We wore the same scent.

A snapshot of a lifetime, boiled down to the size of a bedroom. I stood there for a few minutes, taking in the stillness of the place. Here he was, laid out before me, everything he’d been, everything he was.

I wondered if Grace felt close to death in this room, like I did, or if she felt close to life. And I marveled at the unfairness of it all. How a person could be so tethered to this world one moment, and gone from it the next.

I wandered into the walk-in wardrobe and pulled the cord for the light. Here was more of his tomb. All of his clothes. A pressed suit, probably in preparation for prom. A football jersey from the East River team. Half a dozen pairs of shoes. Unlabeled boxes on the overhead shelves.

The gray band shirt Grace had worn to the movies was folded on the shelf. There was a dark smudge where she’d spilled the ketchup, almost as if she’d sponged it off instead of . . .

Then it dawned on me.

“Oh God . . . ,” I whispered as I picked the shirt up. The stain had been sponged away, but the shirt hadn’t been washed. The fabric still smelled of Grace. Of Dom. Of me.

Grace didn’t wash Dom’s clothes. She didn’t wash his sheets. There was always that musty, boyish smell that hung on her wherever she went. I’d assumed it was a natural quirk, or that she had lackluster hygiene practices, but standing in her dead boyfriend’s closet was a great way to provoke an epiphany.

Grace lived in him. Every hour of every day, he was there with her. The scent of him on her skin. Grace was the ghost, not Dom. Two people had died that day, but one of them still had a body.

I looked around the room again, trying to find any sign of something that belonged to her. There was nothing of Grace here except for an envelope on the dresser that bore her name. The letter I’d written her, still unopened. There was no girls’ clothing, no girls’ shoes, no makeup, none of the things you’d find in your sister’s or mother’s or friends’ bedrooms.

She wore his clothes and his deodorant and she slept in his tangled sheets every night. Whoever she had been—the bright, beautiful girl in her Facebook profile picture—that person was gone now, replaced by this Dom impostor.

You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, she’d said to me once. What was there for me to discern from this room apart from the fact that Grace Town did not exist at all?

“So now you know,” said Grace quietly.

I spun around to find her staring at me from the door frame, Dom’s shirt still crumpled up in my shaking fingers. Looking at her then, it was easy to understand that she wasn’t of the corporeal realm. Her skin was as translucent as perfumed paper, and her blond hair fell in ashen curtains to settle blunt and dead about her shoulders. There were whispers of bruises beneath the skin of her eyes, like she cried so much it made her bleed. Grace was a lost soul, a ghost adrift, the human embodiment of secondhand smoke.

I wanted to touch her. I couldn’t remember if she’d ever felt warm beneath my fingertips, or if she’d always been spun from something more ethereal than skin. “Grace, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“I moved in a month before the accident,” she said, taking the dirty shirt from me and folding it and placing it back on its shelf in the wardrobe. She smoothed the fabric out with her hands, then placed her forehead against the shelf, her eyes closed. “The Sawyers had been trying to get me here for years. I finally worked up the guts to run away from my mom. It was the best worst day of my life.”

“That’s awful. Grace . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to help you.”

Grace looked up at me. “I’m not broken, Henry. I’m not a piece of pottery out of your cabinet. I don’t need to be fixed.”

“I know that. I didn’t mean that. But—you can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, remember?” It went so much deeper than she’d ever been willing to tell me. Grace hadn’t only lost him in the physical sense—she’d lost the promise he held as well. It wouldn’t just be his corpse that would haunt us, but the ghost of the life they could’ve had together. He knew everything about her, all the bad, all the good, and I was only allowed the occasional glimpse. All the potential energy Dom had held had been dispersed back into the universe when he died, and she was scrabbling to hold on to it. “So what does your bedroom look like?”

“That’s what you want to know? I don’t have one, okay? My ‘bedroom’ before I moved in here was a couch in my mother’s husband’s basement.”

“Sometimes I feel like you don’t exist.”

“Get out.”

“You keep everything from me. You don’t tell me anything.”

“Get out, get out, get out!”

Then Martin Sawyer was at the door. He looked from Grace to me and back again and said, “Henry,” and I said, “I’m going.” I stalked out of the house, down the hallway filled with pictures of him that greeted her, smiling, every morning and every night. I was hurt and angry and stupidly, stupidly jealous, which was dumb, because worms were probably eating his eyeballs right now, or maybe they were done with his eyeballs and had moved onto his brain, or his heart, or his testicles, and that wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. He couldn’t love her anymore and he still got to keep her and it all just seemed so desperately unfair to everyone involved.

I was sitting in the gutter outside her house when my phone rang. Murray. I smudged a tear from my eye and answered. “Yeah, I know, I’m on my—”

“Hello, Henry. It’s Maddy.”

“Who?”

“Madison Carlson. From school.”

“Oh . . . Why are you calling me from Murray’s phone?”

“I think I broke Murray.”

“I can’t deal with this right now. I have to get to Lola’s party.”