It doesn’t seem right. Heroes are supposed to be selfless. They don’t hurt innocent people in the name of survival. In all the stories I’ve ever read, being good is how heroes win.

But I guess everything is different here.

I sit back down on the bed and try to imagine the quilted blanket is anything like the one I used to have when I was alive. But trying to remember those little feelings—the mundane details nobody ever really bothers to pay attention to—it’s like trying to hold on to water.

The memories are already fading.

How long before I forget my family, too?

I wipe a tear from my cheek, but not before Gil notices. He doesn’t look at me like I’m still a stranger. He looks at me like he’s certain he already knows me but wishes very much that he didn’t.

“Things will get easier once you accept that you’re really dead,” he offers curtly.

“I know I’m dead,” I reply, a little too sharply. A side effect of being defensive. “But that doesn’t mean I have to be okay with it.”

There are so many questions I’ll never have the answers to—about my old life and all the people I left behind. I don’t get to watch Mei grow up and discover the kind of person she wants to be. I’ll never see my parents grow old, with graying hair, freckled hands, and laughter lines hidden in their wrinkles. I hope I didn’t take that away from them—the laughter, and the light. I hope they remember to live even though I can’t.

And Finn. What’s waiting in his future? College? A new best friend? A family I’ll never get to meet?

I’m going to miss out on all of it. All because of a stranger with a gun, whose face I’ve never seen.

“Who was he?” Gil asks, breaking into my thoughts.

A flutter of embarrassment rushes through me. He saw my dreams; he knows about Finn. And maybe this isn’t the right audience, but I feel so desperate to set my thoughts free. I need to release these feelings. These words.

I need to grieve my own death.

“He was—” I start, but I don’t know what to say. “Friend” doesn’t seem to get across just how specifically important Finn was to me, and calling him “boyfriend” isn’t the truth.

Now when I think of Finn, I think of a sentence that got stopped in the middle. A painting that will never be fully realized.

I died before we ever got the chance to be what we wanted to be.