“No.”

“But you wrote our letters?” Aidy asked.

“I typed them.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. But I’ve said all there is to say.” I was being frustrating. But it was the truth, in all its imperfect glory.

“When you’re stuck in a room with no exit…” Nick started.

Harrison did a three-sixty. “What do you mean? The door’s right there.”

Aidy, Nick, and I exchanged knowing glances, a substitute for the smiles we would’ve shared if the mood was lighter. I always knew we’d be forever stuck in the room of Marley’s death, but it was a surprise to find new ways of surviving it, like the three of us landing on the same side of something. The moment flickered by, folding back into the shadows as quickly as it came.

There was so much to see, even in places I’d searched through for years and years.

Marley’s journal gave us no out. No matter how much he wanted to, Nick could not break down a wall with the weight of the words she wrote.

Marley had left it up to us to decide. Did she know the gun was loaded? Why wouldn’t she tell us she was hurting? Why would she ruin Nick’s life by asking him to do what she couldn’t? They were ugly thoughts. The ugliest of Marleys lived inside them. They were the reason the room had no exit. Uncertainty was a trap we could not work around.

I neared a full panic, clutching my knees tight, trying to find my breath before I lost it again. If I wanted to know everything, I had to deal with what it took.

Ruby placed her hand on my knee. “I have an idea,” she said, redirecting my focus. “If this is all we have, and it’s not enough to know for sure, we have to make our own kind of peace with it.” She gently shook the journal out of my balled fists. “I could look at all of this for hours and come up with a million points for either column, but in these past few days alone, I’ve barely eaten. I haven’t slept. I’m so sick over this every second I’m awake.” She started neatening the pile of hidden objects. “We should hold our own memorial.”

Ruby streamlined the thoughts clanging into me. Cadence did not know how to remember our Marley, because Cadence didn’t know our Marley. Cadence’s Marley was yet another of her infinite iterations, and we’d been memorializing that version for five years. She was dead and gone. Buried under our constant attention to her foam-board stare.