Page 5 of Dance of Thorns

Lark is dead.

And I’m pretty sure it’s my fault.

2

DOVE

Exactly seven years later:

From up here,you can almost believe that the world isn’t as cold a place as it truly is.

Icy wind whips through my hair, pasting blonde and pink tendrils across my face. I brush them back, shivering. My bare toes curl against the concrete as I look out over the sea of lights twinkling like jewels in front of me.

New York is beautiful when it wants to be. I think that’s why Lark loved it up here—even if I hated the gallows humor jokes she made about how she might getdownfrom here.

But that was before she found happiness and love.

And died anyway.

Happiness and love…

I smile wryly as my gaze slowly drifts over the glittering city around me, past my bare toes gripping the very edge of the building and down to the busy streets eighty-three stories below.

Seven years later, I’m still looking for both of those. I’m also pretty sure that some things aren’t meant to be found, not by everyone.

I highly doubt happiness and love are anywhere to be found on the eighty-third story mechanical maintenance decks of the Empire State Building. Maybe you'd find them a few floors higher, on the iconic eighty-sixth story observation deck, like in that movie.

What’s the name? Right.

Sleepless in Seattle. Which has its climactic scene in…New York. Not Seattle.

That always bugged me.

A lot bugs me. Gets to me. Worms its way into my blood like poison or ink, until my veins run black like death.

I used to point this out to Lark when she’d convince me to come up here with her. Not the part about everything bothering me—she already knew that better than most. The part aboutSleepless In Seattlehaving its big romantic moment here in New York City instead of the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s a meet-cute!” she’d argue.

I’d point out that meet-cutes—those sappy moments when the two main characters meet for the first time in some diabetes-inducing way, like Hugh Grant spilling OJ on Julia Roberts inNotting Hill—happen at thebeginningof stories, not the end.

Lark would tell me to quit ruining the moment.

To this day, I have no idea how she discovered the secret way up to the northwest corner deck on the eighty-third floor of the Empire State Building. I mean it isn’t exactly open to the public.

But she did, and we'd come up here maybe once a year for no reason other than wherever Lark went, I went. And similarly, wherever I went, Lark went.

Until the night seven years ago, when I couldn’t go with her.

Seven fucking years.

She’d be twenty-four now, like me.

I look down at the smudges on my yoga pants from Lark’s route up here, which involves picking the lock of a maintenance storage room, shimmying through the extra-large air vent at the back of said room, and hoisting yourself up through a hatch onto the main deck itself.

When we’d come up here, we had no agenda other than to look out over the city. We’d share a set of headphones, one ear bud each, listen to bad emo music, smoke pilfered cigarettes, drink a little stolen vodka, and just…watch.

Watch the city twinkle, and the world keep turning.