I didn’t answer, but I knew he never expected me to. That familiar ache consumed my soul and began to throb. It was more than longing. More than saying that I missed him. That ache beat against my ribs with the force of my heartbeats, demanding that I acknowledge my emptiness. I felt…incomplete without him. He had a piece of me, and the rest noticed.

I put away my phone with a sigh and found Paisley staring at me with a little smirk.

“You ready to talk about that yet?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Fine.” She sighed. “So, what would you like to do today? I’m not even sure what to do with myself without Peyton underfoot. A movie? A pedicure?”

I grinned. “Grab your swimsuit. We can make the paddleboard yoga class that starts in forty-five minutes!”

Her jaw dropped.

…

I knew she craved quiet since her life now had none, so we spent the next day curled up in the living room reading as a summer storm made the tourist-heavy beaches quiet.

The best thing about having a librarian for a best friend was that she didn’t talk when there were books to be read.

Page after page flew by as I devoured Night and Day, despite my better judgment. The book belonged in a display case, protected and preserved, but it felt like a betrayal to put it up without reading it, so I did.

The only sounds were turning pages as we soaked in the quiet, and from time to time, I would stop and pause over the beauty of a well-written line as I savored the last book in my binge of Virginia Woolf novels.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river; to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.

Though the confession belonged to a man who had never lived, published in a book that had been written over a hundred years ago, my chest tightened and my breath caught because I knew that feeling with an intimacy that shook my very being.

I saw him everywhere. He was in the ocean and on the beach. He was in my bedroom and my kitchen and in the clouds that blew by overhead. He was in the rain that pelted my glass and the sun that warmed the deck in the morning.

Somewhere in the last five months, my existence had shifted. My center of gravity had moved. He was my reality of everything.

Jackson.

I closed the book and held it to my chest as an ache of longing consumed me.

“What’s wrong?” Paisley asked from the other end of the couch, looking over her e-reader.

“How did you let Jagger fly again?”

Her eyes widened, and she sat up, placing her tablet on the coffee table. “What do you mean?”