And Jed kept squeezing my hand, and Sam kept hugging my middle.

“Maybe I’m like the force that stops everything, even the Earth from spinning?”

And then finally—finally—I said why.

“I didn’t want Drumlin to come.”

Sam’s arm slid away from me.

“I didn’t want you here in the first place, Sam—and then Drumlin didn’t feel like anything to me,” I said. “And I didn’t want him here, not really. And now he won’t be.”

“You don’t mean that,” Sam whispered.

“Not now I don’t. But I did!”

I pulled away from Jed and turned to Sam, wanted to scream to make him see and understand. But my throat wouldn’t go above a whisper now—it felt like I’d scraped it raw.

“I thought those things—maybe just for a second!—but I still thought them, and then it really happened, so what if it’s me?”

“You didn’t wish that he would die,” Jed said.

No, I didn’t wish that.

Never that.

“My dad doesn’t want me either,” Sam said suddenly. “And sometimes I’d think, if my mom ends up loving Drumlin more than me, because she’s with Luca now—who would have me?”

He hugged his knees to his chest again, put his chin on top of them, and then kept talking.

“Maybe I thought the same thing, Fred. Does that mean I did it, that I made him die?”

“No!” I said, straightaway.

Jed nudged me, and I turned back to him. “So why would you think it was your fault?” he said. “Or anyone’s?”

I shook my head.

“The world hasn’t stopped spinning, Fred.”

No, no it hadn’t.

And I remembered something Luca had told me not too long ago—that the world doesn’t really stop just because there’s tragedy happening in one part of it.

“It just feels like it did,” Sam finally said.

And none of us knew what to say to that. We sat there for just a little while longer, on the freezing cold curb in the middle of a world turned silver by the moon.

44

His Birthday

Anika and Luca came home on what was meant to be Drumlin’s due date. His birthday.

Pop was sitting with us in the kitchen waiting for them to arrive when Sam spotted the calendar—and the big red circle around the date.

He jumped up and ripped that page off in one go, the tearing so loud it made me jump. Then he jammed it deep into the garbage and sat down again.

When we heard the front door unlock we all stood up—and then didn’t know what to do. We waited while Anika came slowly in, with Luca following after.