We were suddenly broke, poor, and homeless.

We moved in with my aunt, Carrie, for the first few weeks, while my father and his coworkers “Band-Aided” the house as much as they could to make it livable again. My father, who owned a blueberry field and a small farm, had to neglect his business and throw himself into putting a roof over our heads. Every night, he pulled himself into bed and closed his eyes without even taking a shower.

I could swear he went weeks without taking a shower.

Months, maybe.

Neither my mother nor my father could bear looking at me. They didn’t blame me explicitly, but they didn’t have to. I’d killed Aubrey. At the very least, I was responsible for her death. And not in some vague ass way—the way people sometimes blamed themselves for someone else’s death because they didn’t insist hard enough on them going to get a mammogram or whatever. I’d straight up made this happen.

If only I’d dragged my sorry self out of bed and kept my promise, Aubrey would be here. With us. Happy, partly toothless, and alive.

I broke up with Whitley a week after the fire. She cried and told me I’d change my mind, but I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t deserve happiness, and a girlfriend definitely equaled happiness.

Once we moved back to our house—or whatever was left of it—my parents threw themselves headfirst into the arms of depression and didn’t leave the bed. They dwelled on their pain, neither of them working or trying to support whatever was left of the family. The blueberry fields were left unattended, the fruit unpicked. I quit football and took a job at Chipotle to help pay the bills. Coach Rudy begged me to reconsider, but once I explained my circumstances to him, he dropped it.

I was worried my parents and I would become homeless and neglected my social life indefinitely, but East stuck by me, even when I spent months not being able to look at his face without lashing out.

Then senior year happened.

Dad decided to get out of bed on my first day of school. I still remember the morning it happened. He put on his working clothes—The North Face jacket and Blundstone boots—and went down to the farm to see the damage. After months of neglect, nothing was left. He’d let the fruit in the fields die, and whatever animals he had, he’d given away for free.

Dad went downtown the same day and got himself a fisherman’s job. Grandpa St. Claire was a fisherman, so he didn’t have to learn the ropes, but by God, it must have been fucking humiliating to get a starter job so late in the game, especially for someone who’d been self-employed since he’d graduated from high school to support his small insta-family.

Mom emerged from her room a few weeks later. She was the first to actually talk to me, and by that time, it had been almost a year since any of them looked me in the eye, much less acknowledged my existence.

I’d been invisible.

They didn’t ask me how I felt.

How I was coping.

Didn’t feel me.

Clothe me.

Ask me how school was going.

Fuck, they didn’t even know I quit football. I was an invisible ghost, hovering in their way to the kitchen occasionally, and nothing more.

She sat me down and told me it was not my fault. Said she appreciated how I’d stepped up and paid the bills, and that from now on, things were going to be different.

But I knew that it was my fault, and that the quicker I got out of my parents’ hair, the better.

In the weeks leading to my eighteenth birthday, my parents made an effort to talk to me. Mom got on some meds after being diagnosed with major depression. Dad constantly smelled of fish. They were pretending to be okay. I didn’t buy it. They spent almost a year virtually ignoring me. There was simply no way they were over what I’d done. Even if they were—I wasn’t over it.

On my eighteenth birthday, they bought me a cake.

I returned from a shift at Chipotle. Walked straight past the cake with the lit candles, up to my room and locked the door.

I vowed not to celebrate birthdays ever again that day.

Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I moved to Sheridan. East insisted on going wherever I was going. I didn’t fight him on this, mostly because I knew I’d be all alone in the world if it wasn’t for him.

Instead, I chose a D1 college where I knew he’d ride a full scholarship and enjoy his time.

The fights at the Sheridan Plaza were the start of my parents’ financial recovery, but they weren’t enough. My dream was to make it up to them the best I could. And that meant rebuilding their house from scratch and getting Dad’s business back on its feet.

But in my quest to find an answer to all of their trouble, I forgot to ask myself where the hell I fit into this equation.

Forgot how to breathe without hurting.

Forgot that there was more to life than earning money and surviving.

Forgot that when you played with fire, eventually, you get burned.

West

In the end, it all boiled down to this: I couldn’t have Kade Appleton and his scouts know that Grace was my girlfriend. He had eyes everywhere, and confirming she and I were together was going to put her in the line of fire.

I couldn’t do that.

So I did what I had to.

Dumped my ugly past at her feet.

Aubrey didn’t die in a car accident.

She died because of me.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about Aub the first night I laid eyes on Grace Shaw. That it wasn’t why I took the job at the food truck. Sure, the extra money was helpful, but mainly, I wanted to see what Aub would be like had she survived the fire. What kind of person she’d grow up to be.

I realized how majorly fucked up that was to look at this chick and see my sister. But that was the thing—I didn’t see Aubrey in Grace. Not at all.

Grace was Grace. A madly unique person. Sweet-mannered and kind and funny, but also sarcastic and feisty and intelligent. She was gorgeous—scratch that, fucking breathtaking, apart from those scars that didn’t even matter to me—and the more I spent time with her, the more it was impossible to think of her as a replacement to the sister I loved so desperately.

Texas thought I pitied her. That she was a pet project. And I’d confirmed her darkest suspicions to make sure Kade Appleton and his rats think the same thing.

But I never pitied her. Not even for one second.

If anything, I envied her strength. I couldn’t have dealt with half the shit she’s been through and still survive.

Hell, I still couldn’t talk to my own parents without breaking into goddamn hives.

Now, the guilt of what I did to her at the cafeteria ate at me alive like the fire that consumed Aubrey.

“You’re such an idiot.” East shook his head. He was cruising around town, clutching the steering wheel like he was ready to yank and throw it out the window. We’d been doing that for an hour now. I sat next to him in his Toyota Camry, wallowing in the sheer volume of my stupidity.

“School’s full of rats. Couldn’t chance Appleton finding out about Grace and getting to her.” I fixed my gaze on the view outside the window, reminding myself to fucking breathe.

“Appleton doesn’t want to hurt your girlfriend, you moron. He wants to hurt you.”

“He’s hurt women before.”

“That was his own girlfriend,” East argued.