But even nothing was something.

“I realized it wasn’t her I’d been looking for,” Nick continued. “It was you.”

Heat rushed up to my cheeks. I had to look away. I still couldn’t handle it.

“I get what you mean about the room with no exit,” he said. “You and me, we’re stuck inside July 11 forever. But I really do have to believe there’s a way for us to get out. And I think we’re finding it.”

“You don’t understand,” I started. “There might not be any real answers to find, because I did all of this. Mr. Bricket didn’t think it was weird when we were in his house because I’m always in his house. I’ve been going to his house, to her room, for years. I wrote the letters. I hid the journal and the map. I put things all over Cadence. I was even the one who put the lock on her nightstand, but I didn’t have the key with me when we went there that night.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“You and me, we feel her in everything we do, right?” I asked. “I felt like the Marley I carried with me wanted me to put this together. She’d told me on the day she died that the Adventure was going to have a different purpose that summer. And after five years, I felt like I knew what it was. I’d spent so much time watching our friends forget her. I mean, think about the day she died. We were all split up. She knew that would keep happening, and she wanted to create a way for us to stay together. That was all the Adventure had ever been in the first place. I don’t think she’d realized until things started to fall apart. She was going to make it official, and she never got the chance. So I did it for her.”

Nick soaked in my every word, nodding along.

“It wasn’t supposed to start the night of the memorial,” I continued. “I wasn’t really ready. That’s why it’s all such a mess. I hadn’t finished planning. But you showed up. And then everyone else saw this so much differently than I did. It was never supposed to be about her wanting to die,” I repeated. “But that might be what it is. All the stuff I used came from real things she had. Like that map. Even the letters were all taken straight from things she wrote about us in her journal. And rereading some of it has made me see what Aidy sees, and I hate that I did this at all. I ruined her.”

So much poured out of me that I was dizzy. The ground was the sky was the ground was Nick, standing in the tar that once filled me whole. A little under half-empty and incapable of deciding if it was good or bad, I took to blaming myself anyway. “It’s turning me back into Little Ollie,” I said. “I don’t want to be her. I’ve spent every day of the last five years making sure I’d never be anything like her again. I thought I’d changed into something new. But the past is catching up to me.”