He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, laughing bitterly. “Really, Hail? I tell you I love you, and you talk about him? Can you, for one minute, not talk about him?”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble.

“Really. Was the sex that good with him?”

“I never… We never…”

He’s reaching for his pants. He stops and stares at me. “You’re kidding me, right?”

I find my bra on the other side of the bed and quickly clasp it. “No. I didn’t even do it with that guy at the party.” I shrug. “I laughed at him. I called him weak. We’re all weak…”

“Screw you, Hail.”

I scowl back at him.

“Declan wasn’t some god. You make him out to be so…” He vises his head in his hands, making his messy hair even messier. “Do you even listen to yourself?”

I swallow.

He sits down on the edge of the bed, so absently he nearly misses it. His voice is quieter. “So…I… You mean, I’m…”

“The only one. Yeah.”

He stares at his lap for a long time, at the condom on his shrunken dick. He’s hunched and surprisingly fragile. I expect him to say something about how that confirms we’re meant for each other. Instead, he mumbles, “So that’s what you think of me. That I’m weak?”

He fishes an empty Coke bottle out of his trash bin, peels off the condom, and feeds it in.

“I’m weak too.”

When he pulls on his boxers, he snaps, “Compared to Declan? Is that what you were going to say? He wasn’t strong. You really think that?”

“He had convictions.”

He rolls his eyes. “Some convictions. He went against them, Hail. All of them. Remember?”

“No, I don’t. What do you mean?”

He throws up a hand. “Well. Obviously. Blowing his fucking head off was against his religion.”

I wince. “That’s what I’m saying! So you know as well as I do that there’s something wrong with this picture. He didn’t kill himself.”

When it’s out in the open, he blinks, a look of profound horror on his face. “Hail. Stop it. Of course he did.”

I sigh. “Until I know what happened, I’ll always think of him. I can’t help it. My mind is a mess, Kane. Juliet calls it selective retention. My mind doesn’t know how to process certain memories, so it simply ignores them. But I don’t think I can ever get past this until I understand.”

He stares at me for a long time, then sucks in a breath. “Wait. Hail. Are you telling me you really don’t remember what happened the day he died?”

“I remember some of it. But I don’t remember a lot of things, from weeks before he died.”