“Get off me!” I shout, pushing him back.

“Ross, wait. Don’t you get it? I don’t want Dominic. I don’t want somebody who might be okay with ruining yet another person, just like he ruined me. I don’t want to become a worse person just so I can get what I thought I wanted. That would just make me a greedy, selfish human, just like you think we all are. And that’s not who I want to be. You showed me that. This whole time I’ve been thinking about myself first when I should have been just trying to move on. I deleted my original Love Shot List, and I deleted all the scenes we had set up to try to win Dominic back. I don’t want anyone else. I don’t need anyone else. I just need me.”

His words send another burst of heat through my body. That’s great that he needs himself, but what about me? How am I supposed to get out of this mess? Anger radiates off me so strongly even Sean notices.

“What’s going on?” he asks, pointing to my arm.

I look down.

There, on my wrist, is the mark. A tiny wave. One that looks an awful lot like the wave emoji, actually.

“The Journey Mark,” I whisper. That’s what the heat was about. Journey magic doing its thing, telling me I accomplished my task. “But how?”

Sean’s round cheeks perk up so high with his grin that there’s no way he can see me. “You did it, Ross. You helped me.”

Air whooshes out of my lungs, a breath escaping that I didn’t even know I was holding. “I helped you. You just had to see you didn’t need anyone after all.” A laugh bursts out of my throat, one that sounds like a near perfect imitation of Sean’s seal bark. “We’re such blowholes. This whole time we were making it so complicated. You just had to move on from Dominic, not try to win him back. It’s so obvious! Sean! Do you know what this means?” I leap forward and hug him as tight as I can. “I can go home! On the Blue Moon, I can go back! Thirteen days!”

Sean smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes this time. “That’s great, Ross. You did great. Thank you. For everything.”

I step back and look at the moon, waxing crescent, its fingernail of light no longer so depressing. Now it’s just a reminder of how long I have left until I can jump in the ocean. Part of me wishes I could go right this second, but the Elders always said the Journey was designed so we could experience as much on land as possible before our moon cycle’s up.

“So, what do we do now?” I ask. “I’ve got a lot of time to kill.”