He looks at me. “Leave Grace, you mean.”

“I didn’t mean it like that—”

“How else could you have meant it?”

“Trace—”

“Get out. I want to be alone.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Get the fuck out, Sloane! Who told you I wanted you here in the first place?” He gets so close and for one second, I think he’ll hit me. I see my father. I will see my father in every anger. “Get out.”

I brush past him and as soon as I’m out of that room, I can breathe in a way I couldn’t before. My legs are shaky. Weak. When I go back to the auditorium, Cary and Rhys are waiting for me.

“How is he?” Rhys asks.

“Bad,” I say. “Where’s Harrison?”

They don’t answer.

“What?”

“Tell her, Cary,” Rhys says. He doesn’t sound happy.

Cary flushes and clears his throat. “He wouldn’t stop fucking crying and I kind of lost my temper. He’s wandering around. Did you mention leaving to Trace?”

Rhys looks at me. “Tell me you didn’t. It’s way too soon to throw that at him.” My face gives it away. He closes his eyes. “Shit, Sloane.”

“That’s Trace’s problem,” Cary says. “Not ours.”

Rhys gets up abruptly, throws Cary a disgusted look.

“I’m going to find Harrison.”

When Rhys is gone, I just stand there, staring at Cary.

“Grace is dead,” I tell him.

“I can’t bring her back.”

“She was ours and she’s dead.”

He stares at the table.

“She wasn’t mine.”

“But you were with her.”

“Sloane.” He looks at me and the bags under his eyes are pulling his face down. In the right light, I’d swear he was infected. He exhales slowly through his teeth. “Don’t.”

Thoughts of Grace prevent me from sleep.

I doze, thinking of her body in Yee’s room, decomposing. We probably can’t move it from there without something happening, her skin shifting. I don’t know where we’d move it. I just think we need to do something with her.

It doesn’t seem right that there can’t be a burial.

I think about how no one has said anything about her. We haven’t talked about how she was good, that she was nice, that she loved Trace more than anything in the world. These things still matter. She was a good person. She wanted me to stay with her when we got to Rayford. The memory of that fragile possibility of her and me, me being part of the kind of family I always wanted to be part of—I feel the weight of it like it’s still there, even though it’s gone.

I wasted it.