with her. Because Elise…she’s not an accident, all right? She was put in our paths—”

“To make all of us better,” I finish raggedly. “And she was put in ours…”

“So we could worship her for it.” Gabe lunges to his feet and yanks open the bedroom door. “Elise.”

I’m right behind him, stumbling through the door, prepared to throw myself down at her feet and beg for mercy. How could I assume the worst in someone who searched for the best in me? I’m a dog. A slug. I’m the lowest form of organism.

My tongue and I have a lot of apologizing to do.

If she lets me.

Lord, what if she doesn’t forgive me?

I’m made so dizzy by the horrible possibility that it takes me a moment to realize Banks and Gabe are starting to look nervous. They enter room after room shouting Elise’s name and all I can do is stand there, my feet encased in cement. No. No. No. She can’t be gone.