The Wicked We Have Done

6

I want to deny that Gordon was lurking around our camp last night. I want to blame what I heard on my lack of sleep, on my wild and frightened imagination. But Casey won’t drop it.

“Someone was there, Ev. We heard him humming. And you can bet your ass that we weren’t imagining the same thing at once.”

Ev. He says it so casually, like we’re longtime buddies. I’m not sure if I’m buying it, but I don’t say anything.

Unfortunately for both of us, we have to tell Tanner, Jace, and Valerie, which causes a bit of an uproar.

“If we don’t leave, that fucker could come back at any time,” Valerie says over breakfast.

“And if we do, who’s to say he won’t simply follow us?” Tanner challenges.

We’ve split two cans of SPAM. I hated SPAM until this morning. Now the fried, overprocessed meat is exactly what my body needs. I find myself licking the last of the fat off of my fingers when I’m finished, listening closely to everyone’s opinion on the situation.

“Tanner’s right.” Casey draws circles in the dirt with a stick. “We can pack up and go somewhere else, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll be any safer than we are here. Hell, it could mean we’re less safe. We have running water.”

“We could find another spot downstream.” Jace hugs her knees and rocks back and forth on the ground. I can tell she wants to bolt, and would be the first to start packing up our things if the decision was made to leave.

“Ev?” Ev again. “You’re the tiebreaker.”

It’s an easy decision for me. “We stay.” I can’t trust that any spot is safer than another, but here, I feel the woven beginnings of a community. “I don’t think he can hurt us. He chased Tanner, but he never got close enough to make an attempt at killing him, am I right?”

Tanner thinks for a moment, and nods.

“If he does, he’s dead. Just like Erity. So let’s leave it at that.”

Valerie grinds her teeth, but says nothing.

I’m left with a lot of time to wonder if they stretched these tests out over a month solely to torture us. Every quake of the branches above, every crunch from the foliage beyond the creek is enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Even with Tanner’s theory that we’re as screwed here as we are meandering in the woods, no one goes more than a hundred feet from the campsite, and that’s just to find a place to pee.

Casey tries to teach Tanner how to build a fire. They construct the teepee out of sticks, and when Casey instructs Tanner to light the tinder, Tanner yelps and drops the lighter, sucking on two of his fingers. Casey huffs and pries Tanner’s hand from his mouth, squinting as he examines the injured digits. “Better be careful. Next time you’ll burn them clean off.”

“Hardy har,” says Tanner.

I laugh. “Log cabin formation’s better.”

Casey raises an eyebrow. “Oh yeah, Miss Fire Expert? Care to show the boys how it’s done?”

I stand, clapping my hands together. “Don’t mind if I do.”

During the downtime, I keep myself occupied by rendering the clay into thick liquid. When the yellow is done, I pick away at the berry patches in the garden, red and purple and blue skins breaking to stain my fingers.

They will be perfect.

Making paint is my way to disconnect. I used to do shit like this when I was a kid, except with the red earth I found near my home. Now, due to the classes I’d taken in college, I have a bit more knowledge of how to create natural paint. I grind coal and boil berry skins until the broth is dark and thick. My palette is a kaleidoscope of reds and pinks and blues and yellows. I carry a wet hunk of coal over to a boulder a little ways outside of camp and sit cross-legged, sketching a black trunk and gnarled arms. Nothing like the trees here, though. This is escapist art.

This is whimsical.

Little fingers tickle my shoulder, sliding to my neck, my hair. They pinch the strands and tug.

“You like it?” I ask Todd.

“It okay.” He tugs harder. “I don’t like my trees I draw at school.”

The little hand claws at my temple, and I lean into his sweaty skin. Memorizing it.

How can this not be real?

“Why don’t you like your trees?”

“They’re too curly. Mom used to say that you’d come home and show me how to draw trees. She said . . . she said you might even let me use your paints.”

I reach up and touch his hand, smearing paint all over his supple skin. I bring him to my lips, kissing his fingers.

“Why’d you have to do it? Why’d you have to leave me?”

I stiffen. “What did Mom tell you, Todd?”

“Why did you have to kill Meghan? Why did you have to blow her brains out?”

This isn’t Todd. This is Compass Room torment. You can’t forget that, Ev. You can’t let your guard down.

A breeze cools the sweat on my neck and I know he’s gone. A shiver seizes me, and I reach forward, smearing a pink leaf on one of my coal branches.

Todd’s visit is almost as exciting as getting my goddamn period. Almost.

I inform Jace and Valerie when we’re squatting around the half-decimated shed, using forks as levers to loosen the nails.

“Damn, that sucks.” Valerie wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. “Luckily I finished the day before the train.” She nods toward Jace, who is picking out the nails on the other side of the shed and paying no attention to us, rubbing at her healing stab wound subconsciously with her free hand. “She’s also supposed to start in a couple days. Think she’s freaking out.”

With her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth, Jace concentrates on wedging the fork just right. Doesn’t seem like she’s freaking out.

“What are we gonna do?”

“Bleed all over yourselves. Wash your clothes when it’s over. Hope it doesn’t stain.”

“Sounds like a terrible idea.” I cross my arms over my chest. “What about your backpack? I didn’t get anything in mine.”

“No tampons, Ma’am.”

“Sexist bastards.”

“No shit. Well, let me know if you figure anything out. I have dinner to make.”

“Thanks,” I mutter, knowing I shouldn’t worry that much. Women have dealt with periods in the woods before, I’m sure. With less than what we have.

I grab a knife from our supplies and sift through the blankets in our tent, finding the thinnest and smallest of our collection. Draping it over a near tree branch, I cut away at the fabric.

“What are you doing?”

Casey, who’s washing a pile of dishes by the stream, gapes at me, horrified.

“Crafting feminine hygiene products, a long-lost artisan technique.”

“But we’re going to need that.”

I don’t know if it’s the cold nights, or PMS, or the fact that he’s breathing over my shoulder again. “Yes, you are quite right, we will be needing it—for vaginas. So please let me get back to my work before I bleed all over you.”

I return to my slicing. After minutes of no interruption, half the blanket is shredded, and I glance back down to the stream to see a vacant bank.

I bathe and redress. Tanner sits by the water, battling a splinter buried deep in his fleshy palm.

There’s a bit of meat grease in our pan from breakfast, so I gather it on the tip of my finger and bring it to him. Sitting down and taking his palm, I rub the fat over the sliver of wood.

“What’s that?”

“SPAM grease,” I say. “The salt will help draw out the splinter.”

He huffs, pushing up his glasses. “I’m useless here.”

I bite my lip to hide my smile. “You shitting me? I’m the splinter doctor. You sit on your merry ass and speculate about how this entire prison works.”

“They say ignorance is bliss.”

“They are a bunch of asshats.”

He grins. “Why can’t all girls be like you?”

“Convicted killers and psychopaths?” I wink at him, and he rolls his eyes.

I make my way back toward camp. Jace and Valerie sit by the fire, deep in conversation. Jace laughs, tracing Valerie’s flowery tattooed elbow with her fingers.

“You guys know where Casey went?”

Jace jerks back her hand, as though she were caught doing something she shouldn’t have been.

Valerie shrugs. “Firewood?”

“We have the shed. It’s enough to last us several days.”

“Maybe nature called. We all have to do our business.”

I shudder. Not having a bathroom has almost been worse than the tentacle dragging me to the bottom of the lake.

Jace points upstream. “I saw him go that way earlier.”

I nod and take off in the direction she suggested. There’s a hint of an overgrown path leading through some younger pine. I swallow my worry and keep searching.

When I come across a clearing, I freeze. My heart thrums so intensely that I can feel it in my throat.

It’s a camp—footprints around a fire pit, the contents burned all the way to ash. It could be days old. This wouldn’t be from anyone in our camp. No one has left long enough to make a fire, and why would they?

I hold my breath and listen—for footsteps, for anything. There’s nothing. Not a breeze, not the sound of birds. Somewhere out in the forest a branch snaps.

The ends of my nerves ignite, screaming for me to run.

Get your ass out of here now.

“Evie.”

I spin toward the sound of Todd’s voice, but he doesn’t speak again. I start to walk, the gush of falling water echoing through the woods. The hill I’m climbing crests. Casey dips his feet in a pool of steaming water—a hot spring, surrounded by smooth rocks on one side and a mossy granite ledge on the other. Water trickles musically.

I cross my arms over my chest to hide my shaking hands. “Holding out on the rest of us?”

“Just found it, actually.” He cocks his head. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I don’t say anything and scramble down the hill. I reach the cusp of the pool and shuffle my feet. The water looks divine, but I can’t help the horrific feeling that if I get in, something is going to slink around my waist and drag me to hell.

“There’s a campfire back there.”

“I saw it. I mean, we knew he was out there.”

“Gordon?”

“Yeah. Nothing we can really do about it now.”

“It could be someone else’s. It could be Stella’s.”

“You’re right, it could be Stella’s.”

I don’t really have a way to respond. I could say something along the lines of, Well, what should we do about it? But there really isn’t anything we can do about it. We can wait. We can guard our shit. We can hope he’s dead by now.

I want Casey to say something, something that will dull the sharp, awkward air between us. He’s mad at me, maybe because of the blanket, maybe because of something else. And the only things I can think to talk about are death and the weather.

“Well, I . . . uhh . . . hope you have a nice soak by yourself. I will see you back at camp, I guess.”

As I speak, his eyes shift to something directly behind me. As dead as his expression was before, he is alert, scooting from the pool and strapping on his boots in a matter of seconds, jumping to his feet.

He says my name.

“What?”

“Walk straight past me. Keep going and you’ll hit the stream. Follow it to camp and don’t you dare turn around.”

A shiver crawls from the base of my spine to my skull. He knows I won’t. He knows exactly what I’m thinking.

“Don’t.” He isn’t threatening. He’s terrified.

I look over my shoulder.

I see absolutely nothing at first. I wonder if he’s fucking with me—he has to be fucking with me, because there’s nothing behind me but a grove of saplings. But then I squint. Beyond, propped up against the trunk of a fir, is a shovel.

I gape at that damn shovel, trying to figure out why Casey’s so scared. And then it clicks.

My desk.

His shovel.

He buried his father.

Casey’s about to have his test.

“It could be nothing,” I try to convince him, but my voice is shaking. “Maybe they’re rewarding us. Shovels are useful.”

“Go. Back. Evalyn.”

I turn to him, attempting to keep a straight face even though Casey’s test means that every passing second could bring me closer to watching him die.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Follow you back to camp.”

“Promise?”

“Go.”

His footsteps crunch behind me. Mist filters down through the branches, doing its damnedest to block out the sun. My legs burn as I try to walk as fast as I can without breaking into a run.

I’m losing it. I’m losing my mind.

A gravelly voice echoes through the woods.

“Turned out just like me, haven’t you?”

I stall.

“Evalyn, run,” Casey commands.

Not without him. I’m not going to leave without him.

With a hint of a Southern drawl, the voice says, “Put me in the ground, but I can still fuck with your head. I can still break you.”

I turn enough to catch a glimpse of the figure emerging from the trees. Then my eyes connect with Casey’s. Amid the panic I find within them, there’s also determination.

“I’m not leaving you.” I extend my hand.

He takes it, and we run down the slippery path. My pulse pounds in my ears. I hear every nervous gasp escaping Casey’s lips as if it were the only sound in the air. The brush thickens until the path before us is nearly impenetrable. He leads me to the right and down a hill.

I take in the moist air and force my legs to work faster until they’re burning up, burning into nothing.

Already tangled in the anorexic arms of foliage, there’s even more stopping us. A stone wall, maybe ten feet wide. I can’t tell if we can get around it, not with the thicket on either side of us.

The man stands on top of the hill we raced down, a shovel in his hand. In his fifties, maybe. Unshaven jaw and salt-and-pepper hair. Work boots and jeans and a navy button-down shirt. The shovel by the hot springs—he carries it in his hands.

“Your dad.”

“I can hoist you over. You’d only have to worry about the drop down.” He clasps his hands together and rests them on his knees, expression mechanical.

He’s giving in to death. Like me.

“I’m not leaving you alone.” The man swaggers down the hill, dragging that rusty old shovel alongside him.

Clunk, clunk, clunk.

He looks like Casey. Older. Less meat on his bones. So sallow he balances on the edge of translucent. Like he’s climbed from the grave Casey dug him.

“What do you want?” Casey mutters. Quietly. The tearing of tissue paper in the middle of a storm.

“To bring you to hell with me.”

Casey shoves me.

Pain rips through my scalp as branches grasp my hair. I land on my ass in the mess of dead underbrush, twigs clawing at me. I try to bounce back up, try to grab on to anything, but the earth won’t release me.

Gnarled branches stretch and curl over my lap, creating a restraint that pins me down.

Casey gapes at me, horrified by what’s happening. He isn’t paying attention to the demon of a man who raises the shovel.

I shriek Casey’s name. The shovel lands across his shoulders.

He falls to his knees, and his father swings, metal head connecting with Casey’s back.

Casey crumples to the ground.

“You little fucker. Never appreciated me.”

Casey rolls over as the shovel drops a third time, slamming into his torso. He relaxes, head rolling toward me.

He’s giving up.

He can’t give up.

“Fight!” I scream.

Vines squeeze my waist, holding me down. The knife. The one I used to cut up the blanket. It’s in my sweatshirt pocket.

I squirm until I can reach it, digging into my clothes and wiggling it free. I saw through the vine as fast as I can until tufts of foam distract me.

The drum of metal on bone fills the air. Tears streak through the dirt on Casey’s cheeks.

Beneath the foam hides a skeleton of wires. Delicate—fibrous. The moment I slice through the twisted thread of them, the vine loosens, and I’m free.

“Never respected the roof over your head. Everything I provided. Just wanted more until nothing was enough, ain’t that right?”

I untangle myself, foliage scraping my cheeks as I crawl out of the brush. Casey’s father takes a step to his left, his back to me, boots dangerously close to Casey’s neck.

“Spent too much of my time trying to protect that neck of yours. Shoulda brought you out back and shot you like a bad dog when I had the chance.”

He raises the shovel, this time, aiming for Casey’s head. Aiming to crush.

“Better late than never.”

I don’t think. Or maybe I think to decide that I don’t care. I charge, sinking the knife into Casey’s father’s back.

He drops his shovel, but he doesn’t turn into smoke, or wail and sink back into the ground. I don’t slice through him as if he were a projection. An illusion. I drive that knife right through real muscle—through meat—wedging the blade between two ribs.

Warm blood seeps out from around the handle.

He arches his back and drops to his knees. The bastard tries to pick up the shovel, like he isn’t registering that he’s been incapacitated. I snatch the shovel up before he can do so. Casey’s father is dead, and this—this situation—is impossible.

I allow that logic to drive me.

Splinters from the handle embed into my flesh as I swing with all my might. The shovel ricochets off Casey’s father’s skull and he falls forward, face sinking into the mud. The knife juts from his back.

As soon as I’m still, Casey rolls over, lifting himself up onto shaking arms, and crawls to his father. The handle of the knife rises and falls with every breath. Up and down. Up and down. I set my own in sync with Casey’s dad’s. In and out. Up and down.

Casey balances himself on his knees and grasps the handle of the knife with both hands, yanking it out. He lets it fall, this time in a different place. His right kidney.

Again, his lower spine.

His neck.

His shoulder blade.

Casey hacks and hacks, blood splattering across his face and clothes as he rips the knife away. He doesn’t stop, not when his dad has to be dead—again—his back nothing more than ripped denim and mangled pockets of swelling blood.

I kneel, grasping on to Casey’s spattered arm. I say his name over and over, prying his fingers away until the knife drops onto the red-coated earth.

We are statues around the corpse.

What have I done?

I’ve cycled, that’s what. I’ve killed to protect. But that doesn’t make it right. I’ve proven that I’m willing to murder again.

They’re going to kill me now. Any moment. I can feel my own heart thrum violently. It knows that this is its last chance to make noise.

I will simply stop existing.

My breath rattles through the air. Nothing happens.

Casey takes his hand back, crawls into the brush I was tangled in, and throws up. His back arches like an animal as he spits bile from his mouth.

“You made it worse. He was going to kill me. It was going to be over. Now I have to sit here and wait to die.”

“You don’t know that.”

He chuckles darkly and sits. “After what I just did, you really think they are going to let me live? I proved them right. I’d kill him again if I had the chance.” His head falls back. “Are you listening? You can finish me off now!”

I flinch as his voice echoes through the woods.

“I helped. At least you don’t have to wait to die all alone.”

His expression breaks in defeat. “Why—why would you do that?”

I open my mouth, but I can’t find a way to explain that watching his father beat him was worse than watching what happened to Erity.

“You’re alive. He isn’t. If they decide to kill you, then fine, but it won’t be because I sat back and did nothing.”

“That’s a stupid answer.”

I rest my palm on his chest. He hisses at the pressure.

“You lost your mind,” I say.

His eyes drift to the mangled corpse. “He does that to me.”

Guiding Casey up the hill almost takes more effort than I have. His head is somewhere else. He doesn’t speak. I keep my fingers entwined with his as I yank him out of the valley. He stops on occasion, shoulders slumping. I give his arm an extra hard tug and promise, “Just a little farther.”

“I shouldn’t.” He uses little effort to yank me back, keeping us at a standstill. “Why waste the time? I should stay here and wait for something to finish me off. I shouldn’t subject everyone at camp to this.”

“I didn’t save your ass to let you do that.”

“I never asked you to save me,” he snaps, eyes a little less vacant than they were moments before.

This feels familiar.

“Shut up and keep walking,” I order, but the threat is humorous with the way my voice trembles. I don’t know why I’m panicking. Maybe because after everything I’ve done, he still doesn’t care enough to keep living.

It’s like he doesn’t think he has a reason to.

It feels like hours have passed as we retrace our way back to the hot spring. I wade in first, the water cool enough to not scald me.

Casey wades in, wincing when he submerges. He’s so pale. I tug on the bottom of his shirt and work it over his head, doing my best to hide my horror as I take in the mottled bruises already forming.

He sinks to his knees. I soak his white T-shirt, the red turning pink, and wipe the caked blood from his face, his hair, his temples.

“I deserve hell,” he says.

I slide the shirt over the bruises on his collarbone, over the old scars spidering across his chest, down his arms. Scars from torture.

I trace them. “No. He deserves hell. He deserves to die over and over.”

“Stop, Evalyn.”

“He did this to you, didn’t he?”

“Don’t feel sorry for me.”

Casey’s hatred of violence for the sake of violence suddenly makes a hell of a lot more sense. It’s not because of a deeply embedded complex. It’s because he experienced such irrational, unneeded violence all throughout his childhood. Until he did something about it.

“They’re going to kill me. It’s what has to happen now.” He shakes his head. “I only wanted to protect my mom. His end was the only way. He has to stay dead, and so do I.”

Casey needs order and control and for things to exist only with meaning. He is the antithesis of chaos. He is the opposite of everything that destroyed my life.

I dip my head toward him, my lips brushing his jaw. Maybe I do feel sorry for him, but it’s more than that.

He inhales through his nose, and I break away. “Tell me to stop again.”

He doesn’t. He leans forward and kisses me hungrily. I capture his bottom lip and drag my teeth slowly across, releasing his mouth and lowering my head to his neck. I lick his bruises.

“You only pity me.”

I cup his jaw in my hands. “You know what I felt when I ran that knife through his back, Casey? Relief. Is that what you felt when you buried him?”

I brush away the tear that trickles down his cheek with the pad of my thumb.

“I know that feeling all too well. If it damns you, then it will damn me too. So do me a favor and trust that this isn’t because I pity you.”

I kiss his steam-slick jaw and he clutches my shoulder blades, sobbing into the crook of my neck.

We are still here. He is warm and alive and holding me for dear life.

We are still here.

No one has noticed our absence by the time we return to camp. There are no questions as to why our shirts are pink, why there are scratches on my face and arms, why Casey walks with a limp.

Everyone is obsessed with a much bigger problem.

Stella’s found us.

And she’s more fucked up than Casey.

The Social Worker Was Skittish.

Talking to Brenda was unnatural, not that jail therapy could ever be natural.

We sat in a visiting room. My hands were bound on the table.

Brenda pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and clasped her hands in front of her. I had known this woman for less than twenty minutes and had already counted this gesture seven times. She hunched forward a bit, as if that would help her see the threadwork of my soul a bit easier.

I leaned back in my seat, like the few extra inches of separation from this woman meant anything.

Although Brenda appeared intrigued by me, I couldn’t ignore the hint of fear I saw behind those hideous wire-framed glasses. Was she cautious of every woman she serviced in this prison, or just the ones as evil as me?

The questions she asked me were very cookie-cutter, like she recycled them over and over with every prisoner that she visited, tweaking them slightly to fit the crime or punishment of her current patient.

“How do you think prison has challenged you?”

Now this question—I’m sure this one stayed the same for everyone. It was a question that she could use to gauge whether a patient took her seriously. A guarded answer would consist of the food or no longer being able to shit in private. But a more emotional response—that would be something that Brenda could sink her fingers into.

“I don’t want to talk about prison.” Prison was a fraction of my torment, and I would be leaving soon anyway. I would be facing death. Wasn’t that more important?

“Then what would you like to talk about?”

Another standard response, one to make me feel as though I was still in control.

“The Compass Room.”

The muscles twitched in her face—a clue that told me how the Compass Room wasn’t where she wanted the conversation to head. But she was a prison therapist. Surely she had talked herself through much worse.

“All right. All right, Evalyn. How do you think the Compass Room will challenge you? Do you think it will force you to struggle with the truth of your past—with all the hidden secrets that weren’t brought to the surface during your trial?”

I smelled Meghan’s blood.

“I think that all of us—every criminal put in the Compass Room—confronts their guilt. The very last moment they could have reversed their actions. Could have said no to inflicting pain.”

“Hmm.” Brenda pushed up her glasses. “I think you’re right.”

“Then they have the choice of being a villain, or a coward, or a hero. Two of those choices are irredeemable.” I was rambling, but it felt good. I had stayed quiet for so long. So shell-shocked. But the presence of trauma was waning, even with my CR sentence nearing. I was gaining a voice.

“Which one are you, Evalyn?” She blinked, her eyes magnified.

“Me?” It was an easy question, the kind of question I wanted to answer. The kind of question I wished a lawyer had asked me during the trial, because my response felt so pure and achingly honest. So inarguable.

“I’m a coward.”

Being a coward wasn’t something I could solely reflect on. I lived my cowardice every day, even on the day that I confessed this to Brenda, because right after our meeting, an electronic form illuminated the wall of my cell requesting my compliance.

Liam wanted to come visit me.

I stalled to accept. No, I didn’t just stall. I allowed the form to glow upon the cold wall all night as I stared until I couldn’t blink, until my sockets had dried out so much I thought that I might go blind.

But then I remembered—there was no stalling for me anymore. Stalling only led to suffering.

The glass separating us created enough tangible severance for me to pretend that he wasn’t really there. The boy in front of me was only a hologram of Liam, an illusion to punish me more. I sat down and picked up the bulbous, wiry phone—something from the century before, albeit necessarily so. Anything more modern, one of us surely would steal.

He looked different—yet there was nothing about him that I could place as out of the ordinary. Still sandy-haired and blue-eyed and thin. Still beautiful with the little crescent scar on his chin. But it was as if my memory somehow skewed him, even though I’d seen him a few months before, at the trial.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Evalyn.”

His voice was how I remembered.

“What?”

He pressed his fingertips to the glass. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

“Liam . . .” The way his name rolled off my tongue brought back five years of breathing it in between kisses. The grief resting in those memories took on a life of its own, occupying me until I could do nothing but stare at him in horror.

I’d been his for a quarter of our lives. And he’d abandoned me.

“Hear me out. It was selfish of me to never come see you, after everything you’d gone through. I didn’t know what do to.”

“Liam.”

“I know you’re not guilty, Evie.” His fingers tensed, as though he was trying to dig through the glass. “God, I knew that during the trial. I was scared.”

“Stop.”

“I’ll never forgive myself. I need you. . . .”

“Stop!” I yelled. Other conversations ceased. Guards lurched forward. “I’m sorry,” I cried. One guard eyed me hatefully as I promised it wouldn’t happen again. He let me stay, but not without hovering over me for the rest of our conversation.

Liam slouched in his chair and buried his face in his free hand.

“Have you not been paying attention to the news? I’ve already received my sentence.”

“It’s only a month long. Only a month and you’ll be free—from your crime, from prison—all of this.” He was delusional.

A shudder rippled through me. There was nothing left I could do. I had nothing left to fight with.

“Oh, Liam.”

I wanted to tell him that I was going to die without him. I wanted to make him suffer with that thought for the rest of his life. But I couldn’t, because I still loved him.

He gritted his teeth, shoulders shaking with a sob that echoed through the receiver. “This isn’t fair.”

Waves of images flooded me, oversaturated images of us. “I never wanted this.”

“I know. I’m so sorry.”

I tried my damnedest to memorize his face, promising myself to hold on to this, for as long as I would last within the Compass Room.

Blinking, tears shot down my cheeks. I licked my cracked lower lip, tasting salt.

“Good-bye, Liam.”