While I sat there, that root canal pain sparking through my body, phrases like I wish I’d never met her and I wish she’d never kissed me started to cascade through my thoughts. I might’ve—had it been a viable option at that moment—gone all Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on her. Bleached her out of my memory. Ripped her from where she’d stitched herself into the lining of my soul.

But I thought, again, of Kintsukuroi. That something must first be shattered for it to be put back together in a way that made it more beautiful than before. I thought of how I liked broken things, things that were blemished or dented or cracked, and why that was probably why I fell for Grace in the first place. She was a broken thing in human form, and now—because of her—I was too.

Grace might always be broken, but I hoped that all my shattered pieces could be glued back together and mended with gold seams. That the tears in my heart would heal into scars that would glisten.

And that’s when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

GRACE TOWN:

I’m outside Hink’s office.

HENRY PAGE:

Why?

Lola told me about the theme. I have something I want to put in the newspaper.

“You are a demon,” I said to La as I stood, my heart stripped and swollen inside my throat.

To which she replied, “In the sack!”

As I stepped out into the pale-pink-and-lemon-colored nightmare that was the hall, I hoped terrible things for Grace Town in spite of myself. I hoped that she would regret this decision for the rest of her life. That it would pierce her like a hot skewer until the day she died. I imagined her old and thin, her skin draped across her bones like damp paper. I saw her draw her final breath, a look of regret in her eyes for the life she could’ve had with me, and I felt vindicated.

And in that moment I wanted things for myself that I’d never wanted before. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be famous. I wanted to marry a supermodel and screw her lingerie-clad body every night. I wanted every achievement of my life to stand in testament as a grand “fuck you” to Grace Town. I wanted to destroy her with my extraordinariness.

But by the time I’d reached the end of the hallway, some of the acid had washed away. Why is it, I thought, that we’re so willing to hurt the ones we care about the most? Two days ago I loved her, and now I wanted to carve away pieces of her soul. Why was that? Because she’d hurt me? Because she didn’t love me back?

You can’t begrudge people their feelings. Grace had done what was right by her. I couldn’t ask for more than that.

• • •

She was sitting on the seat where we’d waited the afternoon we’d been called to Hink’s office. A beginning and an end, all in one place. “Henrik,” she said quietly, motioning to the space next to her, the spot where I’d folded my body awkwardly because of her presence. “I wanted to give you something.”

“I can’t, Grace. I can’t do this anymore.”

“I know. I know. Trust me: this is the end.”

In a normal conversation, this would be the point that she would’ve apologized for ripping my heart out of my chest. But Grace was not a normal girl and she didn’t understand that the word sorry was sometimes enough. Instead, she handed me a small envelope with For the consideration of the editor written across the front and said, “You asked me, the day we started at the newspaper, why I’d changed my mind. I never answered you, but I should’ve, because I already knew.”

“Okay.”

“Every day since the day he died, all I thought about was him. For the first few weeks after the accident, I expected the grief. I let myself feel every inch of it. I’d lost people I loved before. Almost everyone. I knew how grief worked. The only thing that numbs the pain is time, filling up your head with new memories, driving a wedge between yourself and the tragedy. I waited for things to get easier. I waited for the replays of our happiest days together to stop. I waited for my breath to stop catching in my chest whenever a thunderclap of misery would roll through me.

“But it never got easier. After a while I realized it was because I didn’t want it to. I carried him with me heavily, and it exhausted me, but I did it because I deserved it. I deserved the weight of him, and the pain, and when his parents’ grief was too heavy, I carried some of theirs too.

“And then I met you.

“The first afternoon we talked, I didn’t think about him for twenty minutes. I know it doesn’t seem like a lot, but it was a record for me, and I felt so light and buoyant afterward. I slept for four hours that night without waking up once. And I knew it was because of you. I don’t know how, or why, but when I was with you, you made the grief go away.”

“But that still isn’t enough.”

“Oh, Henry,” she said, shuffling closer and taking my cheek in her hand. I closed my eyes at the gentleness of her touch and then her lips were moving against mine, impossibly soft.

“Why do you kiss me like that?” I said when it was over.

“Like what?” she said, pulling back from me slightly.

“Like you’re in love with me.”

Grace looked from my eyes to my lips and then back again. “It’s the only way I know how.”

Because Dom had been her first and only everything, before me. When she’d first learned to kiss, it had been with the great love of her life.

And it took until that moment for me to realize, finally, that I was a blip in someone else’s love story. That there was a grand love going on here, but it wasn’t my own, as I’d hoped; I was a side character in the peripheries, a plot device to keep the main characters apart. That if this were The Notebook and Dom were still alive, he would be Allie, Grace would be Noah, and I would be the redheaded chick whose name I can’t remember, the one who gets shafted and has to pretend like it’s no big deal.