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She and I, we’re damaged beyond repair.

The chair screeches behind me as I stand abruptly, needing to be away from this diner.

“Sorry, Rhenn. I’ll let her know it was my clumsy ass,” Ashen says from his place on the floor where he’s still cleaning the mess, getting no response from me as I shove through the same door Sumner did.

I walk with my head down and hands in my pockets. I’m headed to where I often go when I need to cool down. The place I went so many times with my dad. The place I still feel him the strongest. The Whispering River won’t help with this raging battle inside myself; maybe it will offer some clarity. If anything, it will drown out my thoughts for a while.

But as I walk across Harlow Bridge, my swarming thoughts turn to maddening chaos, because the girl I’m trying so hard to forget won’t stay hidden.

I expected her to be at the pack’s house, letting the bag of fleas cheer her up with his always too fucking peppy attitude. It certainly looks like she could use some cheering up. She encompasses nothing but a cloud of misery. More so than usual.

Sumner sits with her legs hanging over the bridge’s edge, looking down at the very place I found her when I called her last.

Not saying anything, I walk closer, taking my place beside her and letting my feet dangle next to hers.

Sumner doesn’t acknowledge me in any way. Not that I expected her to. We’re back to loathing each other. Our own fun little merry-go-round we both hate.

I realize I should probably say something. The hell knows what, though. I don’t know how to talk to Sumner.

I glance at her from the corner of my eye. She’s staring into the distance, looking at nothing in particular. God only knows what she’s thinking.

“I want to go home,” she answers the question for me.

There hasn’t been a day she hasn’t felt it. I know that. She’s said it on multiple occasions. Right now, though, I believe it with everything in me. There’s nothing left inside her, and she has me to thank for it.

“Come on, it’s not that bad here.” I know it’s pointless, I just don’t know what else to say.

“Pest, stray, worthless, pathetic,” Sumner repeats the names I’ve given her. “Every single day I wake up praying that someone will treat me with any form of decency. That I’ll make it a full twenty-four hours without being someone’s target. I have nothing and no one.”

Throwing myself over this bridge would hurt less than facing the fact that I did say those things. That I meant them. I hold every bit of blame for the painful thorns slicing new holes between us.

How am I supposed to tell the girl I once hated, the girl who thinks she has no one, that she has all of me? That no matter how hard I’ve tried, I can’t break the hold she has on me. The pull. It was my own doing that left us stranded on different shores, too far to swim back to one another, yet the nagging ache to touch her courses like fire through my veins.

I am not dead, though somehow, I’ve never felt quite alive. Not until I saw her. The real her. Not until I heard the smoky melody of her voice. I am hardened, but she, she is my beating heart. The seamstress with the invisible thread who unknowingly linked me to her in ways I’ll never be able to unwind myself from.

“You could end it all now.” Sumner’s low murmur cuts through the silence, a whisper sharp enough to shatter glass. “Just one push. Everyone would think it was an accident. That I fell.”

My focus drops to her, seeing how close she is to the edge. One strong gust, one wrong move. Such a long way down. I let my hand wander closer, my thumb finding the denim of her jeans. She doesn’t flinch, nor does she move into the touch. A perfect statue. Broken and beautiful.

“That’s not the way this ends.” Her, us. Even if we never speak again after this, she and I both know it’s true. Death is far, far too easy. To live, that’s the destination we thrive for. No matter how messy it is or how incredibly difficult, Sumner craves life, for better or worse. I only wish I could give it to her—the one she’s always deserved.

She stares ahead, letting out a soft sigh. “When pain meets hate.” The words aren’t directed to me. They’re said like an afterthought, like something she’d heard in passing once.

Letting my eyes fall shut, I force myself to take a deep breath. “I don’t hate you.”

“I believed that, you know. For a second, I really thought you didn’t.” She shakes her head, continuing to look into the distance. “But I guess my memory of what happened is still foggy.”

“Memory of what?”

A tear streaks down her cheek. She quickly wipes it away. “Nothing. It’s stupid anyway.”

“Vixen,” I press.

She lowers her head, fiddling with her fingers in her lap. “I was in a forest I’d never seen before. I was fading away. You told me… I thought you told me to come back to you. You sounded scared. You were holding onto me.” She shakes her head again, breathing in deeply as she tries to fight off the difficulty of reliving that night. “All of that feels real, but I’m not sure if it was, because when I woke up, we were in your room. I wasn’t in a creepy forest with black trees. You weren’t holding onto me. There were no shadows.”

I hadn’t realized how much of that night was still lost to her. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re in the Land of Shadows for as long as she was. Sumner wasn’t built for any of this. It’s not in her DNA to resist any sort of power from the world I live in. Maybe she’ll never fully remember what happened. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Sumner will never know who I really am to her, what we almost were long ago.