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I heard her suck in a breath. “Seb,” she said softly. “You don’t want to be alive?”

I didn’t want to tell her, but I wanted her to know. “I don’t want to kill myself. But sometimes…I wouldn’t mind if I weren’t alive. It doesn’t seem right that it’s me and not them. Not because I blame myself for their deaths. I don’t. I've replayed that day a million times in my mind, trying to find a way to blame myself, but the truth is, it was a lot of bad luck. But I still can’t forgive myself for not dying with them. Why did I survive? It shouldn’t have been me. Nothing I do will ever be enough to make up for those lost lives. I could cure cancer, and it still wouldn’t be enough. Not for the people who loved them. Not for me.”

My words tumbled over each other in their haste to leave my mouth. Starting was the hard part, but once those first words breached the dam, the rest came pouring out in a flood. “The sick part is that this feeling hits hardest when I’m happy. Like when I found out you weren’t going to die from the rock climbing accident.” Or this morning, when I woke up and realized she might stay. “Something about being happy triggers feelings of doom. I spiral. Why should I be here, feeling fucking happy, when they aren’t?”

Lila was quiet.

I shifted. “I know I sound ungrateful⁠—”

“Give me your hand,” she said, and because every part of me belonged to her, I gave it. Her fingertips brushed my palm. “Do you know how a star dies?”

I did, kind of, but not really. I shook my head. “No.”

“It’s an explosion. The bigger the star, the faster its death. A blink of an eye, that’s all it takes for a red supergiant to go supernova.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythm of her voice, felt the soft stroke of her fingers on my hand.

“Billions of years ago, there was a star that made our sun look like a cute yellow marble. A blink and it exploded, scattering iron atoms like dandelion fluff through space. Little pieces of itself went on to create the planets, the Earth, us. The iron from that star’s death is in all living things.”

Her fingers moved to my wrist, pressed against my pulse that echoed my heartbeat. “You have stardust in your veins. The same stardust is in every drop of blood, every blade of grass, and even when we are long gone, stardust remains. The people we have lost, they were stardust, too, and they are stardust now.”

My face felt wet despite the cloudless sky. Tears leaked from my eyes like a monsoon. I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t care.

“Life is a gift,” Lila said. “You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to deserve it. You can spend your moments counting petals on a sunflower or listening to the crickets sing, and your life is not worth any less for it. Breathing is enough, Seb. You are enough.”

I couldn’t speak. My eyes kept leaking. My breath shuddered.

“You have stardust in your veins, and your existence is magic, but if that’s not enough reason for you to be alive when they can’t be, then there is also this: I love you.” Her fingers curled around mine. “I love you, Seb.”

“Lila,” I said, but her name was the only word I could get out.

“Shhhh, my love. It’s all right.” She brought our hands to her chest. “Just lie there and hold my boob.”

30

SEB

“You know what just occurred to me?” Jay squinted at the makeshift karaoke stage—which was really just stacks of hay bales in the back of the dining hall—where Lila, Holly, Lennon, and Emma were belting out “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” “Their initials spell hell. Should we be concerned about that?”

I mentally rearranged their names. Holly, Emma, Lila, Lennon. H-E-L-L. Well, damn. Literally.

“Nah, I’m not worried.” Mateo pushed his glasses up. “If the universe didn’t want us to find out, it wouldn’t have made it so much fun to fuck around.”

Jay, Liam, and I slowly turned in unison to look at him.

“Seriously,” I said. “Who are you fucking around with?”

“I’m not talking about myself,” he protested. “I’m talking about those girls always being in trouble, and it’s hilarious watching the three of you try to manage that.”

“Holly’s not in trouble,” Liam noted, but his gaze flicked to Emma, and he rubbed his bottom lip.

Mateo snorted. “Holly is trouble. But not for us.”

“Let’s hope, anyway,” I said. I loved Holly like a sister, but I knew she played by different rules than the rest of us. “I’m honestly shocked she’s up there with the others. She doesn’t like to share the spotlight.”

Mateo nudged Jay with his elbow. “You gonna get up there? Give us a repeat duet performance with Lennon?”

Jay gave him a flat look. “No.”