Pinching the corners of my eyes, I feel the thud of his upper body as he drops to the hardwood floor. Like the final nail in a coffin as those two, meaningless words run through my head on repeat:

“She’s gone.”

I don’t know how Mason manages it, but one second he’s sobbing into the floor, and the next he has the bottle of half-full vodka back in his hand, and he’s whipping it at me.

Someone yanks me to the side just before it smashes against the floor where I was just squatting. Cold liquid splashes my shoes, the sweet-sharp scent of the drink flooding my nose. A siren song to the beast inside me that just wants to take this moment and smother the fucking shit out of it.

Mason still doesn’t scream.

Hardly a sound comes out as he claws at his chest, digs his nails into his neck. He pounds the floor beneath him until he reopens the scabs on his knuckles. A blood offering for whoever or whatever might take pity on him, and carry him away from this life.

I scrub my hands down my face and stand up. Something bites into the meat of my thumb—glass. I flick it away, watching the blood bead.

Voices surround me—loud and angry, but I don’t hear any of it.

Looking down, it takes me a moment to register the way my shirt pulls at the side. It’s then, and only then, that I notice the fingers tangled tightly into the fabric at my back, trying to pull me away. Out, out, out. A warm, grounding force I never asked for. Never wanted.

And I am terrified.

I am angry.

“She’s really fucking gone.”

Ripping away from him, I ignore my name on Will’s breath. I can’t look at him right now or I’m going to break. Break more than I’ve already been broken. I know this, just as I know he knows this, because he doesn’t try to grab me again. He doesn’t hug me or take my hand.

Everything in me wants to run. I want to run until I’m as high as I can get in this town. I want to run until I can’t remember why I’m still here. Until the world’s at my feet, and freedom is no longer just an illusion, and the only threat to myself is me.

Not this grief—this unbearable pain. Not the knowledge that Mason and I might forever be broken by our loss.

Not my dad, and the whispers still resonating in my ears. Reminding me of everything that’s wrong with me. Weak about me.

Not the guy behind me, who makes me want to stop running. Stop hiding. Stop chasing the bottom of a bottle.