“I hate you,” I breathed into his chest.
“That’s okay. I hate me, too.”
I peered up at him from the wreckage of my soul and wondered why God chose for us to survive. It didn’t seem fair that we had to be here alone, lost forever in what that night made us.
“I love you,” I said, changing my mind.
“I love you, too. Oh, and Thay told the paramedics to tell you something when you freaked the fuck out.”
I braced, not sure I was ready for Nathem to make this all real.
“He told them to tell you not to pray.”
Beat.
“Because he wasn’t going to heaven or hell.”
Beat.
“He wanted you to know that he was coming home.”
Beat.
I threw my arm over the wound in my chest and closed my eyes, picturing his face, the steadiness in his smile, the way he looked hunched over a sketchpad in the middle of our mattress.
Flutter. Beat.
“I love you, Thay,” I whispered. “I love you forever. I love you for always.”
Beat…
...
This book is for anyone who has ever said
I love you with all my heart.
Epilogue: Window
The sound of Irish rain was not as mythic as I imagined, but even amid the lush green hills, fairy mounds, and saltwater billowing in from the sea, I knew it wasn’t home. Everything here was clean, steeped in something ancient, forever moving inside the brine.
“Where’s Nate?” I asked Milly, his younger sister, who sat at the window staring out at the cliffs. She didn’t love it when I called him by his club name, but he insisted we use it. And after that night took everything from us, he wasn’t about to let them take that, too. “Milly?”
Nathem’s family lived in a stone house pulled straight from a fairy tale, the kind of shit little girls wrote about in their diaries. Everything here was picturesque, and you couldn’t help but wonder how Nathem ended up on a rope in the Underworld.
“He’s in the guesthouse,” she said with a yawn, not all that impressed by me.
I huffed a smile at the strawberry blonde drawing penises on the window and tidied her shoes by the library.
Just one of the many perks of having your soulmate sewn into your chest.
Not only had I developed a knack for organization, but I liked to fight, had a bad temper, doodled everywhere, and always had those root beer candies dusted with flour in my mouth. I had even craved a cigarette once, holding it between my lips, but never fully committing.
Everything hurt without him.
Every single thing.
I pushed open the wooden door to the cobbled path leading to the cottage beside the garden. It was no bigger than my Seattle apartment, but Nathem preferred spaces where his mind could get extra loud. Not a safe idea for either of us.