A lawyer and an assistant CFO, my parents had intense work schedules, and they rarely gave me a second thought when they left the city on work trips leaving me behind for sometimes a week or longer. When that happened, my eighty-seven-year-old neighbor Mrs. Ellis would check in on me every other day or so to make sure I was doing all right, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing as having a mom or dad around.

I knew I was extremely lucky to live in such a nice place and have so much money at my disposal, but the whole “rich” thing honestly made me a little uncomfortable, even if it was something I’d known for most of my life. My parents hadn’t always made stellar paychecks. Sometimes I missed the simple little townhouse we’d lived in over in Chelsea before my mom was promoted and my dad took over his firm. At least then we’d actually spent time as a family and had dinner together every night.

I breathed a sigh of relief once I shut the door to my bedroom and locked it.

My bedroom was my happy place. The Christmas lights strung up above the balcony window, the Broadway playbills and pictures of Taylor and our group tacked up on the corkboard above my desk, the rows and rows of DVDs and CDs I’d collected over the years—all of it was the perfect escape from the stuffy leather furniture and the professional photographs of the city from some art gallery in SoHo that hung in the living room.

I half-heartedly attempted to memorize some formulas for chemistry, but five minutes later I gave up, chucked my textbook at the wall, and flopped facedown on my bed.

It felt as if there was some part of myself that was missing, now that Archer Morales wasn’t alive and walking this earth anymore. It made me desperately wish that he were still here, despite the fact that he and I had only exchanged a few words. Somehow I couldn’t make sense of the fact that he was here yesterday, and now he was gone . . . permanently. Then again, I wasn’t all that familiar with death. I’d gone to my great-grandma Louise’s funeral when I was six, but that was the only time I’d ever experienced someone I knew, at least a little, passing away. But I didn’t like seeing her body in a casket then, and I didn’t like the idea of Archer’s body lying cold somewhere now.

Burrowing underneath the covers, I shoved my face into a pillow and I finally started to cry.