He takes a swig of his water while I sit down on the floor and retrieve my pack of cigarettes from my pocket. “Why don’t you just go with him?” he asks.

“Because of all this.” I remove a cigarette from the pack as I gesture around the partially built house. “I don’t just want to give it all up.”

He sits down on the floor beside me and stretches out his legs in front of him. “You know you can do this stuff anywhere, right? You can even do other stuff and still get the same experience.”

“Yeah, but.” I put the cigarette into my mouth and reach for my lighter in my pocket. “I’m comfortable here.” I cup my hand around the end of the cigarette. “And I like how things are going here.” I light the cigarette and inhale before blowing out smoke. Part of me wants to run and call Nova, because she’d try to cheer me up and figure out solutions, instead of telling me that I should probably go with my dad. And she probably could even help me deal with taking down the photos. Talk me down. Get me to see things in a different light—a brighter light. Because she always makes things seem ten times better.

Wilson takes another swig of his water before screwing the cap back on. “All right, I’m going to throw an idea out there and see where it goes.” He rises to his feet and sets the water down before picking up the nail gun again. “Why don’t you live with me for a little while? At least until you can get on your feet.”

I give him an unfathomable look. “Are you seriously offering me your place?”

He shrugs as he lifts the cord of the nail gun over a pile of wood it’s snagged on. “Sure, why not?”

“Because it would be weird,” I point out. “Having a twenty-year-old ex-junkie living with you.”

“Well, since I’m a thirty-five-year-old ex-junkie, I don’t think that’s too big of a deal,” he says. “Besides, I’m barely there anyway.”

I get to my feet, grazing my thumb across the bottom of the cigarette and scattering ash all over the floor. “Why?”

“Because I travel around a lot to do this.” He gestures around the construction site, where the sounds of hammers and power tools are going off all around us. “In fact, you could always do that, too. You’d have a place to live while we’re on the road and when you’re here you can stay at my place, until you’re ready to get a place of your own.” He points his finger at me. “Now there’s an idea.”

For a second I actually consider it. Just going. Leaving. Taking off and working the crap out of myself to help others. I’d have to say good-bye to a lot of things, though, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet, since an hour ago I nearly cracked saying good-bye to a photo.

I put the cigarette into my mouth and take a slow drag before exhaling. “It seems too easy just to move in with you.”

“What? Things can’t be easy?” he asks as he puts the nail gun up to a board. “Life’s not right if it isn’t hard?”

“It’s not supposed to be easy for me,” I say. “It’s supposed to be difficult and a struggle to pay back for what I…” I stop talking, not wanting to go down that road right now. It’s weird, but the only person I’ve really talked to about this is Nova, which I think says a lot about her… a lot about how she makes me feel.

After putting a few nails into the board, he places the gun down on the floor. “You know, I get the whole self-punishment thing and wanting to pay back for what you did by slowly torturing yourself,” he says, “However, do you really want to be homeless again? Living outside in the fucking cold? Behind a Dumpster or in a crack house with a bunch of other crack addicts? Holes in the wall. Probably no plumbing. Doing God knows what? Snorting lines? Shooting up? Whatever your drug of choice was.”

I hate how direct he is sometimes and the images he’s vividly painting are crawling under my skin. “No, but if I did end up that way I’d probably deserve it… maybe that’s why this isn’t working out for me.” I drop my cigarette to the ground and put it out with the tip of my boot. “I’ll never be able to deserve much of anything, but I’m going to make sure I keep trying to pay everyone back until the day I die again.” I bend down to pick up my hammer, realizing I let something slip out that I’m not sure he knew yet.

“Wait. What do you mean again?” He waits for me to explain, but I don’t, instead going up and hammering a nail that doesn’t necessarily need to be hammered. “Did you die at the scene of the accident?” he asks and I pound the hammer harder against the wood. “Quinton, talk to me.”

My heart misses a beat as I ram the hammer into the nail repeatedly. “Yeah, so what if I did?” I shrug, like it’s no big deal, even though the urge to go find a bump is hitting me harder than it ever has. “Shit happens sometimes.”

“Shit happens sometimes?” He’s astounded, standing there with the nail gun loosely in his hand, about ready to drop it. “Quinton, you’re a walking miracle.”

Miracle? Miracle? Is he fucking kidding me? One pound. Two pound. Three pound. The nail is so far in that the wood is starting to split around it. But I can’t stop until he stops talking. “Yeah, try telling that to Lexi’s parents,” I say, wiping the sweat from my brow with my arm, and then move to another nail. “Or Ryder’s. They’ll tell you how delusional you are.”

He shakes his head and then snags hold of my arm as I swing back to hit the nail again. “Quinton, you can’t expect them to think any differently,” he says, looking me directly in the eye. “They lost their children and are probably never going to forgive you.” His words are sharp and jagged like the shrapnel that cut open my chest and nearly killed me.

I jerk my arm away from him. I’m not really mad at him; it’s more that there’s so much panic and anguish in me that I can’t figure out any other outlet than to yell at him. “I need to tell them I’m sorry at least… I never did that.”

“I don’t think you should, at least until you can deal with what’s probably going to come after you say it,” he explains as I drop the hammer on the ground. “I think what you need to do is work on forgiving yourself, because it’s all you can do and life will get easier when you do. It might even end up being good.”

I cross my arms, wishing I could curl up in a ball and erase the last few minutes, go back home and put that picture up on the wall. “I’m not sure I can do that. Forgive myself when they haven’t yet.”

“Sure you can,” he assures me, picking up my hammer and extending it in my direction for me to take. “It’ll just take some time.”

I don’t take the hammer from him and instead storm away, the knife in my chest digging deeper as I think about how I wanted to say sorry to Lexi’s mom one day, hoping that something might come out of it, but now he’s saying I shouldn’t because what I want—need—to happen probably isn’t going to. Then I think about how I just took down her photo and put it away and I start to regret it.

“Quinton, come back,” he shouts out after me.

I shake my head as I keep walking. “I need to take a walk and think,” I say to him, trotting down the stairs of the house and onto the bottom floor. There are a few guys at the site, but I barely pay attention to them even when they wave.

When I get outside, I dash across the parking area and to the sidewalk. Then I start walking toward the corner. I don’t look back, looking straight ahead as I wander toward the unknown, one foot in front of the other, focusing on that instead of how I feel. I’m not even exactly sure what I’m upset about. I think it might be a combination of everything that’s happened today and the difficulty that just comes with living life.

Life.

It’s so fucking hard.

One minute things are fine. The next they change into something painful. Every day just moving. Changing. And I’m left coping. Is that what I want? To go through day after day like this? So up and down? I’m not sure I can do that.

Not sober, anyway.

The last thought guides my feet to a place where I can start making everything easier. I don’t stop walking, going for at least an hour, passing blocks and blocks, until I’m standing in front of Marcus’s house, staring at the door with a flowery wreath on it like a fucking psychopath. I can’t seem to bring myself to walk away, yet at the same time, I can’t get my hand to knock on the door. I’m getting so furious with myself for even coming here. Why did I do it? I don’t want to be here.

What do I want?

What do I need?

Why do I feel this way?

Why can’t I bring myself to walk away?

Questions are racing through my head so quickly I’m hardly aware of anything around me. It’s like I and what’s on the other side of that door are the only things that exist. That’s it. I need to walk away. I need to knock. Go. Stay. Go. Stay.

My phone starts to vibrate in my pocket and the sound brings me out of my daze. I don’t want this—I remember that. I’ve been to this place and even though it’s easy, I chose to leave it for a reason—I chose life.

I turn to walk away even though my body’s so stiff it feels like it’s going to crack apart. But when I’m in mid-turn the front door of the house suddenly swings open. Marcus looks a little startled as he stumbles back in the doorway. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and no shoes. His black hair is thinner than the last time I saw him. Not from old age—he’s only twenty-two. But because he’s gotten into harder stuff since then. The scabs on his face and arms and his major decrease in weight are evidence of that. And also evidence that he has what my mind is craving at the moment.

“Wow, where the fuck did you come from?” Marcus says, scratching his arm as he glances around at the front yard behind me, which is decorated with a giant inflatable Santa. “Quinton, my man, how the hell have you been?”