Cole goes to take his place on the bench, and I see him pick up the guitar. That song is almost more than I can stand tonight.

I walk onstage and stand right behind him—close enough that I know he can feel me breathing—until his fingers stop moving and the theatre goes silent.

It hits me how hollowed out and sunken in he looks. And I’m trying to remember exactly when he became Orion. But I can’t. I guess I was too focused on becoming Eden.

“I know you’re there,” he tells me. “I can feel you.”

“I almost didn’t come tonight,” I say.

“Then why did you?”

“Because I wanted to say goodbye.”

Cole turns to look back at me. Then he holds out one hand. “Come sit with me,” he says. And it’s such a simple request.

So I do.

“Don’t you love me anymore?” he asks, and it’s like a knife to my heart.

“I more than love you,” I tell him. “But things change. People change.”

“You’ve changed,” he says, and I nod.

“You’ll change, too,” I promise him.

“What if I play your song again?” he asks.

“I’ll always hear your music. It’s the song inside my heart.”

“But you won’t come back again.”

“No,” I say. “I won’t come back again.”

“What if I write you a new song?” he pleads. “Something better.” He almost smiles. “Or louder.”

“Okay.” Willa holds up a finger. “Let’s pause there for a moment before we go on.” You could hear a pin drop in the barn, it’s so quiet. There’s just the sound of our breathing. “Why does Eden say she can’t come back? She clearly loves him. This is killing her. So why is this goodbye?”

I see everyone turning that question over in their minds. And I know the answer, but I can’t figure out how to put it into words.

It’s quiet for a long time.

“Nobody?” Willa asks, and she looks around the barn. She sighs, clearly disappointed. “Eden’s changed too much,” she tells us. “She’s outgrown Orion. And that’s sad. It’s a tragedy, maybe, if she really loves him. But she’s become someone different than she was before her death. Before the chaos of all that. And there’s no going back.”

But that’s not right.

I know Eden inside and out now. She lives somewhere inside me. And that’s not it at all.

Eden won’t come back to see Orion because he deserves the chance to change, too. She wants that for him. She knows that he can’t spend the rest of his life waiting for a ghost. He needs to hurt. And grow. Learn. He needs a chance to become. Because he’s the one still living. And she won’t take that chance away from him.

It seems so strange that Willa could misunderstand her own play like that.

I don’t say anything, though. Because it doesn’t matter whether Willa knows it or not. I know it. She may have created Eden, but I’m the one breathing life into her. It’s my heart that pumps her blood.