I laughed softly despite myself and so did Grace.

“Kids, right?” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “Except he fell in love with me, too, and instead of fading as we got older, it only got more real. Dom was the first boy I held hands with. The first boy I kissed. My first and only everything, until you.”

“I didn’t . . . think about that.”

“I can’t put into words what it is to love someone like that. Or lose someone like that. Which is part of the reason why I don’t write anymore. Because words fail. A lot of people say they don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone, but I knew. I knew. I knew every day that we were together that what we had was extraordinary. And I was so afraid, every day, that I would lose him, lose them all. I used to worry so much about his safety, worry that they’d finally get sick of dealing with my messed-up family, but they never did. And I used to question how two people could be so lucky. How could the universe justify bringing us together when we were only nine? How could it ever be fair that what everyone was looking for was handed to us on a silver platter when we were too young to even know that we wanted it?

“I guess, now, I know. All the love that’s meant to last a lifetime I spent in the space of eight years. We were supposed to grow up together. Go to college together. Travel the world together. When he died, it felt like my future died with him. Dom wasn’t perfect. I mean, I know that. He was meticulous about some things and sloppy about others. He picked his fingernails when he was nervous or watching sports, and it used to drive me crazy. Katherine Heigl was his favorite actress and he made me watch all her movies. He liked Carl Sagan way too much. But my God, Henry, his soul was so extraordinary. The things he would have done with his life . . . You would’ve liked him a lot. You would’ve been friends.”

In that moment, I felt the terrible weight of the unfairness of it all. Grace Town did not believe in souls for the rest of humanity, but for Dom, she was willing to make an exception.

“I was in the hospital when they held his funeral,” she continued. “They waited for as long as they could, but I was too sick and they had to, you know? So they asked me to write something. Something that someone could read out, like a eulogy, because everyone knew I was a writer and they always told me how beautiful my words were. But I didn’t do it. I made out like I was in too much pain and I didn’t do it and I haven’t written anything since. I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything again until I make myself write it.”

“Why didn’t you write it?”

“It was my fault. I’ve never told anyone that before, but it was. It was my fault that we crashed and it’s my fault that he died.”

“It was nobody’s fault. It was an accident.”

“That’s why I haven’t told anyone. Because I know you’ll all say the same thing. Survivor’s guilt and all that. But I was teasing him. Distracting him. He told me to stop but I didn’t, and the next thing I knew, we were in the wrong lane. You know the whole cliché of your life flashing before your eyes the split second before you die?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s bullshit. I saw the car coming and I felt him swerve and I knew in that fraction of a heartbeat that we were both going to die. And the only thought my brain had time to generate was, Well, this is shit. Literally. My last thought could potentially have been a curse word. I didn’t think about my life or my family or my friends or even about him. It makes me wonder what he was thinking, you know? Maybe the same thing.”

“He was probably thinking about you.”

“He didn’t die right away. When it was in the news, all the articles said he’d died instantly, on impact, but he didn’t. It took a minute. We were there in the car, upside down, both of us bleeding, and he was trying to talk. It wasn’t like in the movies. He didn’t die whispering ‘I love you’ or anything like that. He was in pain and he was panicking and he was trying to breathe, but he couldn’t. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could do except watch him go.

“You know what I did on the day of his funeral? I watched Cosmos, the Neil deGrasse Tyson one, in its entirety. Thirteen hours of it. He’d been trying to get me to watch it for months, and I’d kept calling him a nerd for being so into space. It was the only way I knew how to mourn him. To be awed by the universe and remember that even though his consciousness was gone, every single molecule of him was still here.” She took my face in her hands and pressed her damp forehead to mine. “I wish you could see the world the way I see the world. See that death is the reward for having lived.”

“Please don’t talk like that. You scare me when you talk like that.”

“I don’t mean it in any suicidal sense,” she said, and she was whispering even quieter now, like she was telling me a terrible secret. “You know how you sometimes have the most exhausting day and you can’t wait to get home and fall into bed and sleep for hours? I feel that way about life. There are people out there who read books about vampires and they crave immortality, but sometimes I’m so thankful that at the end of it all, we get to sleep forever. No more pain. No more exhaustion. Death is the reward for having lived.”

“We need to get you home,” I said, and this time she did not protest. Instead, Grace reached behind her to where a small metal box was sitting on the steps. Inside it was an assortment of things from Dom’s shrine: the anchor necklace she’d worn the first day I saw her, the Strokes keychain, the Ramones shirt she hadn’t been able to wash. She stood and took my hand and led me back into the pond, her limp barely discernable in the water, where we held hands, our breaths bright white and blooming in the cold, as she released him piece by piece into the depths. The last thing to go was the box itself: DOM GRADE 10 had been scratched into the side. We watched it sink amid a flurry of silver bodies to come to rest on the debris-strewn floor at our feet.

I wondered, as I watched her, if this was what redemption looked like. If this was something like absolution of sin, and now that she’d forgiven herself—if she had forgiven herself—if she could move on. But Grace caught me looking at her and said, as though she could read my mind: “Stories with happy endings are just stories that haven’t finished yet.”