"Whatever you're thinking. That would be good." Adam perches himself on the bathroom counter, bottle in hand, and studies my distressed face in that intense way of his. Like I'm a knot to be carefully untangled.

"What does it matter, Adam? What does any of it matter?" I wipe roughly at my eyes. "You got a job. That's great. I mean that. But what does that mean for me?"

It means he's getting better. It means he's trying, he's moving forward. It means he is a step away from me because he doesn't need me to take care of him anymore. And I am stuck in place with no clue what to do with myself.

Adam swings his legs a little, looking around the bathroom as though he'll find answers in the sink or the grout between the shower tiles. "No idea. What should it mean? It means you could find a job. Work part-time, if you wanted, and go to college."

"A job doing what? Watching animals die?" I'm acutely aware my voice is rising. I don't want to yell at Adam. I really, really don't. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life failing to save dogs and people because what else can I do? I'm fucking useless. I'm stupid and I don't function right in the head and people give me panic-attacks and I don't—I can't—It's all too big, Adam."

"What is?"

"The future. Everything!"

Adam tosses the bottle of pills aside. It hits the floor and rolls into a corner. He slides off the counter and my back is now against the wall, the corner of a towel rack digging between my shoulder blades. I do not complain because Adam has my face in his hands and he's kissing me and my entire mind turns to mush and it might as well be leaking out my ears.

His mouth is clumsy against mine so I think he hasn't done this much before. I'm no expert, either, so it's almost endearing the way we fumble for some sort of rhythm, but only end up frantically crushing our lips together like we can't stand to be apart. It's terrifying because Adam has all this potential to be something so fucking amazing and I would be—

I could be—

I am nothing.

He draws back, breathless. "You're not nothing. You're something to me, and you're so much stronger than you think you are. Whatever's broken with either of us...we can fix it."

Jobs. Therapy. More medication? I don't know if I can do it.

CHAPTER 30

"How does Adam like his job?" Harold asks when I stop by to drop off the emails a few weeks later. He flips through them, scanning pages, then stacks them neatly at the corner of his desk. I'm glad he's not going over them in detail while I'm standing in his office.

It took a lot for me to let Harold have them at all. Some of those emails contain so many personal thoughts and feelings and when he's done reading, he will know the inner workings of my brain better than most people ever have or ever will. I didn't give him Casper's. Harbinger will certainly be going to jail already with the evidence against him, so the added hassle her parents would have to endure isn't worth it. He only has mine, and I hope it's at all useful somehow.