And then we stopped. All I could hear was my pounding heartbeat and Decker’s heavy breathing and the uneven hum of the recovering engine. My heart sounded like the drum in my head when I woke up that first night in the hospital. When I went from feeling nothing to everything and couldn’t stop screaming because it turned out the everything was blinding pain. I had to get out. I threw the car door open and stumbled out into the night.

“Get back in the car.” Decker’s voice wavered.

“I need some air.”

“Don’t move,” he said, and he revved the engine and backed the minivan off the dirt and onto the side of the road.

The dark came into focus. Cracked mounds of earth poking through the snow. Bare trees. Clusters of evergreens. Fog lingering at the white tree line.

Decker hung a U-turn in the middle of the road to get the car facing in the right direction. I walked toward the woods and put my hands on the rough bark of the nearest tree. I rested my forehead on the trunk and sucked in the cold air.

A car door slammed and Decker came running. “What the hell, Delaney? I told you not to move!”

I pushed myself away from the tree and looked at him. “I’m right here.”

“Yeah, I can see that, but I told you to stay over there.” He placed both palms on my shoulders and pushed me, actually pushed me, into the tree trunk.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” I said. Then I felt his hands shaking on top of my shoulders. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He was terrified. So I lowered my voice and said, “Hey, we’re okay. We’re fine.”

And without warning, Decker’s lips were moving on mine, forceful and desperate, and I thought about pushing him away, but somehow instead my arms wrapped around his neck and I was pulling him closer, closer. His hands clung to the back of my jacket, like I was a thing that might slip away if he paused to take a single breath. And he kissed me like he was looking for something, like there was some question he couldn’t quite find the answer to. And the only answer I had was that no one else mattered—not Troy or Tara or Carson or anyone else—as long as he would just keep kissing me.

But he didn’t keep kissing me. Headlights crested the hill ahead, and we pulled apart, exposed. And now that he wasn’t kissing me, everything mattered again. We walked back to the car. “You can’t do that if you’re with Tara,” I said.

He jammed his seat belt in the buckle and gunned the engine as much as a minivan’s engine can be gunned. We were back on the road when he said, “It was a mistake.”

But I’d seen the way he kissed her. Like he had done it a million times before. And I’d seen her stupid red car at his place. “Don’t pretend it was just once. I know she was over last night.”

Decker clenched his jaw and his knuckles on the wheel turned white. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say she showed up unexpectedly, he didn’t say he asked her to leave, or that he was sorry. He didn’t say any of that. I opened my mouth to ask him to explain, but I couldn’t. Because I realized the mistake wasn’t Tara. He’d meant the mistake was me.

Decker cleared his throat when he pulled into my driveway. “You seeing that guy from the other day?”

I shrugged and thought about it. “He knows me,” I said. But when I heard the words, I realized they weren’t mine. They were Troy’s.

“I know you,” he said.

“He was in a coma, too. He knows what it’s like.”

“I would too if you told me. So it’s a yes then. You’re starting something with him.”

Is this how it starts? Meeting some guy I have something in common with and kissing him on Christmas? Or did it start thirteen years ago, with a boy who promised to make me smile and has been doing it every day since? It didn’t matter. We couldn’t go backward. We couldn’t go forward. We were stuck.

I swung my bag onto my shoulder and hopped down from the car. “I really don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“I guess not,” he said, and I slammed the door. But then he lowered the window. “I was just wondering where you knew him from, is all. Because I remember where I saw him.” I stood, one hand on my hip, leaning into it, eyebrow raised like I didn’t care but obviously I did because I was still standing there. “The hospital,” he said. “He was at the hospital.”

He raised the window and rolled down the driveway. He was already in his house before I willed myself up the front porch steps. Something twisted in my stomach, and it wasn’t until I made it to my room that I thought of what it might be.