27

I CAN’T TELL WHERE I AM. Everything is white and blotchy and cold. I think of Joules and Shaw and my parents, and how I would’ve said goodbye to them if I’d had the chance. I imagine them happy to have had the time they had with me instead of sad to lose me, but I’m not ready to let go yet.

It takes all that I have left to blink away the light blinding me—lifting a single eyelid seems like moving an eighty-story building—but then I see him. And it’s worth every second of the struggle.

Ethan.

His face is the only clear image I know now. I reach for him, but I’m not sure whether he can still feel me until glittery bits of dust float before my eyes, and I know he can’t.

He pulls up a rueful smile. “I’m here, and so are you.” He must not see the dust taking over my hand, spreading up my arm and across my chest. He says something else I don’t hear.

I wonder what it was, but it’s just as well not knowing. I can tell I don’t have much time left, so I say the two things I’ve been meaning to tell him since the first time I knew he could see Ghost Me. “I … love you and … I am so sorry.”

“I know. I love you too,” he replies against my hair. “No more sorrys.” He leans away from me so I can see his face again. “Do you know what I see in the river?” He waits a moment, then continues. “You. Always you.”

Every inch of me sings. My lips manage one last word, one last promise. “Always.”

His head tilts toward mine, and I squeeze my eyes shut, terrified my face will melt through him. But I can feel his mouth close around mine and the warmth of his tongue as it smooths along my bottom lip and slides into my mouth. I pull him closer, but my fingertips sink into his too-soft flesh as I slowly fall forward. The air around me thickens as I pass through him, like the cool rush of a waterfall.

My entire body seems to open up and release any pain and guilt and confusion. I sense the world is slipping away from me, but I’m still anchored to Ethan—not the way I once was, with a pulse, but by a new connection that is unfaltering, endless.

Then I’m gone and I’m here, and I’m everything and nothing. And all the choices I made, good and bad, when I was alive seem to make perfect sense because they led me to this freeing moment, this peace.

The whole world feels as if it has restarted and my journey has only begun.