Then she waded through the water and ascended the stairs wearing my jacket and her white dress, the latter of which clung, damp and sheer, to all the curves of her body. She walked out of the train station and up the hill and climbed the hedge and fence barefoot, and when we got to my car, she stripped to her underwear in the street and threw her dress in the gutter.

“I was going to marry him in that,” she said flatly, staring at the sopping pile of wet lace. “I’d already said yes.” Then, trembling, she got into the car and put on her seat belt and drew her knees to her chest, alive but empty, her hair wreathed in flowers like a walking grave.

• • •

We didn’t speak on the drive back to her place. I cranked the heat so Grace could warm up, but even though her skin was rashed with goose bumps, she sat perfectly still, a statue of a fallen angel.

All the lights in the house were on when we arrived. Martin and his wife Mary and Grace’s mom and two cops were standing on the front lawn. They moved toward the car as I slowed, but Grace shook her head and held up her hand to stop them and they slowed and waited and watched.

Grace turned to me. “I killed their son, and as a reward, they’re paying my medical bills and letting me live in their house. That’s part of the reason why I can’t be with you. I can’t . . . spit in their faces like that. I can’t watch their son die next to me and then let myself fall in love with someone else a few months later. You understand?” I did understand, sort of, but sort of understanding didn’t make it any easier. Would Dom’s parents really not want her to move on? Would they really want her to be in so much pain as some sort of sick repayment for what she thought she’d done?

I’d asked her that first night at the abandoned train station what sins she needed absolved, and here was the truth, finally. “You think you deserve to be sad. You think you’re working off some kind of cosmic debt by torturing yourself. You think this is your redemption.”

“I feel less guilty and less shit about myself when I’m sad than when I’m happy. It’s the least I can do for Dom and his parents. Don’t you get that? It’s the only justice I can offer.”

“So you’ve handed yourself down a prison sentence. For how long? A year? Two years? The rest of your life? How much pain do you have to put yourself through before you’ve repaid your debt?”

“At least a little bit more.”

“Jesus. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t kill him. It was an accident.”

Grace took off her seat belt then and tucked her hair behind her ears and leaned over and kissed me, her almost-bare breasts pressed against my chest. I held her jaw in my hand and she worked her fingers into my hair, and for a few moments, the world was better, even if it was so fucking broken. But then she pulled away, the way she always did, and looked at me like she was trying to tell me something she couldn’t find the words to say.

“Why did you kiss me?” I said to her quietly, because I really, truly didn’t understand. “That first night. Why did you kiss me if you knew you’d never be able to let him go?”

“You don’t want to know,” whispered Grace. “You don’t want to know that.”

“I do. I have to.”

“Because I was drunk and you were there and I missed him.” Grace shook her head. “God, how can you still look at me like that after everything I’ve put you through?” she whispered.

“Because I’m in love with you.” There seemed to be no point in hiding it anymore. No shame in saying the words first. It was true. I didn’t know the exact point when I’d moved from wanting her to loving her, but I had.

“You don’t know what love is, Henry,” she said, in the same tone you’d use to tell someone they’re an idiot. “You don’t even know who I am. You have a teenage crush. That’s all.”

I didn’t say anything. I inhaled deeply and turned my head and stared out the window as Grace gathered her wet shoes and got out of the car wearing nothing but her underwear and my jacket. “Good night,” she said, but I only nodded, because I couldn’t speak.

Then Martin and Mary and her mom were hugging her and the cops were escorting her inside out of the cold, back into the house where she had to work off her debt to her dead boyfriend’s parents, and I was left alone in the dark.

I wondered if she really believed she could make herself and the Sawyers feel better by letting her sorrow infect her, or if she just loved the pain. Loved the grief. I wondered if she let herself feel it in every one of her many billions of atoms because she truly, deeply thought she deserved it.

I messaged my mom to let her know Grace was safe but that I wouldn’t be home for a while. Then I drove to the place I’d been avoiding for months now, the place that’d lodged in the back of my mind like a burr but that I hadn’t realized I wanted to visit until tonight.

• • •

The cemetery wasn’t as frightening as I thought it would be. There was no mist, no wolfish howls echoing from the distance, no swooping crows. I walked through the rows of graves quickly at first, jumping at every sound, but eventually I relaxed. I found Dom where I’d seen Grace kneeling a few months earlier. There were still flowers all over his grave, some older, their petals pulled away in the breeze, but fresh ones, too, garlands of them. She’d never stopped coming here. Even when she said she’d try, she never had.

The inscription on his gravestone was simple. The three lines read:

Dominic Henry Sawyer

Aged 17

“If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.”

I traced the letters of his middle name. Henry. We shared so much, Dom and I. A name. A scent. A love. I tried to imagine us as friends, in another life, instead of me being jealous of his bones. But no. Probably not. The love Grace had described was the kind that transcended time and space. In any universe, in any life, it would always be them and I would always be the after. The lesser.