“I didn’t even mean to be at the memorial,” he said. “Every year, I wake up with the sound of the gun in my ears.” He broke his endless stare to look at me, giving a you know with a raise of his eyebrows. “When it happens, it’s like I’m wearing headphones with the volume turned all the way up. There’s nothing else to hear. And then the sound becomes the feeling, and it’s like I’m falling over, like I did when it fired, even though I’m only lying in my bed. That’s when I get up and start moving.”

In all my playbacks of the day she died, the moment belonged to Marley. As soon as the trigger was pulled, I saw no one other than her. I didn’t even know Nick had fallen over.

Each word he spoke became a line drawn between stars, completing a constellation I hadn’t noticed before.

“I walk for hours,” he continued. “I go until my entire body can’t feel anything anymore. I practically fall asleep standing up, that’s how tired I try to make myself. This year was different, though. She started showing up in all those ways I told you, but there was more to it. I don’t know. The morning of the eleventh came, and the gun fired in my mind like it always does. When I opened my eyes, I felt as if she were behind me somehow, sitting me up. Pushing me out the door. As soon I started my walk, it felt like she was everywhere, and I couldn’t catch her. I always avoid City Hall, because I know no one wants to see me at the memorial, but I was so caught up in trying to find her again that I ended up right in front of the building.”

A soft breeze blew his hair across his forehead. I pushed it back into place for him.

“And there you were, getting out of the car,” he said. He clutched a handful that wanted to fly away again. “So then I was walking in, and in my head I was asking myself, What are you doing? But I couldn’t stop, because I knew you would never think I was making this up.”

When Marley died, our lives to that point got put on permanent pause. It was up to Nick and me to figure out a new way to animate. We were not lucky to just be kids. We were cursed with big imaginations and open hearts. We felt everything. And then we felt nothing.

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.