“Decker?”

He didn’t respond, but I could hear his steady breathing in between the gusts of wind. I walked in the darkness with my hands out in front of me, trying to gauge the distance between the stairs and the couch. I whacked into the back of it with my hip, and then I didn’t hear Decker’s steady breathing anymore, but he didn’t say anything either.

So I edged around it, my fingers trailing the sofa, and eased myself onto the corner of the pull-out couch. The old springs shifted downward. I crawled toward the center of the mattress and sat cross-legged next to his body. His arm fell across my legs, and we just sat like that. I stared down at the space where I thought he’d be, even though I couldn’t really see him. I kept thinking of what to say, what to do. I was over-thinking it. So I said nothing.

And then the house grew colder. The heat escaped through the crack under the door and the thin glass windows, and without the power, all that was left was the cold. Which wasn’t a thing at all. Just an absence of heat. But it felt as real as anything else. So I slid under the sheets and curled up next to Decker, seeking his warmth. And still we didn’t say anything.

The great thing about the blackness was that I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed, and he couldn’t tell what I was thinking and I could go along pretending he didn’t know I was there, and he could go along thinking I was scared of the dark or lonely for company. My head rested in the curved space between his chin and his shoulder and my arm covered his chest, and I could hear and feel the beating of his heart.

His hand traced the edge of my face in the darkness. Like he knew me by heart and he was making sure it was me.

I drifted to sleep when his fingers slid down my face to the curve of my neck. Heaven. But I dreamed of hell. Of looking up from a useless body, tied to a bed, with Troy grinning down at me. He checked my pulse with one hand and caressed my cheek with the other, and I fought to pull away. To bite his hand. To do something. Anything. But I was powerless. And then he moved his hands to my mouth, traced the outline of my lips, and brought his palm down hard. He pinched my nose shut with his other hand. And I couldn’t even fight or claw or rage. I just lay there, watching him, until the blackness settled in.

I woke up gasping for breath. I sucked in deep breath after deep breath and heard the beeping of the microwave ready to be programmed and the heat click on and the refrigerator power itself back up. Light seeped through the curtains. One of Decker’s arms was still on me, though he was sleeping soundly.

I crept out from under the sheets before my parents woke up and found us in a compromising position and made our relationship limbo so much worse by making us talk about it. We couldn’t even talk to each other about it.

I peeked out the front curtains and saw Troy’s car down at the corner of the street. He wasn’t in it. Except it was too far for me to really know that.

But I did. I knew exactly where he was because I felt him. I felt him.

I stepped back from the window and let the curtains fall back into place. I knew where Troy was. I could always sense when he was around. I knew it then, and I knew it now. I just didn’t want to see it.

A lump rose in the back of my throat. With shaking hands, I pulled my boots and bright red parka over my flannel pajamas, grabbed my cell phone off the kitchen table, and stepped outside. The wind lulled for a brief second as I pulled the door closed behind me, and it slammed shut, rattling the door frame and the windows.

I looked toward his car, angled in front of Mrs. Merkowitz’s yard, wondering if he’d been camping out in her abandoned home. I closed my eyes and focused. I turned in the opposite direction and walked down the center of the road, where the melting slush rippled with the wind. I followed the current down the street, to the edge of the block, toward the lake.

I paused at the intersection, knowing exactly which way to go, but wondering how to do it. I took out my phone and dialed.

“911, what is your emergency?” It was a different voice from when Carson died. A male, bored and muffled. Like his head was down on the desk.

“Please send help to Falcon Lake.”

“What is the emer—” I snapped the phone shut and walked to the crest of the hill. I stood on the top, looking down at the edge of the lake. Someone had painted a handmade sign, red lettering on brown wood. DANGER—THIN ICE, it read. And a man stood beside it, gloved hand resting on the top of the sign, staring at the rising sun across the vast expanse of ice.

“What are you doing, Troy?”

He turned to face me and his mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him over the roaring wind. So I sidestepped down the embankment and stood on the other side of the warning sign and stuffed my hands deep inside the pockets of my coat.