I didn’t know this woman.
This woman was a fictitious character, only living in faded photographs as far as I was concerned.
But there she was in the front row. Beaming at her younger daughter, if only by a few minutes, never once looking at me, her only son. The one who had somehowlived, even though he shouldn’t have.
Fuck.
Nobody wants me alive.
Not even me.
My palms grew clammy at the thought. My ears—as useless as they were—began to ring. The sound of phantom gunshots and the blasting of bombs in the distance corroded the walls of my skull as every breath grew more and more shallow.
Keep it together.
I swallowed, sniffled, and looked at the sky.
Happy little clouds.
Fluffy. White.
My memory plucked out a moment of my bullet piercing the space between a pair of dark, unblinking eyes. The woman who had killed Lizzie. Had she been a mother? Had she cared that Lizzie was a mother too?
Lizzie.
No, no, no. Stop it. Look at the clouds. Breathe in the air. Inhale, exhale.
“… the rings?”
Inhale, exhale. Come on, asshole. You can do this.
Something nudged my wrist. I startled with a gasp, pulling my arm away. I took a step backward, bumped into someone behind me, and gasped again. A hand landed on my shoulder, a voice muttered something I didn’t understand, but that hand … I glanced at it.
Sid.
Sid’s here.
I caught my breath. My eyes looked ahead, struggling to focus on who had touched my wrist, and then I saw him.Ricky. My friend. His smile disguised the look of concern he held deep within his eyes.
“S-sorry.” I rubbed the spot he’d touched with my other hand, Sid’s hand still on my shoulder. “Sorry.”
Ricky nodded. “It’s okay, man. You’re okay.”
Sid leaned in and whispered into my ear, “The rings, Max. He was asking about the rings.”
Ricky chuckled awkwardly, and the crowd before us laughed. “We kinda need them now.”
I struggled to pull in a breath as I swept my eyes out to all fifty of those faces, all laughing or annoyed or bored.I turned to look at Lucy, leaning over to stare at me, her face blanketed with nothing but concern and worry.
It was me.Ihad done that.
I’m ruining everything.
My gaze passed over my parents, both looking horribly displeased and angry. Impatient. Like I was nothing more than a misbehaving little boy, goofing off at his sister’s wedding.
I thought about Smoky, our dog. The first life I had destroyed—taken—by being stupid and irresponsible.
“O-oh, right.”
