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We pull in behind the garbage truck. The men lift the headboard toward its metal mouth.

I grab the door handle. “Tell them to stop.”

Kane issues a one-word answer: “No.”

I swing around. “That was my grandmother’s!”

“I know,” he intones emotionlessly.

“Then what the hell are they doing?”

“Removing a shitty memory.”

The truck’s hydraulic lift groans. I lunge for the exit, but Kane’s hand closes around my wrist.

“Let go,” I hiss at him.

He does immediately.

But it’s too late.

By the time I shove the door open, the headboard is gone.

The truck compacts with a mechanical roar. I stand on the icy curb in yesterday’s boots, staring at the place where the antique disappeared. It’s matchsticks now, being swallowed up by the truck’s guts.

Kane comes around the SUV.

“That belonged to me!” I cry.

“Yes, it did—in the past tense. But you’re better off without it. It’s been defiled.”

“So you threw it away?”

“You deserve better.”

I whirl on him. “That is not your decision!”

He’s tall, a black-haired demon slouching against the side of the SUV, surrounded by fresh white snow. “It was the place where they disrespected you,” he says in a violent rumble. “I saw it in the recording.”

The cold catches in my lungs.

He glances past me at the garbage truck. “So did everyone in your mother’s living room. Now, strangers have seen it. That piece of wood became a landmark in your humiliation, and you were going to go right back to sleep under it like it was just a little mistake you could sweep under the rug.”

I feel my lip quivering. No words will come.

Kane steps closer. “They don’t get to keep lurking in your bedroom, haunting you. So if you won’t throw them out… I’ll do it for you.”

The garbage truck pulls away.

My grandmother’s headboard goes with it.

Kane’s not wrong: I have been picturing myself sleeping in that bed again someday. After eight nights on Chateau du Boulangerie’s finest cot, I was almost looking forward to it.

I was just gonna strip the bed, wash the sheets a couple times, and pretend like that fixed everything. It’d be fine.

But no.

It would not be “fine.”