I kept trying to summon up the sound, but it wouldn’t come; I could visualize him with his mouth moving, but nothing would come out besides a weird news-anchor voice that didn’t sound like his at all.

How could I forget? How could I forget?

I hated my brain for doing this to me. To him. How could it do this? How dare it?

But I was my brain and my brain was me so I had forgotten.

But maybe it wasn’t really something you actively forgot, and more something that just went away. A candle doesn’t forget its flame; eventually, it just doesn’t burn any more.

And despite all of June’s talk about fires and windows, I told her all this on that Wednesday morning, an abject sense of betrayal hammering away at my insides.

She was quiet for a long time, which I was grateful for at first; I knew if I’d told Olivia the same thing, she would have given me three separate pieces of unhelpful and slightly patronizing advice by now. But eventually the silence became so long that I’d worried I’d at last crashed through her outer limits and had irreparably freaked her out. Finally, at the red light on the corner of Main and Summit, June turned to me and said, ‘Did you know I can read palms?’

I looked at her, expecting her to crack, but she didn’t. ‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah, give me your hand.’

‘Palm-reading isn’t … real.’

‘Silence, naysayer. Hurry.’

I gave in, because I wanted her to touch me. I offered up my left hand because it was less sweaty than my right, and June took it, examined the lines, or whatever, and hummed quietly to herself while I tried to keep from shivering. After a moment, her face fell. ‘Oh no.’

She was dead serious. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her so serious. ‘What?’

‘It says …’ A pause. ‘You’re a dork.’ We looked at each other for a second, my hand in her hand, neither of us saying anything. And then she cracked into this goofy surprised expression, her mouth wide open and her eyes huge. ‘Oh no! What will we do!’ A honk came from behind us; the light on her face had gone green. ‘All right, all right,’ she said, switching her attention to the road.

‘That was nasty,’ I said, trying to suppress what I knew would be a dumb, toothy grin. My skin tingled where her fingers had been. ‘Nasty trick.’

This was when I realized why, exactly, I got along with June, and why it was so easy to trust her: she didn’t treat grief like a problem to be solved, but a constant to be endured. She created all the little moments of clarity that became the iceberg tips in an existence spent primarily dragging myself across the ocean floor.