She’d taken off from work, so she’d been around for the past couple of days. I appreciated the effort; I just didn’t want to talk to her. Not now. Not like this.

Not with Kori out of my life. Not with Mom having gotten her wish.

If it weren’t for picking up Baby Charmmy, I probably wouldn’t have ever gone back to school. But now that I was up, I just wanted to go through the motions. It was all I could handle.

Walking through the school halls was surreal. It was as if I awoke to find the sun had dropped away, leaving the Earth to revolve in a different direction. I didn’t quite know where to put my feet as I tried to walk along its surface. It took my complete attention to simply not trip on myself.

Since I’d stayed home the past couple of days, I’d missed a lot of the crying and emotion. Cole told me it’d been brutal, but she was holding up. She had to, for Lexi. She didn’t say that, but I knew. It was how she was. Lexi’s tears had stopped, though. Now all she talked about was the future.

Her chest should have been so heavy with ache she couldn’t even pull in enough air to speak. But all she did was talk, talk, talk.

Her sudden passion for learning French and going to Paris and getting a boyfriend and trying out for the next school play and maybe learning to snowmobile grated on my nerves.

I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t even see a future. The world in front of my eyes was as hollow and dark as it was behind them.

The only future I could think about was the one with Kori. “I’m just waiting for you, kitten.” I heard her voice replaying in my head for the thousandth time. And every time I heard it, I thought, They can’t keep us apart. Whatever lengths it takes.

And I meant it, even knowing there was only one way to accomplish it and that I didn’t have the guts to do it.

An image of Kori trapped in a coffin flashed behind my eyelids, when I saw Charmmy secured in a Ziploc bag on the counter in the school’s office.

The delusional idea that Baby Charms was suffocating tore my senses apart. Yellow and blue make green, keeps Mrs. K.’s life safe and clean. I yanked the seam open and pulled Charms free from the plastic.