PROLOGUE

## Emily

July 6th, 2021

The last time I felt anything was the night my sister died.

Not the funeral. Not the weeks of casseroles from strangers who couldn't look me in the eye. Not the moment they lowered two caskets into the same plot because my father was too cheap — or too broken, depending on which lie you preferred — to buy a second one.

No. The last time I felt anything real was the night itself.

Three years ago. July 6th.

I'd been sitting on the kitchen counter in our old house, the one with the yellow door and the crooked mailbox that Dad never fixed. Charlie was in the living room, stretched across the couch with her legs dangling off the armrest, painting her toenails the same violent shade of red she put on everything. Red sneakers. Red scrunchie. Red case on her phone. She said it was the colour of joy, which was such a Charlie thing to say that I'd stopped questioning it by the time we were twelve.

Mom was in the hallway, keys in one hand, phone pressed between her shoulder and ear. Laughing. She had this laugh — full-bodied, reckless, the kind that made you want to join in even if you didn't know the joke. She was talking to Aunt Patricia about the church bake sale, something about snickerdoodles and a woman named Dolores who always brought store-bought cookies and passed them off as homemade.

I was eating gummy worms.

Sour ones. The kind that make your tongue feel like it's been scraped with sandpaper, and you keep going back because the pain is the point. I'd had three bags that week. Charlie said I was going to rot my teeth out of my skull. I told her at least I'd die happy.

She threw a pillow at me.

That was the last thing she ever did to me. Threw a decorative pillow with a stitched sunflower on it, and it hit me square in the face, and I laughed so hard I choked on a gummy worm, and she laughed so hard she knocked over the nail polish, and Mom yelled from the hallway that we were animals, and everything was loud and messy and alive.

Then Mom said, "Charlie, come on, we're going to be late."

And Charlie groaned and shoved her feet into those red sneakers without tying them, and she grabbed her jacket and said, "Em, you sure you don't want to come? Dad's at the office, you'll be alone."

I said no.

I said no because I had a paper due Monday and a Redbull in the fridge and I wanted to rewatch the Doctor Who Christmas special for the ninth time. The one where the Eleventh Doctor regenerates. The one that makes me cry every single time because Matt Smith looks into the camera and says, "I will always remember when the Doctor was me," and it's the most devastating sentence in the history of television and I will die on that hill.

I said no because I was twenty years old and comfortable and didn't feel like putting on pants.

I said no.

Mom kissed the top of my head. She smelled like vanilla and dryer sheets and the perfume Dad had bought her for Christmas that she pretended to love even though it was too floral. "Don't stay up too late, baby."

Charlie hugged me from behind, her chin hooking over my shoulder the way it always did because we were the exact same height — identical in every way except that she got the Joy Gene and I got whatever the opposite of that is. "Love you, loser."

"Love you more, loser."

She pulled back and grinned. That grin. God, that grin. All teeth and crinkled nose and eyes that looked exactly like mine but somehow held twice the light.

The yellow door closed behind them.

The engine started.

Tires on gravel.

And then silence.

---

The call came at 11:47 PM.

I know this because I was staring at my phone, waiting for Charlie to text me back. I'd sent her a photo of the gummy worm I'd twisted into a heart shape — don't ask, I was bored — and she hadn't responded, which wasn't like her. Charlie responded to everything within thirty seconds. She was pathological about it. "What if someone needs me?" she'd say. "What if it's important?"

A twisted gummy worm was not important. But she would have responded anyway.

The phone rang instead.

It wasn't Charlie.

A man's voice. Calm, measured, the vocal equivalent of a pressed suit. He asked if I was Emily Glass. He asked if I was related to Margaret Glass and Charlotte Glass. He used their full names, which was how I knew before he said another word.

Nobody called my mother Margaret.

Nobody called Charlie Charlotte.

Except people who had never met them.

Except people reading names off a clipboard.

Drunk driver. Head-on. Route 9, just past the old covered bridge where Charlie and I used to catch tadpoles. Mom died on impact. Charlie made it to the hospital. She died in surgery. Internal bleeding. The surgeon said she fought hard.

Of course she fought hard. She was Charlie.

She fought and fought and fought while I sat on my ass watching a fictional alien regenerate into a new face, eating sour gummy worms and crying about endings that weren't even real.

The man on the phone asked if there was someone who could be with me tonight.

I hung up.

I sat on the kitchen counter for a long time. I don't know how long. Could have been minutes. Could have been hours. The Redbull went flat. The gummy worms sat untouched in their crinkled bag.

I didn't cry.

I didn't scream.

I didn't do anything at all.

Something inside me — some wire that connected the world to my chest — it just... snapped. Quietly. Like a guitar string giving out in the middle of a song nobody was playing anymore.

And that was it.

That was the last time I felt anything.

---

Three years.

Three years of my father's silence, his new wife Helen who tried too hard, and Jordan, his son from a previous marriage, who filled the silence with fists and whiskey and rage.

Three years of medication that made the world foggy and medication that made the world sharp and medication that made the world nothing at all.

Three years of pulling my sleeves down.

Three years of carrying Charlie's stuffed bear — the one she'd had since we were five, the one she'd named Charlie because she thought it was hilarious to name things after herself — in the bottom of my bag like some kind of talisman against the dark.

Three years of Ash texting me every morning: you alive?

And me responding: unfortunately

She thought I was joking.

I was never joking.

---

Tomorrow is July 7th.

The anniversary.

I'm sitting on the floor of my apartment — Jordan's apartment, technically, because nothing in my life is actually mine — with a bottle of vodka that's seen better days and a bag of gummy worms that I'm eating one at a time, slowly, letting the sour crystals dissolve on my tongue because it's the closest thing to feeling something that I've found.

The razor is in the bathroom.

I know exactly where it is. Top shelf, behind the mouthwash, next to the box of bandaids I bought in bulk because I go through them the way other people go through tissues during allergy season.

I'm not going to use it tonight.

Probably.

Tomorrow I'll walk to the gas station because we're out of milk and Jordan will lose his shit if there's no milk for his cereal, and maybe I'll buy another bag of gummy worms, and maybe I'll stand outside for a minute in the warm July air and try to remember what it felt like when Charlie threw that pillow at my face.

The thing about grief is that everyone tells you it gets easier.

They're lying.

It doesn't get easier. You just get better at pretending it does. You smile when you're supposed to smile. You laugh when the timing is right. You nod along in therapy and say things like "I'm processing" and "I'm working through it" and "I'm taking it one day at a time," and your therapist writes it down and nods and says, "That's really great progress, Emily," and you want to scream because nothing about any of this is progress. Progress implies forward motion. Progress implies a destination.

I'm not going anywhere.

I'm right here, on this floor, in this apartment that smells like stale beer and Jordan's cheap cologne, and the only thing keeping me from using that razor is a dead girl's stuffed bear and the faint, stupid, irrational hope that tomorrow might be different.

It won't be.

But I'll pretend it might.

That's what I do now. I pretend. I perform alive like it's a role in a play that never ends, and the audience is everyone who loves me, and the reviews are mixed, and the show must go on because the alternative is a closed casket and a eulogy nobody wants to write.

So.

Tomorrow.

July 7th.

I'll walk to the gas station. I'll buy milk. I'll buy gummy worms. I'll stand outside in the sticky summer heat and I'll breathe, even though breathing has become something I do out of habit rather than desire.

And maybe — probably not, but maybe — something will happen.

Something small. Something stupid. Something that makes the wire reconnect, even for a second.

I'm not holding my breath.

But I'm also not dead yet.

And in the absence of anything better, that's going to have to be enough.