“You know you’re always welcome at our table,” she tells me before she leaves. I don’t know if it’ll even be possible to go back to Riverside, if I’ll be able to handle it, but it’s kind of her to offer. “You’re always welcome there. You and Elise both were.”

“But you and Elise—” I think of what Christian said, how Elise had embellished aspects of her story. I remember what she told me the day we went off campus for lunch in that sub’s car, about how Melody had confronted her about our friendship. I’m about to ask Mel but I decide not to. I have to let go of the past.

• • •

Later that day, when Mom has gone back to work, Dad sticks around for lunch. “Let’s do it,” he tells me.

“Do what?” I ask warily.

“Get out of here. For real.”

“Um, I kind of can’t on account of being shot,” I say with a weak laugh.

“No, not this.” He laughs too. “I mean you and me. Let’s do it, okay?”

I shrug with my right shoulder. We’ve been here before. “Okay,” I say, indulging him. “Let’s do it.”

“I mean it,” he insists. “This—this was a wake-up call, Remy. I almost lost you.” He begins to cry. “I want to start over. I don’t want to fail you.”

“Dad . . .”

“I’ll get an apartment and then we can move out right away.”

“Okay,” I say, my smile a little warmer this time. I’m not sure I have faith in anything he says anymore, but I can’t help but hope anyway.

FRIDAY // SEPTEMBER 8 // DAY 364

69.

I’m sitting outside on the front steps of my house, my left arm in a sling, when Evan pulls up. Lola jumps out of his car and runs toward me, and I smile genuinely for the first time since Jack’s death. I walk her around the neighborhood for a bit with Evan, and when Mom comes home, Lola’s napping under the dining table.

Mom freezes when she spots her. She sets down her bag and slips off her shoes, and without a word, she makes her way over to Lola and lifts a tentative hand before petting her.

I’m ready with arguments but she begins to speak and they never make it out of my throat.

“We had a cat once,” she says, surprising me. “When I was six. Princess Georgina, we called her. Just George for short.” Over the years, Christian and I have gotten every excuse under the sun for why we weren’t allowed to have pets. A spark of anger pulses through me, but before I get a chance to call her out on her hypocrisy, she sheds a tear.

“I loved George so much. Some of my earliest memories were of that silly cat,” she says now, leaving me in a stunned silence. “But when I was twelve or thirteen, she got sick, really, really sick. She passed away within a year, and I—” Her eyes widen with realization.