I can’t remember even one interaction with anyone in the entire town.

It hits me.

A jolt.

I never left that red mangle of steel in the ditch.

Chapter 51

When the thought comes to my head, there’s a panic in it. A feeling that I’m supposed to be doing something but I don’t know what it is but I’m supposed to be doing it.

A promise unkept.

But then, something happens to the green grass laid out in front of me, an emerald carpet.

A lightness to it.

A feeling, somehow, of a secret garden.

A glimmering green garden.

The campus green, the row of trees, seems to have taken on a new life, somehow sparkling. The elms, with their bright green leaves bending over this grass promenade, a canopy from each side, seeming to shutter like a magic spell in the wind.

The cherry blossom trees, farther up toward the library, an impossible shade of pink. A candy pink. A bubblegum lollipop.

And now somehow, even though all these scurrying, pensive students are skittering past me, not noticing me, not a one, there’s no panic to it. Not anymore.

It’s done.

The thing is set.

Let be.

And somehow there’s no terror in it, in all that I thought not being and all that I didn’t think actually being.

I had it twisted.

I got it wrong.

But that’s okay.

Everything is okay.

And I’m walking through the grass and everything is light, suddenly, peaceful.

Everything is as it should be.

And there is one student who seems to see me.

Coming down the long promenade. Through the canopy of leaves overhead, a million shades of green with some lilac blossoms thrown in.

He is headed right toward me.

Coming closer now.

A kind of calm washing over me. And then, I can just make him out. I can just make him out but he’s still so far away. So far away but somehow closer, somehow brighter, somehow shinier.

And I gasp to see.

To see who it is.

To feel who it is in every millimeter of my body.

It’s . . . Zander.

My Zander.

Who I haven’t seen since the night of the rain in April and the Jeep and the crash and the mangled steel and the blue and red lights swirling, swirling in the night sky.

I have never thought of this moment because I believed this moment does not exist. Could not exist. Never would exist.

Without me saying it, he looks straight through me and gives me a nod. As if he read my thoughts:

Yes, it exists.

Daffy, you weirdo.

There are a thousand questions I want to ask, but somehow he puts this thought in my head. Right smack-dab in the middle of my brain, between my ears:

“I’ve been waiting for you.” A twinkle in it.

“What? How can you have been waiting for me, how could any of this—” I interrupt.

But he calms me.

“You were lost.” He finally reaches me across the green. Standing before me, he gently moves my chin up with his finger. “Did you hear me calling you? You needed to remember before you could come.”