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USUALLY THERE’S A HEADS-UP WHEN YOU’RE APPROACHING moments that will mark a permanent Before and an After in your life, like a “Welcome Guide for Incoming Freshmen,” or a printout of an ultrasound picture, or a save-the-date postcard for a wedding.

But sometimes they slam into you with no notice at all.

It was a cold. My best friend got a simple fucking spring cold.

The kind where you feel a bit knackered, sniffle for a couple days, then resume your life.

The kind that can sometimes turn into pneumonia, if you happen to be living with a compromised immune system, say due to organ failure.

Lia’s liver was the wanker, but it was her spleen that caused the bigger problem. The larger it grew to help compensate for her liver’s failures, the less it was able to do its own job of filtering out the damaged blood cells and producing white blood cells to fight off bacterial infections—or so I learned that nightmare of a morning.

They took her straight to the ICU.

When your best friend tells you she’s got a disease that could end her life, you put on a brave face and you fight like hell because anything less would make it seem as if you’re giving up on her, and you are literally her blocker; your job is to clear all obstacles from her way.

You don’t say goodbye. Goodbyes would be admitting defeat and you would never do that, not until she reached her dying breath.

But then she goes into septic shock and she does reach her dying breath and you still don’t get to say goodbye, because your cell phone gets terrible reception at school, because even when you finally get the voice mail and “borrow” a moped from the student parking lot and run every red light, you aren’t even allowed into the ICU despite some very aggressive protesting. Because you could never have imagined that morning would be your last chance to—

Because even though you knew your best friend had this serious disease, you still never let yourself imagine she might actually—Fuck. I can’t say the words.

Goddammit, if she’d just gotten that liver the first time. If there was a surplus of them instead of a shortage, she never would have—

For her sake, I’m glad it was sudden like that. I hope like bloody hell she didn’t have time to be scared.

But I have time to be scared. I have all the goddamn time in the world to be terrified.

I’m afraid of the space between blinks and of the hollow in my belly . . . because now I know.

Now I know that you can soak your skin in starlight and scrub your lungs with noonday winds and trail your fingers through ombré sunrises and call yourself the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn, and none of that breath or beauty or blaze is ward or amulet.

Because the harshest truth, the truth that’s been there all the while, is that the worst thing you can ever imagine happening . . . ?

Some days it actually does.