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I reach out and touch his arm. “No.”

Vero is quiet for a moment, and everything else is background noise—the sound of Brawley inside, a television on inside the house.

“Can I ask you something?” he finally says.

“You can always ask me anything.”

He shifts to face me, his smile a shell of what it normally is. “What was it like in the coffin?”

I freeze; nobody has asked me that directly. Clay came closest when he made me cry; he gave me permission to fall apart but didn’t ask me to walk him through the trauma.

I glare at my hands in my lap. “Dark and claustrophobic. Smaller than you would think it would be, which sounds stupid. Obviously a coffin is small, but nothing prepares you for what that really means until you’re inside it . . . I could feel the wood pressing on both of my arms, and I couldn’t turn my head. I kept thinking . . .” I stop, needing to breathe.

“What?” he pushes.

“I kept thinking that if no one came, the last thing I would have done was get lunch.” I laugh, edged in hysteria. “That felt so stupid. That the last thing I would have done is argue with myself about whether to pack you sugar or listen to Brawley.”

I glance at him, and his jaw is tight. “I’m sorry, I should have been there,” he murmurs.

“You couldn’t have known what was going to happen. I didn’t tell you about Aaron.”

“Still,” he says, staring into my eyes, his own glassy. “I should have gone with you.”

“Nobody could have known. Aaron was planning this since he was released from prison. It’s no one’s fault but his.”

Vero holds my gaze, and I can see him considering what I said. “I know that logically, but that voice in the back of my mind tells me otherwise.”

“That voice is wrong.”

He nods. “I would have burned the whole island down to find you.”

That I believe. It’s terrifying but very on brand for Vero. He is one hundred percent loyal and won’t let anyone mess with those he loves.

“Can I tell you something?” I ask , and he nods. “I had a panic attack in the shed when I smelled the blood. I couldn’t breathe.” Looking down, I pick at my thumbnail. “I had them more often around the time I left him. Aaron had trained me out of them while we were together, which sounds like a good thing, but it wasn’t. He just made me afraid to have them in front of him, so I got very good at suppressing them until I was alone.”

Vero takes my hand in his and intertwines our fingers.

I let out a shaky breath and continue. “In the shed, Cipher simply said it like it was normal, and I wasn’t made to feel stupid. Clay was just there, and you asked and didn’t just touch me.”

“I always want to touch you, but you said once that touching you without asking is taking something from you. I think about that a lot.”

“I will always want you to touch me.”

We sit together for a while, and Brawley laughing at the television pulls us from the silence.

“He missed you when you were gone,” I whisper.

“And I feel bad about that, but in the moment I don’t think clearly.” I squeeze his hand and he squeezes back. “While I didn’t mean to scare him, in my head I was trying to fix things. I thought if I dealt with it, if I could just . . .” He pauses and thinks about what he wants to say next. “I wanted to make it right for you. Then I had this idea that I could make you feel better by knowing how many paper cuts it takes to kill a man. But I lost count. The human body is pretty big and paper cuts are small.” Vero sighs. “I wanted to make it even with what he did to you.”

“Did it?”

He shrugs. “It turns out what I was most angry about isn’t something you can solve with paper cuts. Now I can see that what I did will never erase what he did. I can’t undo his actions.”

“You can’t,” I agree.

“Does that make you sad?” he asks, and I think about it.

“Some parts make me sad, but not like they used to. It used to feel like grief, because along the way I’d lost parts of myself. But now it’s different; it’s almost a relief that it’s over. Really, finally over.”