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He knows nothing but pain.

Panicked hazel eyes.

And the desperate, all-consuming urge to make sure she knows he is desperately, all-consumingly in love with her.

Numbly staring at the tiled floor, I turn a wooden figurine over in my hand, again, and again, and again.

My legs ache from standing in the same position for so long, the wall behind me hard and unforgiving against my spine, but I don’t move.

I don’t dare. I stand and I stare and I count the rotations in my head, and I try to ignore the gentle hum of conversation coming from the waiting room around the corner, only partially within my line of sight. The same as I’ve been doing for…

I have no idea. I have no idea how long I’ve been here. Long enough for the sun to come up, streaming in through the window at the end of the hall. Long enough for the waiting room to fill with familiar faces.

Not long enough for the phantom burn of cold metal against my forehead to recede.

Nor the sting of a abused skin. Not for the memory of warm, viscous liquid gushing between my fingers to fade either, but I’m okay with that.

Just like I’m okay with no one approaching me, with no one looking at me, with being alone.

I deserve it.

My fist tightens around my wooden four-leaf clover. I hold it against my chest, chin dropping so my lips brush my knuckles, my fatigue-stung eyes drifting shut.

A millisecond later, they fly open again. Heart thundering, I tilt my head back so I can stare into the shockingly bright ceiling lights in the hopes they’ll scorch the images playing on repeat behind my eyelids, erase them from my brain.

They don’t. No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop seeing it.

Him.

Finn pressing a hand to his chest, frowning when his fingertips come away tainted red. Finn dropping to the ground, blood pouring from a bullet wound and pooling on the grass. Finn in the back of an ambulance, an inch away from me, but I wasn’t allowed to touch him, I couldn’t do anything.

I couldn’t do anything, and I’d already done enough.

It’s karma, I think, how I remember those horrible images so clearly yet everything after is such a blur.

The ride here, refusing to let an EMT treat my wounds, being grateful when they draped a blanket around my shoulders because it meant that I could hide my injuries from the hospital staff who greeted us on arrival, all of it is hazy.

Fogged by a fine layer of disbelief, like none of it was real, like it wasn't actually happening to me.

Later, when I have my wits about me a little more, I’ll recall a nurse ushering me to the waiting room, telling me to sit, and staying on my feet instead.

I’ll remember numbly wiping my stinging hands, soaked in the blood of another, on the tank top already stained with my own blood, and fumbling for my phone and hitting the speed dial.

I don’t think I’ll ever remember what I said to my sister—I’m not sure I actually said anything beyond the name of the hospital—but I do remember her flying through the emergency room doors.

The relief… I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.

My hands are clean now, the injured one wrapped since I couldn’t hide that burn, and I changed my shirt, but Lux is still here.

Eliza too. Jackson came and went hours, minutes, who knows how long ago, and I think he tried to talk to me.

I think he sat with our sisters for a little while, held their hands the way they hold each others now, helped soothe the pain I caused.

I close my eyes again before realizing my mistake.

When they re-open, though, it quickly becomes clear I should’ve just sucked it up and suffered through the assailment of memories.

A couple rushes into the waiting room. Before they even make a beeline for Lux, I know who they are. The woman, tall and fit and distraught, looks exactly like her son. The man doesn’t have the same lean build, he’s stockier and shorter, but there’s no mistaking the resemblance there either.

Finn’s mother embraces my older sister with the kind of familiarity that makes me wince.

Warm and comforting and emotional, tears in both of their eyes while mine are dry as a bone because I haven’t cried, not once.

I didn’t cry out when I realized what had happened, I didn’t weep over his body like the main character in a movie, because there’s something so very wrong with me.

That’s just how fucked up I am. I can’t summon a single tear for the man cut open on an operating table or rotting in a fucking morgue for all I know, who took a goddam bullet for me, because of me, who—

The mirror image of the obsidian eyes I know so well flick in my direction, and I take my first step in hours, almost tripping over my own feet in my rush to move out of sight around the corner.

Like a pathetic coward, I hide from the approaching footfalls, willing my legs to work and take me away .

But they won’t. They can’t.

And it’s a small, sad miracle that the person that rounds the corner is someone I can just about stand the sight of.

“How ya doing, kid?”

I don’t respond. What am I going to say? Just fine, thanks?

As Lux rests against the wall, her shoulder brushes mine. My uninjured one, yet I still flinch as it burns from the simple, brief contact. I itch at nothing, frowning at my hand, and that’s when I spot the flecks of dried blood stubbornly clinging to the underside of my nails.

Curling it into a fist, I drop my hand.

My sister tries again. “Can I get you something?”

A drink. A meeting. Self-control.

Finn.

“Jackson found Ruin,” Lux murmurs, slow and quiet and cautious like I’m the horse she speaks of, like I might bolt or bite or worse. “He made his way to the A-frame. Calmed right down, he said.”

Good. That’s good. One less thing for my mind to fixate on.

More room for me to spiral about something else.

“Shut up,” I rasp.

Lux jerks. “What?”

“That’s the last real thing I said to him. He told me he loved me, and I told him to shut up. And now he might be—” A dry sob scratches my throat and I cover my mouth. “I didn’t say it back.”

A quiet, trembling voice says my name, fingers graze my arm and I jolt, side-stepping the attempted comfort, shaking my head frantically.

“Let’s go sit down for a bit, okay? You should get something to eat.”

“No.”

“Lottie—”

“I can’t . This is all my fault.”

“It’s not,” Lux gently protests, but she’s lying. She was there when I told the sheriff everything. She knows as well as I do that it all comes back to me.

“If he’s okay—”

“ When he’s okay,” Lux corrects firmly.

“—he’s not gonna love me anymore. I got him shot. I did this .”

Lux mouths my name and reaches for me again.

I bat her away harder than necessary, stepping away again too, almost barrelling someone over in my desperation.

I whip around, not to apologize, but to snap, to let loose on whatever poor bastard happened to stumble into my path, to ease a little of the maelstrom making my bones ache.

I take one look at Silas, and my anger dries up.

When I rasp, “What the hell are you doing here?” it isn’t sharp. It’s panicked, dulled by a different vein of the guilt that’s been plaguing me for hours. Cloying failure coats my tongue as I drop my gaze to the floor, fearing he might see my cravings reflected in it.

A pointless fear—of course, he knows. That’s why he’s here.

“You tricked me into being your sponsor,” he grunts. “And now you’re mad when I actually be your sponsor. Typical.”

I don’t say anything. I just stare at the ratty old slippers on his feet that, under any other circumstances, I’d mock.

Right now though, they make me want to cry.

Especially when one of them nudges the tip of my mud-and-blood-stained boots, as uncharacteristically gentle as the voice that mutters, “Let’s go. ”

“I don’t wanna go anywhere.”

He has a cane, I suddenly realize. I didn’t know he used one, I’ve never seen it before, but I briefly become intimately acquainted with the wooden aid when it thwacks me on the shin. “Did I ask?”

No. He didn’t. And he doesn’t as he turns on his heel and starts shuffling down the hall, his cane tapping the floor in a slow, steady rhythm.

And for some reason, my feet choose this moment to work.

As Silas pushes through a set of double doors and flips his cane, using the hooked end to drag me in after him, I frown. “I’m not religious.”

“Me neither.” He drops onto a pew, huffing as he tries and fails to get comfortable on the unforgiving wooden seat. “But I don’t sit on hospital floors, little one.”

“You could’ve sat in the waiting room.”

“There are people there.”

Something akin to a laugh escapes me. Wood creaks as I take a seat too, feet propped on the back of the pew in front of me, hands curled around my knee caps.

Three hands. Both of mine, and another resting on top of one, pale against my tan.

“Right,” Silas grunts roughly, shifting in that ever-failing quest for comfort, slouching as if he’s settling in for a long night. “Spill it.”

“What?”

“Anything. Everything. Get it all out.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed to scream in a church.”

“I don’t think this is really a church.”

“I’m sure it counts.”

“Well, I hear the good Lord is real forgiving.”

“I think I used up all my forgiveness.”

Silas sighs. Shifts an inch closer. Promises, “He’ll be okay.”

Another knot adds itself to the ever-growing tangle of them sitting heavy in my gut. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“You can’t.”

“I can. I’m old. That makes me wise.”

“Yeah, you’re a regular oracle.”

Patting my hand, he repeats his useless assurance.

I shake my head. He wasn’t there. He didn’t see him. He can’t still feel blood rushing from a gaping wound, he can’t still see the literal life fade from a face, he—

Surprisingly strong fingers tighten around mine. “Enough, girl. God himself would have to haul his ass down here and drag that man away from you.”

My eyes burn, so I close them. “I don’t think you’re supposed to talk about God’s ass.”

“I’m old,” Silas repeats. “Not worth smiting.”

“Can you move over, just in case? I don’t wanna get second-hand smited.”

“ Smote .”

“Really?”

He nods. “Hm.”

“Wow. You are wise.”

Silas huffs a laugh, a small smile quirking his thin lips, and I find myself smiling back until I realize what I’m doing. Until I realize that I’m smiling, joking, fucking around, while my boyfriend…

I press hand to the base of my throat, wishing my fingers could sink beneath my skin and pluck out the lump making it so very hard to breathe.

“Talk,” Silas requests again—commands, really.

For once, “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Finn?”

He hums.

“You know him. You met him.”

“Tell me what I don’t know.”

I don’t want to. I’m scared to. I’m not sure I deserve to, but Silas is staring at me in that insistent, inarguable way and there’s nothing else to do, and maybe if I think about Finn in the lovely way he lives in my mind, I’ll stop thinking about the very real possibility of him only living there.

Tears clog my throat, but words struggle their way out around them. I recite every little thing I can think of. Random things. Things that mean nothing to Silas, but are lodged so steadfastly in my brain.

Like how he loves Australian reality shows and shits on their American counterparts.

How he lets me help make dinner except I’m not actually helping, he just gives me some inane task to make me happy and then he does all the work.

How Wordle isn’t a competition, but he lets me win anyway, he pretends he doesn’t know or he gets it wrong on purpose because he likes how I smile when I get it first, how I snicker and jeer and poke him triumphantly.

He likes teasing me until I’m angry, he likes me angry, and he’s the first person, the only person in the entire world who does.

There’s only one saddle in the entire barn that he’ll use because he claims it’s molded to the shape of his ass.

He spins his tools twice before he uses them, every single one, every single time.

He always carries sugar cubes in his pockets now, and he always offers me one.

When I run out of breath or words or both, I repeat them all in my head. Again and again and again as I sit quietly, as Silas lets me sit quietly, as he holds my hand.

And despite my earlier areligious claims, I fucking pray.

I’m not sure how long passes before the door behind us creaks open—long enough that the intricate patterns on the stained-glass window are imprinted in my brain so thoroughly, the image lingers as I turn around.

I wish I hadn’t. One look at Lux’s drawn face, and I feel sick.

I stand so abruptly, the pew rattles. Dread rushing through my veins like poison, I back up clumsily until my back hits a wall. “What?”

Lux exhales shakily, and my legs give out. I sink to the ground, my knees tucked to my chest, my arms hanging limply at my sides, my neck hardly capable of holding up my heavy, exhausted head.

Footsteps. A murmur of my name. Another assuaged exhale. “He’s out of surgery.” Two palms smooth over my knees. “He’s okay.”

My own breath leaves me like a dry gust of wind, stuttering and stale from being held in my lungs for so long.

“He’s okay,” Lux repeats, and I parrot the phrase.

I set my hand on top of hers, letting them linger for a second before peeling them off. Before lifting my gaze to her, then to Silas, then back, making sure they know I’m talking to both of them. “Leave me alone now.”

And I must sound exactly how I feel because they do.