Cole’s vigil doesn’t end when daylight comes, though. For the next couple of days, he’s my shadow. He eats every meal with us in the cafeteria. He waits for me outside my morning classes. Checks in on me when I’m working with Glory in the afternoons. I find him leaning against the outside wall of the bathroom when I come out after my shower. Waiting for me at the door when rehearsal is finished. He tells me he wants me to stay away from George. Not to ever let myself be alone with him. That it’s not safe.

And every night he ends the day by sitting guard on the steps. I sit up with him, as long as I can. He presses pieces of sea glass into my palm, and we pour over my mother’s notebook by cell phone light. Looking for clues. I tell him about the missing notebook. The one that will have “#1” written in the upper right-hand corner. On the back.

We talk through every memory I have. Every piece of the puzzle. Until my head gets too heavy, and it falls against his shoulder. Or until he sees me shivering. Then he sends me in to bed. But he promises he’ll stay. That he won’t leave. That he doesn’t mind. Because he doesn’t sleep anyway.

He doesn’t say it out loud, but over and over again he’s promising that he’ll save me.

And I’d give anything to be able to save him, too. But his cheeks are more sunken and hollow every day. His eyes are dimmer. There’s this darkness swelling in him. A kind of hopelessness. I can see it when I look at him. And I feel it when he kisses me.

By Thursday, we’re not really any closer to figuring out what happened the night my mother died, and I’m becoming more worried about Cole than I am about me.

“I didn’t find it,” he tells me that evening when we meet up before rehearsal.

“Find what?” I ask him.

“That first notebook,” he says. “I tore the house apart. Top to bottom. Every drawer. Every closest. But it isn’t there.”

And I know how bad he must have been hoping he’d find it, and that there would be something in there that proved me wrong.

Some clue that would point toward someone other than his father.

It’s written so plainly on his face.

We’re in the final few days before we move out to the amphitheater to start working with sound and lights, and everyone is feeling the pressure. The lack of sleep. The ticking clock. The stress of wanting to do justice to this beautiful piece of theatre we’re creating together.