It’s now a little after seven thirty in the morning. I’ve been lying in bed for an hour, willing myself to go to sleep. But I couldn’t. Despite all the time I’ve spent sleeping in the past six months—the near perfection I achieved at falling asleep and waking myself up—it has been impossible this morning.

I was replaying every moment of the fight with Aaron in my head anyway, so I figured I should write it down.

“I just really don’t understand you,” he had said, shaking his head. “I don’t understand how you could trust someone you barely know and help them commit a crime.”

“Damien understands me,” I argued and Aaron laughed darkly. “He does.”

“Rose, he’s a thirty-year-old man whose only friend seems to be a nineteen-year-old girl that he coerced into breaking into a government facility with him,” Aaron said simply. “It doesn’t matter if you feel understood by him, that’s not real.”

“He’s twenty-nine,” I rebutted, like that meant anything at all. I knew it was weird. I’ve known the whole time. I know that it’s strange that Damien and I have been friends in the same way that I know I will never see him again.

That was when I started to cry again. Not just little tears, but another wave of enormous sobs. At that point, I’m not sure what I was even crying about. I thought I had cried about my dad, my life, in the woods, that I had gotten everything out, but there I was, sliding my back down the kitchen cabinets until I was sitting on the floor, because I just couldn’t support my own body weight anymore.

“Rosie—” I heard Aaron whisper and then he was next to me on the floor, his long arms wrapped around me. I turned my face into his chest and cried into his sweatshirt, his hands rubbing my back like they would whenever I got sick when we were little. That just made me cry harder.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered into my ear. “I’m so sorry that things have been like this. But they’re going to get better, I promise. I’m here now. I’m here now.”

“There’s nothing I can do,” I sobbed. “There’s nothing I can do for him and we’re gonna lose him, Aaron. We’re gonna lose him.”

I felt Aaron take a shuddering breath in when I said that, and soon I could feel tears falling into my hair, Aaron’s chin resting on the top of my head, as he held me close.

“I know,” he cried. “I know. So please—I can’t lose you too. Please.”

He kept whispering and we both kept crying. It felt like a piece of me was coming back together while every single part of me was breaking apart.