After a brief interview with the police, we are released and driven back to the hotel. We pack our things, still in shock, and leave Brandy and the rest of the staff in tears behind us. There is nothing I want to do more than stay and console people and figure out what happened, but I know how badly Mal wants to go back home, and now is not the time to defy Ryner.

On the plane, we stare at nothing and stay quiet.

Mal is the first one to break the silence.

“I feel like shite for treating him the way I did, you know.”

“He really liked you.” I swallow.

I kissed the guy this week. His mouth was hot and alive, his heart beating against mine. Hell, I talked to him just a few hours ago, and he was funny and sweet and easygoing—not a care in his madman’s world. I don’t know why I’m so deeply devastated by the loss of his life, but I just want to crawl into myself and cry.

“I hate that we could have prevented it,” I mumble.

“We couldn’t.”

“He was high all the time. We let it happen.”

“You obviously haven’t met an addict before. There was nothing you or I could have done to prevent him from using. This is not on you, Rory.” He kisses my shoulder.

I feel my eyes coating with tears again. “Then why am I so sad?”

“Because you’re a good human. Because essentially, he was one, too.”

We don’t talk about the project, about the album, about the absurdity of us reuniting to work on something that will never materialize. Now that the project is officially dead—along with its star—something fundamental has snapped and shifted in the world we created together. We no longer have ground on which to operate. I don’t have a deadline in Ireland.

I tap my phone where it rests on my knee, pushing away Summer’s nonstop unanswered calls and Mom’s book-long messages begging me to come back home before something terrible happens.

“You’re crying.” Mal squeezes my shoulder.

I realize I am.

I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I’ve just never dealt with death up close before. My grandparents were dead before I hit three, and even though Glen died when I was a teenager, I didn’t know him and never witnessed it. It sounds ridiculous. I’m almost twenty-seven, yet up until now, death seemed like this vague, abstract idea. It was there, but not really. Now I feel it everywhere.”

Mal takes my hand in his and kisses it.

“It is,” he agrees.

“You probably miss Kathleen all the time,” I say.