Rhys takes the water back from me.

“You’re sick.” The way he says it, I can’t tell if it’s an insult or a diagnosis. “Maybe you’re concussed. Maybe you have brain damage. But then I think you must have been totally brain damaged before we went out there, so—”

“Rhys—”

“Or maybe,” he continues, “you’re infected. Maybe you’ll be dead in hours and then you’ll come back—”

“Stop it.”

“But you went out there to die, didn’t you? So who cares.”

I turn my face away from him. He’s right. Who cares. Maybe I’m infected. I try to listen to what’s happening inside me. If there’s any part of me that’s dying and becoming something rotten but more purposeful than what I am now.

“You went out there to die, didn’t you.”

I close my eyes.

“Sloane.”

I open them.

“Yes.”

He moves away from me like I am infected, and then he kicks his chair. Hard. It rattles into the wall and I flinch and he whirls around so fast, my hands automatically fly up to my face. Don’t hit me. It’s such a bad thing to do. He knows I think he’d hurt me and his eyes widen and he steps back.

“You let me go out there with you,” he says. “You risked my life—”

“I wasn’t going to let you die—”

“Oh, fuck you, Sloane—”

“I wasn’t! I didn’t—”

“Well, it came just a little too close for my comfort—”

“You wouldn’t let me go! I wanted to go and you wouldn’t let me—”

“If you want to die, do it like a normal person—slit your wrists or something! Jesus!” Too much. I press my fingers into my temples and fight the urge to puke. He grabs pills from the table beside me and holds them out to me. I eye him warily. “It’s Tylenol. Just take it.”

I take the pills, swallow them dry.

“That man out there,” he says. I pick at my blanket. Maybe if I act disinterested enough he’ll stop talking. “He’s dead because of you. Think he wanted to live?”

“It could’ve been me,” I say. “But you wouldn’t go back inside without me.”

“Because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—”

“Why? Why couldn’t you? Have you seen it out there, Rhys? There’s nothing out there anymore, there’s nothing—”

“That’s such bullshit, Sloane! And even if it wasn’t, you don’t get to decide that for me—”

“And you don’t get to decide that for me!”

Stalemate. He knows I’m right. He digs his hands into his pockets and tosses a crumpled piece of paper at me and then he leaves. I open it up. It’s water-stained, the handwriting mostly melted, save for a few words here and there. My suicide note to Lily.

I’m struggling to stay awake when Grace comes in. I don’t want to close my eyes because every time I do I see the man, I see the dead girl, I see Rhys kicking the chair against the wall. But mostly it’s the man, staggering around the parking lot calling out for his friend? Lover? Brother? Father? It cuts through me. Did he want to live? Was he fit to live? Was that my call to make? I have to push what I’ve done all the way to my toes, as far from my head as it can get, otherwise, I’ll never be able to let it go. Murderer. That’s what Grace and Trace call Cary, but it’s not Cary, is it. It’s me. That’s what I’m thinking when I hear Grace’s footsteps and then she’s standing in the door. She makes a concentrated effort not to look directly at me.