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The record store is gone. Has been for years. What’s left is a vacant lot choked with weeds and broken beer bottles, surrounded by a chain-link fence. I carve through it with bolt cutters and slip inside.

I remember this place so differently. I remember sunlight and music spilling out through a propped-open door. I remember a woman in a red dress spinning like she didn’t know anyone was watching, like the whole world had melted away and left behind only her and the song.

I remember her tripping, how she stumbled right into my arms, looked up at me with those brown eyes, and laughed, as if falling into a stranger was the most natural thing that could be.

God help me, I never stood a fucking chance.

The ground tonight is hard from the early spring frost. My shovel bites into it with a sound like grinding bones. I dig in the darkness. Warm blood soaks through my shirt as the stem cell extraction sites tear open and leak.

As I dig, I hold her promise in my head.

“Kirill can never know I chose to leave him.”

Clank. Crunch. Skritch. Shff.The pile of dirt grows. The hole deepens.

I’d wanted to refuse. The boy deserves the truth: that his mother loved him enough to spare him the slow decay, the hospital vigils, the watching her disappear piece by piece. He ought to know she wasbrave, not broken.

But Elena had gripped my hand and made me swear I’d do as she asked.

So I swore.

The hole is deep enough now. I lower her into it carefully, arranging her limbs, smoothing the blanket around her shoulders. I want her to be comfortable in her final sleep.

Her journal goes in last. The leather-bound book where she wrote everything down, her final gift to me. I don’t want to read it. I can’t.

Neither can Kirill. Never Kirill.

I swore he’d never know.

The dirt goes back easier than it came out. I pack it down, scatter dead leaves over the surface, and drag a piece of rusted corrugated metal across to hide the fresh-turned earth.

When I’m finished, I stand there in the darkness where Elena and I first met, covered in blood and soil, and I feel something I haven’t felt in months.

Relief.

It feels so fucking good to know she isn’t hurting anymore.

The sun is almost coming up by the time I make it home. The kitchen still smells like the applesauce I mixed the pills into. I can’t bring myself to throw the empty jar away. I can’t bring myself to do much of anything except climb the stairs.

The bedroom door is open. The sheets are still tangled from where I lifted her out of them. Her pillow still holds the indent of her head, the faint impression of her cheek.

I strip off my bloody shirt and let it fall to the floor. My back screams in protest as I lower myself onto the mattress—not my side, but hers. The depression her body carved into the foam over months of wasting away.

It’s cold now. Everything is cold.

I press my face into her pillow and breathe in what’s left of her.

And I make a second vow:

Never again.

I will never give another person this kind of power over me. I will never open myself up to this devastation, this complete and total annihilation of everything I thought I was.

Never again.

Never, never again.

I keep that promise for eighteen years.