Challenging each other, being competitive and trying to get the higher score. Getting in actual arguments over it, where we were both pissy the next day. Making up. Dean telling me, as we cuddled, that competitive was hard for him, because his dad expected so much, and he could sense his father’s disappointment when he didn’t do his best. I’d had such a distinct mental picture of Dean’s dad standing in the doorway, because so often when I went over there with Dean, there would be that kind of distance. As if Dean and I being in one of their living rooms watching a show together meant the room was ours and his dad couldn’t or wouldn’t intrude. I’d been so able to imagine the disappointment and distance both.

My mind jumped from that to an image of Amy standing in a doorway in the same way. It—

My heart had already dropped. The warm memory was wiped away and replaced with a chilled, ugly feeling. I tried to reason my way through it, think around it.

It hadn’t been when Dean and I were cuddling, but we’d been together. Another time. Why had I connected that image to Amy? The distance? She hadn’t been disappointed—or, no. Maybe she had, but I hadn’t known it then.

The ugly feeling persisted.

Had I known? Had there been some glimmer of a suspicion?

It wasn’t a rhetorical question or a revelation. Just… a very real question, where both answers were bad in their own way.

The ugly feeling got worse, as I dwelt on it.

I couldn’t cling to that for strength, so long as other memories attached themselves. Both the times she’d been there when I was with Dean and the times she hadn’t been there when I’d been with him were mucked in together, muddled and muddied, shat on by her proximity to them. That he’d had to have known. That she could have saved him and she hadn’t.

I couldn’t. The kernel of love I felt for him was too hard to reach for.

Then—then the other direction. Reaching for that other direction meant getting close, meant walking through a corridor of memories and ignoring the person who kept on peering in through the windows and stood off to the side, punctuating so, so much of my early life.

What wasn’t hers?

In the hospital room, studying like I’d studied the master–stranger protocols. Being the powers geek with the Patrol. Yes. It was an identity I could and had wrapped around myself like a security blanket.

Never hers. Untainted, but for a few intrusions looking in on Dean and I.

I wasn’t moving any faster, walking in line with the others, my jaw set, but I felt like I was.