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Everything goes quiet, but people’s mouths are still moving. Jack’s screams are barely audible above the ringing in my head. I move achingly slow, like I’m in a sea of sludge. People won’t move. I lean on them until they do, until the last person in the circle parts, and shows me Jack leaning over Sophia’s lovely white dress, Tallie’s bracelet around her contorted wrist, and her head twisted at a perfect ninety degree angle and her ocean eyes staring at me, wide and open, like a mannequin, like a doll, like a bird who never learned how to take flight.
‘The sadness will last forever. And I think he was right, but I also think he was very, very wrong. It doesn’t last forever. Because we don’t last forever.’