“Actually, this is good.” I hold the box like it’s toxic waste. I don’t want to go in his room. I imagine it smells like him, like soap and woodworker’s glue and motor oil. Even this box does. Or maybe that’s my imagination.

She looks over her shoulder as Kane helps lug the bag to the curb. She calls out, “Kane, there are a few more upstairs, for Goodwill.”

“On it,” he says, jogging inside.

She lowers her voice for me. “I wanted to get you alone, because I have to ask you something.”

She starts unfolding an envelope. I already know it’s something I don’t want to see, like that brown scar in the backyard. Instinctively, I step back.

“Do you know what this is?”

She pulls a tiny photograph out of the envelope, the kind from one of those instant cameras. My gaze catches on it, and I can’t look away.

It’s like one of those kids’ puzzles where objects are magnified to such an extent you can’t really tell what they are. Body parts melding. Hair. Light and dark, smooth and textured, some shadowed, some overexposed. Skin upon skin. Declan’s skin. My skin? And in the white space underneath, printed with a Sharpie in harsh block letters, the words:

THIS ENDS HERE.

583 Days Before

Bitch, bitch, bitch. Kane bitched like crazy sometimes.

This time, though, I had to admit he had a good reason.

His mother had been out of the picture for twelve years, and it’d been Kane and his dad ever since, living in that three-bedroom bachelor pad like a couple of fraternity brothers. His father was neater than the average frat guy, sure, but the absence of a woman’s touch was obvious—Penn State curtains in the living room, where the only decor on the wall was a fifty-six-inch television set. The place always smelled like nachos, and there was never anything but beer and ketchup in the fridge. His father kept an antique carburetor from an old Mustang on the kitchen island because he thought it made a good centerpiece. Stuff like that.

Earlier that summer, Kane’s dad had gone to SoCal on what we all thought was a business trip. Kane was pissed because he’d had to go to his aunt’s house in Union for a whole week and miss out on baseball camp. I’d spent the entire week missing him. Luisa summered in Europe, so without either of them around, I was alone. Though things had been different in the months after we had sex. I’m not sure how. He didn’t exactly avoid me, but something shifted. I tried to pretend like everything was the same. But I couldn’t look at him without feeling him between my legs, closer to me than anyone could possibly get.