Finn is silent. He just lets me cry. Watching me in that strange, soft way.

I don’t think he’s going to respond at all, but then he opens his mouth. “Of course it haunts me too. Of course it does.”

He rises from where he’s kneeling in front of me and joins me on the bench. I feel small and broken as he wraps his arms around me. He lets my tears dampen the shoulder of his shirt, and he strokes my back in small circles as I sob.

“I am sorry,” he says against my hair. “If you think I’m not haunted by all of it, you’re wrong.”

I lift my head from his shoulder and push him away. I can’t handle the sensation of touching him when he’s so warm and so willingly offering me the comfort I desperately crave.

I do not need this moment, not with him. Any warmth, any closeness we once had was snuffed out unceremoniously like a burnt-down candle that awful November night at Haxahaven.

There are some things you can’t come back from.

I push him away from me, and he slides willingly across the bench.

At my show of visible disgust, he speaks once more. “I’m sorry.” I’m not sure if he’s apologizing for the crime of killing my brother or touching me. “I don’t want to fight anymore.” His whisper is gravelly, the confession ripped from the back of his throat.

He crowds into my space again, soft curls and soft eyes and a sharp jaw, and it would be so easy to taste candy floss on a boardwalk instead of death in a river. But there is no taking back what Finn did. That’s the whole thing. That’s the point of all of this. I taste it, sour in the back of my throat like smoke from a gun.

I’ve only gotten fragments of Finn, never the whole thing. Is this him now? A boy, twenty and broken and full of fire looking for something to smelt into steel? There is something inside of him, a yawning pit that wants and wants and wants. I recognize it because I have the same one in me.

But there’s a difference between me and Finn.

Finn wants, so he takes. He took my brother. He took the lives of Boss Olan and the other Sons. He took my very soul, scooped it right out of my chest like it was always his for the taking.

When Finn wants, he takes.

When I want, I ache.

I’m aching now, staring at the constellation of freckles scattered across his perfect nose. How is it that no one has broken it yet?

I push away from him.

If he’s dead to me, I need to stop laying flowers on his grave.