Chapter 1

Once she found out I wouldn't live past twenty-five, the childhood sweetheart who used to fight me over everything changed.

She stopped competing to be first, stopped bickering with me. Even when I called her a shrew the way I always had, she just took it, her eyes rimmed red.

She watched sunrises with me, took me to see the aurora, filled the whole sky with floating lanterns for me, and in front of everyone she said, eyes wet:

"Even if he doesn't have long, he's still the only husband Lottie Barnes will ever have."

But the year I turned twenty-two, a bright, tall young man appeared at her side.

They rode roller coasters together, ate late-night dinners out together, laughed together riding through downpours...

Everything she and I could never do, they did.

Lottie promised me she'd send him away in three months.

She knelt at my feet. "He and I only have three months. But you and I still have three years."

On my birthday, the night Lottie was supposed to cut the cake with me, she never came home.

I stood at the window and watched her and that young man hold each other again and again under the streetlight, pulling apart only to cling back together,

and finally kiss in the rain like they could never be separated.

The clock struck midnight. The three-month deadline came and went.

I finally decided I would stop waiting for Lottie to turn back into the girl who used to cry, afraid I would leave.

...

I pulled my gaze back from the bay window, and the moment I turned, I saw Lottie stepping in from the entryway, changing out of her shoes.

The air carried a faint scent of cedar.

That was the smell that clung to Steve Matthews.

She saw me standing by the window and paused. "Why aren't the lights on?"

I didn't answer.

"Steve's landlord came pounding on his door drunk tonight. He was terrified and called me, so I went over to help him sort it out."

The light fell across my pale face. I gave a thin twist of my mouth.

"You don't have to explain so much to me."

She visibly froze.

Before, anything involving Steve Matthews used to set me bristling, and even in silence those prickles were enough to leave her restless and rattled.

But now I was calm, too worn out to stir up even a ripple.

Lottie seemed unused to that calm.

She stepped toward me without thinking, her hand lifting to touch my hair.

"If I don't explain, you'll just bottle it up alone and torture yourself."

"You're the person I've always wanted to keep going with. I care how you feel, so how could I not explain?"

I turned my head away on instinct, and her hand stopped in midair.

"Steve has no one in this city, no one to lean on. Something like this happens and of course he panics."

"...I've already started processing his resignation."

Lottie drew her hand back, her tone softening a little.

"But he doesn't really know anyone in Riverton, and the thing with the landlord has to be settled before he can go, or I won't feel easy about it."

She looked at me and added, "Give it a few more days, okay?"

I stared at the trace of unfaded urgency in her eyes, my face blank.

"Fine."

The tension in Lottie's shoulders visibly eased, and she pulled out a delicate velvet box.

"Happy twenty-second birthday. I had this watch custom-made this year."

She bent to fasten it on my wrist. "It looks good. It suits you."

She probably hadn't noticed that the little star shape was identical to a watch Steve Matthews had once posted on his social media feed.

Lottie turned and went into the bathroom. I lifted my hand, took the watch off, and slid the ring off my left ring finger while I was at it, the one I'd worn for four years.

Lottie had gone all the way to Europe to have it custom-made for me the year she turned eighteen.

She'd said, "Russ Simmons, you're the only husband I'll ever have in this life."

At four in the morning, a snatch of Steve Matthews's voice, thick with tears, leaked out.

"...I dreamed the landlord came knocking again. I'm so scared..."

Without the slightest hesitation, Lottie got up, walked out to the balcony, and soothed him gently.

"Don't be scared. I'm here. Dreams aren't real..."

I lay in the dark, my bones aching too much to close my eyes.

In my ears was that gentle voice that had once belonged only to me, coaxing me to take my medicine, coaxing me not to cry, coaxing me that the sun would rise again tomorrow just the same.

Now, every word of it was landing on someone else, cutting straight into my heart that was already ruined through and through.

After dawn, I started clearing out the room.

The photos on the wall came down one by one and went into a drawer.

One was from the year we were fifteen, the first time she took my hand, my face so red I didn't dare look up.

She'd written something on the back:

【The hand I took at fifteen, I won't let go of it until I die.】

But after Steve Matthews appeared, she never took my hand again.