I rubbed at the back of my neck as I stared out at the ocean. “Thanks, A.” I could finally look at it and say I was sorry, too. None of us had deserved how the accident had torn our lives apart. Each in very different ways, but destruction and disease ensued nonetheless. Vi would never get to put her pieces back together, but Bell and I…we had to try.

“I’m fucking things up with her sister.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. I had been holding in all my feelings about Bell and the situation for more than a month now, and they were just dying to get out.

Austin sucked in a sharp breath. “What’s going on? Were you guys friends?”

Friends seemed like such a bizarre term for what Bell and I had been. She’d always been more, though not in any sort of romantic way—I just hadn’t seen her in that light. Bell had always been like another limb. She was simply a part of me. I didn’t think about it much, it just was. This girl, who had always been wise beyond her years, had seen things about me no one else did, as if she lived inside the deepest parts of my mind. And, God, I had missed it when that part of me went quiet, when she went silent. Those phantom pains had never gone away.

I swallowed against the emotion building in my throat. “We were close.”

Austin was quiet for a moment. “You have feelings for her.” It wasn’t a question, it was a simple statement of truth. We’d known each other for a decade, he could read between the lines.

“I can’t.” The two words hurt as I spoke them, as if they contained a ball of barbed wire, slicing through my body as it traveled up to escape my mouth.

Austin let out a low whistle. “Bet you’re beating yourself up pretty hard right now.”

I chuckled and bent to pick up a rock along the shore. “If you were here, I’d let you go a few rounds in the ring with me.”

“You’re worse off than I thought if you want me to kick your ass.”

I put all the force I could into sending the stone in my hand out into the ocean. “It’s so damn complicated. It’s this mess of guilt and want and anger and so many other things I don’t have a name for, and it’s making me question everything.”